How do we forgive?
“[Love] does not take into account a wrong suffered” 1 Corinthians 13:5
Wrong Suffered – All evil is not the same. If you’re confused about this, you’re walking a dangerous path. There are two views of evil floating around in this world. Only one of them is Biblical. The other is a lie.
The second word in this verse is kakon (evil). For the Greeks, kakos expressed a lack of something. It showed incapacity or weakness. Kakos is used to mean unserviceable, incapable, unhappy, bad, morally corrupt, wicked and weak. Kakos is the result of ignorance. For the Greeks, overcoming evil is exclusively the role of knowledge. It is knowledge of virtue that leads men to be good. It is knowledge of deity that leads men to see their proper place in the universe. And it is knowledge of love (eros) that leads men to identify the divine reflection within them. Kakos is not a mark of my true self but rather the hallmark of being ignorant of my true self.
The New Testament proclaims that this Greek view of kakos is completely wrong! The New Testament associates kakos with sin and unrighteousness, not ignorance. Kakos is not the result of unenlightened divine reflection within Man but rather the continual product and eventual culmination of all of Man’s efforts without God. It is the ruin that comes upon Man both temporally and eternally as a result of sin because sin is the deliberate decision of Man to separate himself from God. Evil befalls Man because Man refuses to give God glory, because Man opposes God. Kakos is not a lack of understanding. It is the deliberate choosing to be godless, to replace the rightful glory of the Creator with the usurping infamy of the created. It is the conscious and intentional denial of true fellowship with God.
We might want to pat ourselves on the back by saying that we don’t keep track of minor mistakes, those small accidents that happen between any two people in relationship. We are spiritually enlightened, so we show empathy for those unenlightened souls who sometimes act inappropriately. They don’t know better. We can help them become more virtuous if we overlook those errors, scratch them off the scorecard and let them play again with a new sheet. If we think this way, we are essentially Greek – full of self-pride and entirely wrong. This is not love. This is intellectual (and foolish) arrogance.
God says something very different. He says that because of cross, Love overcomes evil, not through enlightened reason or illuminated virtue, but because Christ’s death and resurrection declared the final verdict on all acts of sedition against God and godliness. Love overcomes Man’s deliberate disregard for holiness by stepping into the place of deserved punishment. It takes the burden of sin upon itself, not by dismissing it but by bearing it. Love does not erase the scorecard. Love accepts the deserved punishment for the deliberate act against it as though the scorecard belongs to Love itself. To not reckon a wrong to itself is not to push it aside but rather to bear the full weight of this sin and accept the consequences for this sin in place of the one who caused the sin. Love takes a two-step motion: first, it does not hold the evil act against another (it does not even count it), and secondly, it bears the weight of the evil act as though the Lover were to blame.
How do we forgive? By becoming the Lover who takes on the evil of someone else and bears it to the cross.
