Over the last few posts I've been talking a lot about conflict and resolution. A big part of that has been talking about conflict and it's challenges. We all know that conflict can be a messy complicated thing, but did you know that the same is true about resolution?
How do we make a resolution stick? We can talk about conflict, and talk about getting through it, and we can acknowledge that that will be hard and messy, but what makes a resolution stick? It’s one thing to work through conflict, but it’s another to work through the resolution.
To get through it, and to make it stick, you have to have forgiveness. It’s the key that holds everything together. But what about the people that we don’t want to forgive? The “undeserving” people. These are the people that have caused us pain, or more often we think have caused us pain, or would have caused us pain if we didn’t get things resolved.
The desire that we have, and it’s a normal one, is that we want people who have sinned, or done wrong to us, to face the “consequences” of their actions. Sometimes, if we’re honest with ourselves, we really want them to pay for it. Something has to happen, because something happened to us.
And the truth is, that there will be consequences, there will be punishments or discipline as a part of the resolution for many conflicts. Other times there won’t. We know this, because we’re human and we’ve seen it happen. Regardless, forgiveness still is important and it needs to happen. We can’t go forward without it. Without forgiveness we become stuck in the middle of the conflict and the resolution can be finished.
Forgiveness and consequences are not a part of the same process. They are separate things. We have to separate them for our own good.
Forgiveness, at its most basic, gives us space to work out the resolution. It gives us permission to go forward, and it gives us the strength to be able to handle it all while taking the weight off of our shoulders. The process that Jesus gives us to work through conflict is followed with the importance of forgiveness, not just the forgiveness that we get from God, but that we forgive each other too.
To get there, we’re going into another story. At some point, I’m going to come back and we’re going to do a series on Jonah because there is so much there, and so much that speaks to us directly….so watch for it, probably this Summer.
But there is one big point I want to make about Jonah, and that’s to not get caught up in the fish. The fish gets our attention, just like it did Jonah’s, but the fish is not the point of the story. If all we focus on is the fish, then we’re going to miss the important parts.
Now we’re getting to the point of the story. Speaking here is the King of Nineveh. He is turning his people around because he’s afraid of Jonah’s God and what might be coming, so he wants to make sure his people are doing the right thing. This kind of turn around is what Jonah was sent to Nineveh to do!
Jonah was successful! He was told by God to go and cry out against the city of Nineveh, to get them to change their ways. It worked! He didn’t want to go, he ran from it (that’s how we end up wit the fish story), but then he goes, and he does it!
But Jonah wasn’t happy, take a look at chapter 4 (starts at 6:12)
But why is God doing that, and why is Jonah so upset? Nineveh was the capital of Assyria. They were awful people, not just by our standards, but even by the standards of their time. They were gruesome and violent, and Jonah was right to be afraid of them when he tried running away. It’s why it took a big fish and “enforced seclusion” for three days before he went.
Jonah can’t accept his victory, because they were so wrong and so bad and awful that in his mind they still needed to suffer. He didn’t like that God was going to forgive them. We know that God forgives them, but does Jonah accept it?
God is doing a couple of things here.
God is telling Jonah, and this should be foreshadowing not just for the Israelites of the time who were reading this story first, but for us today, that God is the God of all people. Not just the special ones, not just the ones that have said all the right words, not just the ones that we like, but God is the God of all people. God is telling Jonah that he can save them because they are also his children. They are a part of his creation, even if they have been incredibly awful people in the past.
But the second part of this, that Jonah was learning, and that we see Jesus teach us over and over again, is that forgiveness is personal. It’s personal in that we have to forgive, because if we don’t, then we get torn up by it. The resolution won’t work because then we can’t let go of it. Jonah couldn’t accept that he’d won!
The brutal Ninevites weren’t the same people anymore, they were working to become different, and yet he was still trying make them suffer more. Were his pleas to God going to work? Not a chance, but they were going to make him bitter, and angry, and ultimately Jonah would have been worse off than he was before. Because Jonah couldn’t accept the resolution, he was going to stay in the conflict and he wasn’t going to win, it would just continue to get worse.
Forgiveness is important for resolution, not because we need to tell someone that we’ve forgiven them for them to actually be forgiven. That’s God’s job. Sometimes it helps, because when we’ve been in that position it can be hard to accept that God forgives, especially when we know that maybe we’ve caused someone else pain, or we think we might have. But our giving it to someone else isn’t necessary.
Forgiveness is important so we don’t end up like Jonah. It’s important so we don’t end up like the man Jesus tells the parable about who had had his debts forgiven, but refused to forgive a smaller amount to someone that owed him (that’s one of the next parts of Matthew 18).
Conflict is hard, complicated, and messy. Resolution can be reached, but it won’t stick without forgiveness. It doesn’t mean you have to like the other person(s) after, but forgiveness is for us, so we can go on and go forward, and we aren’t going to be pulled back into the conflict by our own doing.
As we go through this week, we all have thing in our lives that we need to forgive. Take one of those things this week, and forgive it. Then, when it tries to come back and reinsert itself (which it will because we’re stubborn), remind yourself that you’ve forgiven it, and look to Christ who helps us let those things go, and puts us in a community of faith and people in our lives to help us do it.
The more we do this, the more the world changes for the better. Go out, knowing that God forgives you, and that you in turn can forgive others. Go and do this in Jesus name. Amen.
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