Some years ago I heard someone tell her story at a small group meeting.
As a young person growing up, she recounted, “I was active in my Methodist church and the youth group. I thought I would keep rules and try to be a good church girl, and then God would help me with my life. He would be there to smooth all the edges and take care of me.”
But then, she said, a campus group in college brought into her life people who had a more robust faith. She noticed that they saw God as more than a vague presence.
They spoke of Christ’s forgiveness in a way that seemed deeper and more intense. They were more willing to use a word like sin when talking about their lives.
She told us, “I had been tempted before to simply say, “No one’s perfect. and Christ died for sins, but I didn’t really see what Christ died for. But now I looked deeper and saw my own heart, its slothfulness, selfishness, its capacity for vengefulness and jealousy. I learned to look to Christ for mercy.
“And my faith came alive.”
Her story, encouraging as it is, raises questions for some. So does a passage like found in 1 Peter 3:18, which I’ve been pondering lately: “Christ suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.”
Graphic. Gripping, but Christ dying for our sins? Doesn’t talk of a cross and atoning death sound like primitive religion, like ancient pagan gods needing to be appeased by sacrifice? At home in the piety of roadside signs that declare, JESUS SAVES? And besides, why not just talk about a God of love? Why not just say, God simply forgives?
The reality of God’s love, as the woman in the small group shared, as the New Testament affirms, goes deeper.
Christ suffered, Peter says. He suffered. Peter wrote to people who desperately need encouraging, who were daily facing abuse and rejection because of their faith. These early Christians needed to find their footing again and again in the great Christian hope.
They needed not only to be reminded to stand firm; they needed to be grounded again in the conviction that Christ suffered too. Suffered for us. For our sins. Christ’s suffering led to death. His suffering showed a costly love that was willing to die… for us.
Our condition warranted more than a quick, It doesn’t really matter. It’s more serious than that. God says, something is very wrong. Sin has broken communion that we enjoyed. My ways have been ignored or disobeyed. But, God also says in Christ, I will offer the costly means to forgive the transgression. It’s not easy but I will do it.
So in Jesus God becomes one of us, one with us, and willingly says, I will take it on: all of what it means to be human, including temptation and suffering. You can see why it might have to be more complicated than a simple, Oh, don’t worry about it.
When we forgive evil done to us, when we truly forgive it, we do not excuse it, we don’t say, Oh, don’t worry about it.
No, we say, if only to ourselves, I am offended, disappointed, even angry. I have been wronged. We let the full effect of what was done roll over us: not repressing it, but processing it. To forgive someone in our human sphere is not sweeping it under some emotional rug, but looking at the harm done to you full on. And then, at great emotional cost, we give up exacting the price. We absorb the hurt, in a way. We give up your right to retaliate.
This kind of forgiveness requires a kind of death—a death to our own entitlement, a death to our thinking that we can and should exact vengeance. That’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that true forgiveness is a form of suffering.
Costly forgiveness defines Jesus’ life. His coming at all was at great cost. He who could have stayed in the heavenly realm, remaining in the intimate communion of the Trinity, leaves it behind to help.
We see the drama heighten, and as we move through Lent, we see the suffering increase. Especially when we come to Holy Week. With its Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, with Good Friday, and the Gethsemane agony. we will recall just how far Christ was willing to go, how willing to suffer.
And when Peter says he died the righteous for the unrighteous, and that he did it once for all,
he means the absolute certainty and sufficiency of his death. So it’s costly, but God withheld nothing, not even self of his own self, his own Son. That’s not winking indulgence but something better: costly love.
Lent is somber, yes, but no season more saturates us in the loving mercy of God. Mercy that we need, and that God freely gives.