How Do You Find Yourself Again after Being Wronged?
How do you survive, or even flourish, after you have been wronged? No doubt, we have all wrestled with this question. For this conversation, we will define an enemy as someone who intentionally and unremorsefully wrongs us. They may have manipulated us, abused us, lied to us, or taken advantage of us; they might have gone after our reputation, disregarded our livelihood, disrespected our humanity, targeted us, taken away our safety, robbed us of our innocence, hurt someone we love, triangulated people we love against us, or played the victim to gain control over us. Regardless of what they did to us, we lost part of ourselves and we are left wondering if we'll ever get it back. And it is only here - in this often painful and undesired place - that Jesus offers us profound hope we can discover nowhere else. If we cling to His promises, we will find the wholeness God desires for us (Mt 5:48), we can know God by becoming just like Him (Mt 5:45), and receive the abundant life He is freely offering us (Lk 10:28).
Regardless of what they did to us, we lost part of ourselves and we are left wondering if we'll ever get it back. And it is only here - in this often painful and undesired place - that Jesus offers us profound hope we can discover nowhere else.
Our story begins when an aggressive authority figure disrespects Jesus publically. We know this because the "expert in religious law stood up" to ask Jesus a question. In this culture, that was deeply disrespectful. Teachers stood, never students. The man has no intention of learning from Jesus, only in "schooling" Him. It is a fitting setting for Jesus to respond with a parable about loving our enemies. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37), Jesus tells a story about a man going from Jerusalem to Jericho when he is brutally attacked and left for dead. While this story has often been interpreted as a story about always being willing to extend hospitality and not being too "busy" to ignore the needs of others around us (Both great principles to have, by the way!), we miss the impact of the story if that is our takeaway. This is a parable about humanizing our enemies. It is about protecting and respecting the dignity of those who have wronged us. It is about always maintaining the hope that, through the power of mercy, even the people we think the least capable of doing good (Which is often how we think of those who have wronged us!) are capable of looking just like Jesus. We must ask the same question that the combative questioner asks, "Can my enemy really be my neighbor?"
In the parable, two others, a priest and a Levite, come across the man lying on the road. But they both ignore him. At first, this might seem egregious, but in this context, most of Jesus' listeners would not have found their responses unreasonable. Since we know that this road leads to Jerusalem, the priest and the Levite were most likely on their way to that holy city for duties in the temple. If it was for Passover, there may have been tens of thousands of people counting on them to perform their duties. If the priest touched a dead body, he would be defiled and unfit to serve in the temple (Lev 21:1-2;11). So while their responses were expected, what happens next was not.
This is a parable about humanizing our enemies. It is about protecting and respecting the dignity of those who have wronged us. It is about always maintaining the hope that, through the power of mercy, even the people we think the least capable of doing good are capable of looking just like Jesus.
A Samaritan stops and helps the man. He transports him to safety and pays for all of his recovery costs. The Samaritan was an enemy to everyone listening to the story. And for good reason. The Jews and Samaritans had been in a centuries-long conflict (Jn 4:9). Wrongs had been committed. There is even a historical record of a group of Samaritans scattering bones in the temple to defile it around the time of Jesus - an ancient near-east version of a hate crime. One can only wonder if some of Jesus' original listeners had this event come to mind as he told this story. So when Jesus tells them a "good Samaritan" was compelled to "pay the cost" of this man's salvation, he is pushing them to consider the dignity of someone they did not want to think had any.
Miroslav Volf was a Christian theologian who was interrogated and harassed for many months during the collapse of Yugoslavia during the 90's. Seen as a Western sympathizer, and a threat to the state because of his Christain faith, he was detained illegally and tortured by military officers who had complete control over his life. As he moved to forgive his captors years later, he noticed something strange happening in his own heart. As he noted in his book, The End of Memory, his wounded heart "passed on to my memory injuries that Captain G (the name he gave to the officer responsible for his mistreatment) did not inflict, or exaggerated those he did". He noticed that he began to villanize the captain more and more as time went on until the "wrongdoing no longer remained an isolated stain on the character of the one who committed it, but had spread over and colored his entire character."
For evil to triumph, Volf realized it needed two victories - the first victory being when evil was originally committed, and the second victory being when evil was returned by allowing hate towards the captors to control his own heart. And while he couldn't control the first victory, he could prevent the second one by not being overcome by evil but overcoming evil with good (Rom 12:21).
Miroslav Volf kept his heart from sinking into hate by recognizing that his memories of the wrongs had begun to morph from a "protective shield into a vicious sword". He recognized that his memory could not have the "last word" over his tormentor's heart. If evil were to be robbed of its much-needed second victory, he would have to give the last word to the Judge who "knows everyone better than they know themselves." He realized he could not truly judge the man because he could not understand "his wrongdoing in the context of his whole life" which might also contain a "great deal of virtue." Volf knew that for good to win out, he would have to make the difficult journey of humanizing his captors.
For evil to triumph, Volf realized it needed two victories - the first victory being when evil was originally committed, and the second victory being when evil was returned by allowing hate towards the captors to control his own heart. And while he couldn't control the first victory, he could prevent the second one by not being overcome by evil but overcoming evil with good (Rom 12:21).
Volf realized that if he were to keep his own humanity, he would have to keep seeing the humanity of those who had wronged him. He couldn’t understand his enemies in the context of their whole lives. He would never fully understand the story that Captain G himself may have been caught up in or what set of desperate circumstances may have been influencing him. Therefore, he found it best to restrain his own heart from being the final judge over Captain G’s life. When people insert themselves over us, even in a narcissistic way, we may not have the full picture. As shame researcher Brené Brown notes, narcissism is a “shame-based” disorder. So what may appear to us as blatant bigotry or priority of the self over another, may actually be a desperate fear of not being enough. It is a fear often forged from childhood trauma that follows a person into adulthood as Chuck Degroat, PhD, believes. So while that doesn’t excuse or condone someone’s behavior, it does help us approach it from a more compassionate place. Often when people wrong us, there are always wounds and painful circumstances influencing them that we will never fully understand.
The journey towards humanizing our enemies is uncertain. As the Samaritan takes the wounded man into town, he does so at great personal risk. For a Samaritan to walk into town with an unconscious, nearly dead Jewish man on his horseback would have disquieted the town. Context would not have been considered much by the townspeople and they could have very quickly and easily become violent towards the Samaritan. As Volf states, "To embrace the heart of the Christian faith is precisely to be pulled beyond the zone of comfort into the risky territory marked by the commitment to love one's enemies." Jesus tells this parable on his way to the cross. The Good Samaritan reflects the costly enemy-love Jesus Himself was about to give.
It is here, in this often unwanted and painful space, that we can know God's love like never before. Great beauty can come from the ashes of cruelty if we will trust Jesus' promises to us here. Corrie Ten Boom was placed in a Nazi concentration camp in WWII after she and her sister were caught sheltering Jews. During that time, her sister died from mistreatment by a certain guard. Her sister, whom she loved more than anyone, was the whole world to her. And just like that, through someone's cold indifference, her world was taken from her in the most cruel way possible. After the war, she opened up a shelter for survivors of the war. As a Christian, she knew that God was beckoning her to forgive the one responsible for taking her world. But she struggled. As theologian, Lewis Smedes writes, "We talk a good forgiving line as long as somebody else needs to do it, but few of us have the heart for it while we are dangling from one end of a bond broken by somebody else’s cruelty."
As Volf states, "To embrace the heart of the Christian faith is precisely to be pulled beyond the zone of comfort into the risky territory marked by the commitment to love one's enemies." Jesus tells this parable on his way to the cross. The Good Samaritan reflects the costly enemy love Jesus Himself was about to give.
Corrie Ten Boom lost everything dangling at the end of someone else's cruelty. Then it happened. She found herself face to face with that very same guard. While he did not recognize her, she knew exactly who he was. As she embraced him, she wrote in her book The Hiding Place, something incredible took place, “The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, and sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. For a long moment, we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then." Just as Jesus promised she would, she knew God more in that moment than ever before.
While the path to forgiving our enemies is risky, we do not do it alone. We do it with the wisdom of counselors and trusted friends. But more than anything, we do it with the promise of the Great Forgiver Himself that we will find ourselves again on this path. As Jesus promises in Matthew 5 when we pray for our enemies we are "working out of our true selves, our God-created selves." When our enemies wrong us, we lose part of ourselves, when we love them, we find our true selves again.