Building Healthy Community through Jesus's Forgiveness
Forgiveness. The word can make us cringe. Yet, forgiveness is integral to healthy communities. How do we push past the hurt to embrace Jesus's forgiveness to build healthy communities?
Hardly a day goes by when we do not see the results of fractured communities around us: broken relationships give way to pain and suffering. Around the world, the desire for loving, healthy community unites us all. Sadly, this desire remains elusive. We remain divided and unable to transcend past and present slights. Followers of Jesus hold on to the hope of healthy community underwritten by God’s love and forgiveness as part of their mandate to love others. But how? How can we be effective ambassadors of love in a world with hurt and hate, especially as we navigate our own pain?
The foundation of healthy community
People are created to walk in close, intimate relationship with God. From this relationship flows our ability to love others well and foster healthy communities. Love reaches its apex in the context of perfect justice which is only possible in the context of moral purity. When moral purity is compromised, injustice spawns, obstructing perfect love, like arterial plaque clogging the heart.
Despite our best intentions, we instinctively understand that no one walks in perfect moral purity. We all have moments we wish we could take back. We have all experienced injustice. This means that none of us ever truly experiences perfect love. Just as the lack of moral purity impacts our relationships with others, our lack of moral purity also hinders a vibrant relationship with God. Passionate for relationship with us, God sent Jesus to invite us back into relationship with Him:
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.1
In choosing to follow Jesus, we accept this invitation, admitting our moral imperfection. We recognize we have fallen short, missing the mark in loving God and people. Then Jesus does something radical: He forgives us, clothing us in moral purity we can never hope to attain on our own, opening the door for us to experience God’s love in high fidelity.
When Jesus’s followers experienced this for themselves, it completely and utterly transformed their lives and communities. People in bondage to their imperfection entered a liberating, life-altering freedom. Consider the case of Zacchaeus, who was utterly redeemed by Jesus’ forgiveness.
The redemptive power of Jesus’s forgiveness
Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector, a wealthy, corrupt man who used this position to exploit vulnerable people. Hearing about Jesus, he was so desperate to meet Him that he climbed up a tree to his shame due to his short stature. Sensing his spiritual and emotional need, Jesus saw Zacchaeus and invited himself to a meal at Zacchaeus’s house. People questioned Jesus’s kindness and His association with such a greedy, corrupt man:
And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”2
But where people only saw the man’s repulsive and predatory behavior, Jesus knew Zacchaeus’s heart was dry and parched for love and forgiveness. Jesus’s love for humanity spurred Him to extend forgiveness to Zacchaeus. This forgiveness was so transformational that Zacchaeus changed immediately:
And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”3
Here was a rich, corrupt agent of the Roman government who had clearly abused his power and defrauded his own people. After a meal with Jesus, he had been so completely transformed that he vowed to give half his wealth to the poor and make restitution to anyone he had defrauded four times what he stole. Tax administration would be fairer and the defrauded would be made whole. Jesus’s love and forgiveness had transformed Zacchaeus with a profound redemptive impact on his community.
Seeing our own need for forgiveness
It is easy to miss the relevance of this story for us. Well, that’s well and good but I’m not Jesus. There’s no way I’m forgiving this greedy, corrupt person! And I’m certainly not as bad as Zacchaeus. Yet Jesus lovingly but firmly is categorically clear to His followers: we have a responsibility to forgive.
This responsibility is rooted in the spiritual reality of the forgiveness we experience as followers of Jesus. We often fall short of God’s standard of moral perfection. We hurt others sometimes. Followers of Jesus see and understand their moral shortcomings and do not engage in moral relativism to justify any of them. Followers of Jesus grasp the corrosive impact of their faults and are deeply grateful that Jesus does not hold these failings against them. Jesus forgives us fully and completely. When we understand this truth, we accept the responsibility to forgive others, hard though it may be.
Why forgiveness is hard
Forgiveness is not easy. Otherwise, the whole world would be transformed. The biggest hindrance to our willingness to forgive is our desire for retribution when we have been hurt and experienced injustice. When we decide to forgive, we accept the cost of forgoing retribution, trusting God will orchestrate justice for us.
Some mistake this forgiveness as giving license for others to keep hurting people, but that is not forgiveness. Instead, forgiveness is the decision to release those who we forgive of the moral debt they owe us arising out of the injustice they have perpetrated towards us. We do this because we realize God has done the same thing for us.
Yet, forgiveness is not naïve. Forgiveness fully coexists with accountability. The forgiven still face the consequences of their actions. The forgiven thief on the cross still died.4 Parsing our role versus God’s role in balancing the scales of justice is highly complex but here is the simple truth: in receiving Jesus’s forgiveness, we become responsible for extending the same forgiveness to others we ourselves have received. When we do, we invite healing and love into our lives and theirs, setting the stage for healthy community.
Experiencing the redemptive power of forgiveness personally and in community
Practically, forgiveness is usually a process, not a singular event. It starts with seeing and accepting our own shortcomings and understanding how much we have been forgiven. We must also have the courage and faith to believe that God will bring justice for us in His own wisdom and timing. In fact, it is virtually impossible to forgive others without believing in God’s fundamental fairness, wisdom, and ability to right the wrongs we experience.
Crucially, we must also seek forgiveness from those we have wronged. Zacchaeus’s transformation is most instructive in how completely he goes from causing offense to seeking reconciliation. When we truly experience God’s forgiveness, we become deeply troubled by the way we have hurt others and become motivated to seek reconciliation where possible.
By accepting Jesus’s forgiveness, extending it to others, and seeking reconciliation with those we have hurt, we set a powerful and durable foundation for healthy community, underwritten by the same love and forgiveness God has extended to us.
This is how imperfect followers of Jesus become powerful ambassadors for redemptive love, serving as agents of peace and compassion in the communities in which we live and work. As we do that, we begin to experience incredible emotional and spiritual freedom and we experience God’s amazing love for us enabling us to foster healthy community.
John 3:17
Luke 19:7
Luke 19:8-9
Luke 23:26-43