Are you more like a Judge Judy or Mother Teresa?
I confess, when I used to visit my brother at his rest home, Judge Judy was often on TV, and I was always tempted to sit down and watch the episode. Why? Because I love her stern justice, her ability and authority to call out the guilty party, name their offense, and nail them with real life consequences.
That said, as a Christian, I know I’m supposed to be more like Mother Teresa full of endless love for the sick, desperate, and dying.
Truth be told, we’re all a little like both Judy and Teresa.
No shocker. Since we’re created in God’s image, we crave justice, but when it suits us, because we’re also fallen, desperate, sick, and dying.
To show you what I mean, I’ll share a quick vignette from when I was in third grade and got into a playground fight.
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My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Duval, wears a steel bun bolted to the back of her head and steel-rimmed glasses. Her self-appointed uniform, a white buttoned blouse and a black calf-length skirt over support hose and lace-up heels. Everything about her classroom is strict and regulated. Arithmetic in the morning. Word problems and counting backwards to make change. The new X that means multiplication. Grammar in the afternoon in books full of subjects, objects, and verbs. All this punctuated by a thirty-minute recess after lunch.
Mrs. McGinty, the recess lady, prowls the small playground not covered by snow and ice, a whistle around her neck. The swings beyond are useless, anchored in three feet of snow. The slides buried up to their necks. There is one concrete tube whose curved head is barely above the height of the snowbank. Ralphie La Brie has tunneled, so you can still crawl through it.
But I want to be on top, along with every other third grader scaling its summit to be king of the mountain. In a bunchy snowsuit I begin my ascent. Two ton Peggy climbs from the other side, and just as I reach the peak, she lunges for me, and we both fall off. I land on my back with Peggy sitting on my chest. I can’t squirm free. Ralphie climbs out of the tunnel like a troll and starts shoving snow in my ear. Peggy squeals with delight and won’t get off. Her cheeks round with laughter. Her curly pigtails jiggle as my red mittens pound her puffy, pink parka and slash at Ralphie’s stupid grin. Frustration bursts from my eyeballs, and I’m crying in front of the pee-wee crowd gathered in a tight circle. The whistle shrieks. Peggy flinches. I roll out from under, and punch Ralphie in the ear.
Mrs. McGinty marches Peggy and I, soggy and dripping, into Miss Ander’s principal office. We sit on a bench opposite her ordered desk. She lectures us on good citizenship and wants each of us to say sorry. But my red, sweaty face, glowers in silence. Even as a kid, I know that forgiveness is a tight bud that cannot be forced. No sorry lips can make my heart unfurl.
Miss Anders ushers Peggy and I back to our room. Our class is diagramming sentences while Mrs. Duval marks math papers at her desk. Miss Anders whispers our infraction in Mrs. Duval’s ear. She peers over her steel-rimmed frames as I return to my seat. In her world of plusses and minuses surely Peggy is in the negative column, and counting backwards, owes me a big fat apology. And how about Ralphie La Brie? He multiplied the offense. Isn’t it obvious who the subject and object of the verb are? But Mrs. Duval’s expression contains no exoneration or mercy. Her answer book as useless as swings locked in ice.
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I share this example to show that even a child knows when someone hurts you, they owe you something. There’s also no doubt that saying sorry without a contrite heart is worthless. But do you hear my child’s heart full of pride and desire for revenge?
Thankfully God is nothing like my third-grade teacher. He is completely good, so he must be completely just.
When I was a brand-new Christian, I drew a cross inside the cover of my Bible. Along its vertical axis I scribbled the word LOVE. Along the horizontal, the word JUSTICE.
The vertical line represented God’s love reaching down through Christ to protect me from the eternal damnation we all deserve for screwing up a million different ways.
Some versions of The Lord’s prayer call sin trespasses. The word trespass means to enter an owner’s property without permission. Those who trespass against us have crossed a line into our lives where they don’t belong, demanding things, taking things, destroying things that are not theirs. That’s what the horizontal line represents.
In other versions of the Lord’s prayer, sin is referred to as debt. Those who have trespassed into our intimate space owe us a debt for what they have stolen or damaged. And we owe others for what we have wreaked in theirs.
Forgiveness is trusting God with what others owe us. But trusting God does not come naturally, even for the believer, so how in the world can we forgive others let alone ourselves?
Jesus told this story:
“A man loaned money to two people—500 pieces of silver[a] to one and 50 pieces to the other. 42 But neither of them could repay him, so he kindly forgave them both, canceling their debts. Who do you suppose loved him more after that?”
43 Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the larger debt.”
“That’s right,” Jesus said. 44 Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Look at this woman kneeling here… 47 “I tell you, her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.” Luke 7:41-47 (NLT)
I came to Christ as ashamed as this woman of my sins and the sins done to me, and so grateful to be cleansed from them all.
And yet, even though I knew, in my head, I was clean, I continued to drag along the garbage can containing all my trash as well as the dead weight of those who hurt me.
Over the years, learning my Bible, I became a Pharisee myself, at times acting like Judge Judy, so eager to hold others who hurt me, even in small ways, accountable with a heart full of vengeance as if I was back in third grade.
I knew this was not the gospel. When was I going to get it together and turn into Mother Teresa?
In Relationships, a Mess Worth Making, author Paul Tripp says, “An entrenched refusal to forgive is a sign that you have not known God’s amazing forgiveness yourself… holding onto an offense will make you a bitter and unloving person, and you will inevitably damage all your relationships.”
But he goes on to ask, “How can I forgive without acting like what he/she did is okay?”
He confirms my paradigm of forgiveness saying, “The vertical aspect of forgiveness is unconditional, but the horizontal aspect depends on the offender admitting guilt and asking for forgiveness.
The idea is no one can single-handedly bring about reconciliation in a relationship because reconciliation depends on trust, not simply giving lip service to the words, I’m sorry. Rather, trust between people is built over time through acts of remorse and faithfulness.
So how do I begin to unravel my mess?
The Cure by John Lynch, Bruce Mc Nicol, and Bill Thrall says, “Forgiveness has an order. We must initiate the vertical transaction with God before we can move into the horizontal transaction with another. First, before God I forgive the offender for what they’ve done and the consequences in my life. This is before God and me, and it is for my sake. It doesn’t let anyone off the hook; it does not excuse any action. It does not restore relational forgiveness to the other. This is the vertical transaction. It is a choice to free myself, to begin healing.”
It’s the decision to cut ourselves free from that person and the baggage we share.
The Cure, goes onto say, “God never tells me to get over something and just get past it. Never. Instead, he asks me to trust him with every circumstance.”
So, the first step is to get it all out to God, everything that is rotting in your soul. Everything that’s pissed you off. Everything that makes you feel fearful, used, diminished, unable to trust, unlovable. Name it as best you can. The wages of sin is death, so ask yourself what has been destroyed?
Then spit it out, cry it out, spill it into a journal, confess to a trusted friend. Do this as often as the rot replaces itself with new confusion, angst, regret, and shame.
Next, immerse yourself in God’s Word in order to know, really know his character, his strength, and the depth of his desire to love and protect you. The book of Romans makes the point over and over again that we are new creatures in Christ, that Christ paid for all our grotesque experiences and mistakes with his holy blood.
Memorize the verses that confirm your impossible burden of debt was charged to Jesus’ infinite account, so your heart can unclench, your fingers can release their grip, so everything moves out of your hands into the sphere of God Almighty whose justice is divine. Then you can raise your emptied arms in praise to the savior who has turned the key that kept you caged in your past.
Let me add here that I hate pat answers that diminish the pain and struggle involved in all this. Please understand that everything I’ve said about forgiveness and the freedom that God alone supplies is a process, a daily process, a moment-by-moment process, a mind game, a heart battle, a habit to be cultivated as we become more and more intimate with God’s truth and absorb it.
It’s also a mysterious process beyond formula, something that God does for us and in us.
I have a note on my refrigerator to remind myself that:
Truth trusted transforms!
With the new year, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could be who we really want to be? More like Mother Teresa and less like Judge Judy. May the Holy Spirit move us moment by moment towards the quiet end of forgiveness. And may our hearts freely unfurl in God’s love and perfect justice for ourselves and others, even our enemies.
Cover photo by Robert Klank on Unspalsh
