Ah, revenge. We love it, don’t we? To see justice done – particularly when justice involved making right some wrong that was done to us.
My family loves the movie “The Princess Bride.” The character of Inigo Montoya has spent his life seeking revenge on the six-finger man who killed his father. He’s spent nearly his entire life looking for this six-fingered man, and when he finally meets him he utters (repeatedly) one of the great lines from a movie of great lines: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
Only the thing is, after all those years when Inigo finally gets his revenge, he is lost. He says, “It is very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life.”
We get to the end of Job, and after all the theology, drama, discussion of the previous 41 chapters, it’s easy to simply be thankful Job’s ordeal is finally come to an end, making it easy to gloss over this last chapter as simply the Disney ending of “And everyone lived happily ever after.”
But I think we make a mistake to dismiss these final words so easily.
As far as we can tell, Job’s friends hear God talking to Job, which means they soon understand they have been wrong all this time, Job was right, and God is not happy with them.
God tells the friends, “So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly.”
A couple of things happen here.
One, God tells the friends to ask Job to forgive them. In fact, it sounds like God is saying not only do the friends need to ask for Job’s forgiveness, but whether or not God will forgive them depends entirely on Job.
If you’re Job, that’s pretty powerful. He can have final say over the people who have been doubting him, speaking lies about him, arguing with him that Job deserved all that has happened to him. I don’t know about you, but I like nothing better than to be proven right. I love it when people say, “We should have listened to you.” And it’s only human nature to want to see those people who spoke ill of me to experience a little misery of their own.
Once, many years ago, a young man wanted to join an organization I was part of. I didn’t think this young man was a good fit, and said so. I had enough influence to block the application, but the next week the leaders of this organization brought the application up again and used a rule to block me from having a vote. The young man was accepted into the organization.
It just so happened that I left that organization not long afterward. It had nothing to do with this incident; I simply moved to take advantage of another opportunity. But years later I ran into a few of the people from that organization who told me it was soon evident that I was right, and in fact it became something of a catch phrase whenever this person did something not in keeping with the organization, and someone would say, “Melick was right.” Selfishly, part of me was gratified.
So God tells Job, “I know your friends have spoken ill of you, and they’ve spoken lies about me. If they ask you to forgive them, it’s up to you. If you forgive them, I’ll forgive them too.”
But as Scripture tells us time and time again, we’ve been forgiven so much – our sins, and the penalty of death that those sins call for – how can we fail to forgive someone who wrongs us, some human who really has no power over our eternal destiny?
What does that say to us about how we’re to behave when we realize we’re wrong? What we’d like to do – what most of us do – is simply say, “Hey, that whole thing that I accused you of, that ruined your life? Apparently, I was wrong. Sorry about that.”
God offers a more extreme measure of how to ask forgiveness. Not that we need to go gather livestock to kill in front of the person we did wrong in order to show how sorry we are, but I am afraid that my asking for forgiveness needs to go beyond a simple, “Sorry about that.”
Asking forgiveness is, I think, not something we’re to take lightly. There is a cost in forgiveness. Jesus demonstrated that on the cross. And while I’m not comparing my willingness to forgive someone with Jesus’ sacrifice, when we’re asked to forgive someone for something they did to us there is some humility involved on our part. We could demand justice. We could react with righteous indignation. And who would fault us for that?
Maybe God.
In what we call “the Lord’s Prayer,’’ we’re told to say, “Forgive us, as we forgive others.” (My paraphrase). That’s compelling, that we ask to be forgiven to the extent that we forgive. In fact, Jesus goes on to break this down further when he unpacks it in Matthew 6:14–15: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” That’s huge.
James, the half-brother of Jesus whose language is most like that of Jesus, says in his book (chapter 2, verse 13), “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” (NIV). Kind of like Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” And the Old Testament prophet Micah (6:8): “What is required of you but this: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”
And Job – for all we know, Job is still sick. He’s still scratching and sitting in ashes, miserable. When the three friends come to Job seeking his intercession with God on their behalf, it's not just their humility that is on trial. Job is now being asked to love his enemies and pray for those who abused him. He is being asked to bless those who cursed him and not to return evil for evil.
It’s like one last test of Job – even after all this, will Job still do what is right in God's eyes?
The very one that they had accused of being far from God must become their priest to bring them near to God. In other words, God is seeing to it that the only way the three friends can experience reconciliation with God is through experiencing reconciliation with Job. They must humble themselves before Job, not simply before God.
Asking forgiveness should not be easy. It should not be something like a throw-away line. It seems to me it should be serious stuff - and I know I'm as guilty of trivializing it as anyone; of simply asking to be forgiven because I want to end the argument or release the tension and about half the time I don't really mean it because down deep I can make really convincing excuses for myself.
Let me go back to my story up above. I don’t remember that young man’s name. I have no idea of what happened to him. Hopefully, we went on to a great life, and doesn’t remember me or my name either.
But I do wish I had the chance to say to him that I handled that situation wrong, and I know I offended him, and in retrospect no organization was worth the embarrassment I caused him. At the time it seemed really important; now, all I can think of is I never had the chance to at least try to make it right.
Just as the book of Job teaches us about caring for someone who is going through a tragedy, just as it offers us clues on how to comfort and give advice, now we see what asking - and giving - forgiveness should look like.
Let me close with a passage from another of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis who, in his book "The Weight of Glory," wrote about forgiveness:
"... you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart — every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out. The difference between this situation and the one in such you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough.
As regards my own sin it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men’s sins against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought.
But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine percent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life — to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son—how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night ‘forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says. ..."
God means what He says.
When asking or offering forgiveness, pray that we mean it, too.
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