Forgiveness for Lost Sheep, at the Expense of Scapegoats
As a formerly devout Christian, I often find it hard to disagree publicly with people I used to regard as brothers and sisters (particularly those who I wish were still close friends) over matters of faith. But perhaps one of the freedoms afforded by loneliness is a sense of free-agency — by not belonging to the flock, I am no longer beholden to its doctrines and social norms.
A topic I have been mulling over recently is the quandary of the American Church’s response to the recent Atlanta shootings. There is a significant vein of thought that, despite the severe nature of Robert Aaron Long’s actions, there should be some sort of effort to forgive and restore him to the faith.
A Detour in Empathy
I do want to emphasize that I understand where this camp is coming from. Many Christians are often spiritually guilt-tripped into forgiving those that harm them, particularly if that person was a fellow church member. A parable often used to emphasize the need to forgive others is that of the unmerciful servant:
Matthew 18:21–35 (ESV) The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant
21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
22 Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
23 “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. 25 Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26 “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ 27 The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28 “But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. 29 “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ 30 “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32 “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33 Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34 In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35 “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
The generous grace of Christ is used as a foil to show that the sins we do each other pale in comparison to the debt we owed God (if you believe in that). This parable is preceded by another commonly used in sermons:
Matthew 18:10–13 (ESV) The Parable of the Wandering Sheep
10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.
11 “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? 12 And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. 13 In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
An inability on the church’s part to forgive and reconcile with Long is viewed by some of my former peers as a “failure” of the Church to live up to the mercy Christ has shown it. And indeed, had I still been within their ranks, I likely would have felt similarly; as much as I felt hurt as an Asian-American, there would be a tug of spiritual guilt towards some herculean ideal of unconditional forgiveness, and to salvage a lost sheep.
To Whom Belongs Forgiveness?
As a former believer who was often racked with spiritual guilt, let me offer a somewhat disconcerting hypothesis: what if the voice that tells us to forgive is not actually that of God, but what we feel like we should be hearing? If the sermons and books we consume tune our sense of spiritual “pitch” a certain way, is our guilt a result of dissonance with God, or with our expectation of what his voice should sound like?
It should be noted that between the two parables I mentioned earlier is wedged another teaching:
Matthew 18:15–17 (ESV) If Your Brother Sins Against You
15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
There are a few things to consider here:
- Forgiveness is not actually unconditional; it must be preceded by acknowledgement of wrong, and true repentance.
- Problems are meant initially to be resolved between the victim and the transgressor. The wider church gets involved as as escalation point if the transgressor refuses, but their roles is for accountability, not forgiveness.
- If the person still denies wrongdoing, they are as good as “a Gentile/tax collector” (an unclean outsider; this foreshadows excommunication). This is coming straight from New Testament Jesus, not Old Testament God.
The dilemma, then, is perhaps not whether the church should forgive, but whether it has the actual right to. If I were a Christian, I may have the burden to find it in my heart to forgive a fellow Christian who wronged me. But it is not necessarily meaningful or in my power to forgive a transgressor on behalf of the victim. Going a degree further, would it be within reasonable grounds for me to forgive a member of the Church on behalf of a non-believer they injured? In the case of the shootings, the victims cannot forgive because they’re already gone.
It is not clear whether the victims or their families were Christian, or whether Long provided a meaningful apology to them. As such, should the church be wracked with guilt over how to restore Robert to the faith? In an ironic twist of fate, I find myself agreeing more with Jewish interpretations of God’s law.
The Talmud says God Himself cannot forgive transgressions between people. If Reuven harms Shimon, and Reuven repents sincerely but doesn’t ask Shimon to forgive him, God cannot grant that forgiveness. In a famous incident recounted by Simon Wiesenthal in The Sunflower, Wiesenthal, a prisoner in the camps, was called to an infirmary where an SS officer lay dying. The officer wanted to confess and ask forgiveness for his crimes against Jews. In his last moments, he asked Wiesenthal to forgive him, as a surrogate for the Jewish people. Wiesenthal exited the room. He subsequently wrote that while he felt the urge to forgive, those who were actually in a position to forgive were not there, so he couldn’t do it.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein
CrossCurrents
Los Angeles, CA
Per Wiesenthal, who is famous for the quote “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing”, in terms of forgiveness, “only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision”.
On those I’ve Failed
The “failure” of the church to guide Long is something that sticks out to me a lot — the notion that there is this one sheep that fell off the deep end and that the Church must absolutely save. Truth be told, the Church “fails” people all the time. The urgency to reconcile Long vs a congregant who faded into obscurity is a matter of perspective; the heightened guilt over his fall from grace, in my opinion, is due to availability bias (extreme conditions seem more weighty because they’re easier to recall). His is a sadder case because of how vivid his implosion was compared to someone whose faith merely eroded into apathy.
After being pulled into a church ministry in my freshman year of college, I had faithfully and eagerly served every year after that. One pattern that I started to notice was that:
- For each new cohort of new members at the start of the year, there would only be a small percentage that would return to consistently participate.
- Of those that did participate, there would still be considerable attrition due to different priorities, conflicting beliefs, or a feeling of not fitting in.
At first, since I served in a function that oversaw the bird’s eye view of the group, it hurt to see people leave. I would try to chase after “lost sheep”, hopefully without sounding too preachy. After a while, I found myself more comfortable with the notion that “you can’t save everyone”, and even more jadedly, that not everyone wants to be saved. It was just normal for people to come in and out, and I forgave myself for forgetting people that I could have reached out to.
Later on, while trading war stories with other lapsed ministry peers, I found that we were in the same shoes as those we failed previously; the Church was not in the business of making grand gestures towards reconciling those who had faded into obscurity. There might be individuals who would reach out, but there wasn’t a such a deep sense of grief despite the fact that technically, both I and Long could end up in hell.
Must Long be restored to the faith/Church? The Bible suggests that believers are pre-ordained according to God’s wisdom, “as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” (Ephesians 1:4). Large masses of people have been sorted into “saved” and “damned” by this arbitration, and I would argue that in the grand scheme of things, Long’s soul is a drop in the bucket of history (in which the Hebrew God also endorsed genocide for the sake of purity).
Romans 9:11–13 (ESV) God’s Sovereign Choice
11 though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad — in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls — 12 she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” 13 As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
Perhaps God will salvage Long later on, but think of it this way — if not all are meant to be saved, Long’s restoration is more a “nice to have” rather than an imperative.
Love Thy Neighbor
Despite separation of Church and State being instituted to protect freedoms, the Church in America has always exerted its influence in politics — just look at the right-wing pandering to Christian values in terms of reproductive rights and sexual orientation equality. We cannot deny that any statement or position taken by the Church will inherently have some political impact, as long as it plays a role as a voting block.
It does not matter whether we can explicitly prove that Long had anti-Asian motivations in carrying out his massacre. In the middle of the current zeitgeist of anti-Asian sentiment, this event is inevitably intertwined with the attacks on Asian-Americans of all ages and genders. As a devotee turned outsider, I believe that the Church must consider the optics of its stance on how to deal with Robert Long in light of the current sociopolitical climate.
Think about what it says by encouraging a forgiveness which is not in the hands of the Church to give, and by framing Long as some poor soul that the Church failed to nurture properly.
It tells the victims and their families that their pain is outweighed by the Church’s grief over one of their own going astray.
To forgive Long when he hasn’t even asked for it from the families of the victims is insulting, to be frank. Pastors and elders have been removed from churches, and people of color have been dealt more harshly by law enforcement, for much less.
It also tells other frustrated and disenfranchised folks that they can take their anger out on people weaker than they are, as long as they have a community willing to protect them.
If the fear of God doesn’t stop “Christians” from hurting others, then use the fear of shunning to keep them in line. Don’t let non-believers suffer because of the people you are responsible for.
The Church fails people all the time. In this case, however, in its attempts not to “fail” one soul, the Church stands to fail many more. Pray for Long in private if you wish, but the more “loving” thing the Church can do in the public theatre is to support accountability for one’s crimes, not forgiveness and restoration.
