Forgiving and Reconciling

Bridges to Wholeness and Hope

Everett L. Worthington Jr.

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780830875269
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A Templeton Foundation Book of DistinctionAll of us have suffered painful emotional and relational hurts. God calls us to forgive those who have hurt us, but that's often easier said than done. We don't usually know how to forgive others, nor are we always sure if we have truly forgiven them.Psychologist and counselor Everett L. Worthington Jr., the leading Christian researcher on forgiveness, says that forgiving is a gift we give to others. When we offer forgiveness to others as an altruistic gift, it is more effective than when we forgive only for our own benefit in an effort to "get over" the hurt. True forgiveness is accomplished through a careful process of understanding both the offense and the offender and taking active steps to forgiveness. In this insightful and practical book, Worthington provides a wealth of clinically proven tools and exercises for moving toward forgiveness.Worthington's expertise comes not only from years of scientific research but also from the experience of the brutal murder of his own mother. His convictions were put to the test as he worked through his conflicting emotions and rage toward the murderer. He found that the principles of Christian forgiveness enabled him to forgive even his mother's killer.While forgiveness is something that we can do on our own, reconciliation involves another party. Worthington brings both themes together and shows how we can move beyond forgiveness and cross the bridge to reconciliation. This book, previously published as Five Steps to Forgiveness, has been fully revised to make clear the scriptural foundations of Christian forgiveness. Biblical, authoritative and pastorally sound, this guide will be of help to anyone who wants to find the freedom of forgiveness.

Part 3

How to RECONCILE

In the second part of Forgiving and Reconciling, you have learned a five-step method to help you reach the forgiveness that a Christian relationship to the triune God encourages, stimulates and commands. You have practiced each step. You saw how to use the method to help yourself develop a more forgiving character. You saw how to pick symbolic hurts to enable you to forgive a hard-to-forgive person.

In each case, we assumed that the person you are trying to forgive isn’t present. When you have to deal with the person, forgiving becomes more complicated. He or she can respond to what you do, referring to his or her own agenda and perspective on the events. The person might believe that you are at fault and might hurt you again.

We need to take the next step and consider how our interactions can help or hinder forgiving. Rebuilding trust is the context of seeking, granting and accepting forgiveness. That is the focus of the third part of Forgiving and Reconciling. We will walk carefully across a bridge to reconciliation.

9

Decisions

You cannot build a bridge by starting in the middle. Bridge-builders begin from the side they are on.

JOHN PAUL LEDERAC

In our laboratory and clinic, after I had developed the Pyramid Model to REACH Forgiveness, my students and I began to apply it. Jennifer Ripley helped groups of couples from Richmond who were seeking marital enrichment.1 Near the end of the group, we had partners talk to each other about past unforgiven transgressions. Imagine the scene. Five couples were scattered around a room. One group leader tried to monitor those conversations.

When the group leader was nearby, most couples talked calmly. But the leader was always facing away from several couples. Voices began to rise. The group leader would drift toward the rising voices. Under the leader’s attention, the partners could calm down. Meanwhile, though, two other arguments might erupt. The group leader was like a pinball, bouncing back and forth among the couples. No group leader could control five conversations. Some wounds were healed, but other wounds surfaced. We had not taught partners how to talk about the transgression itself. Some talked harshly with each other. They sometimes hurt each other anew.

By looking hard at our study’s weaknesses, Jennifer and I saw ways to correct them. The scientific method had worked. We had new ideas. We just hope those first groups of couples forgave us.

We realized that forgiving was more complex when people had to go nose to nose with another person than when individuals were forgiving an absent person. (This might seem like a “duh” insight, but we had not taken it seriously prior to Jennifer’s study.)

We began to think about forgiveness within the context of reconciliation. In this third part of the book, I will describe how to forgive and perhaps reconcile when you are still in a relationship with someone who hurt you. As with forgiving, so also empathy, sympathy, compassion and agape love are at the core of reconciling.

Differences in Forgiveness and Reconciliation

People can forgive a person who is absent, like a parent who has been long dead. They can also learn to forgive someone who must be faced daily. When you have to interact with a person, two roads open up if you discuss the hurt. You can resolve or dissolve the relationship.

The other person can talk back, bring up times when you inflicted hurt, push your buttons and provoke you to blind rage. But the other person can also be accommodating, contrite, remorseful and loving. How you both interact will determine the future of the relationship. Will you tick each other off or tackle the problem? Will you jerk each other’s chains or link your hearts closer together?

What’s the difference between forgiving and reconciling? When people interact, we are no longer considering mere forgiveness. We are talking reconciliation. Reconciliation is restoring trust in a relationship in which trust has been damaged. Reconciliation requires both people to be trustworthy.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are often confused with each other (see table 9.1). Forgiveness is internal. I replace negative emotions or grant forgiveness as a gift. Reconciliation is interpersonal. It is not granted but earned. It occurs within a relationship.

Reconciliation and forgiveness are related to each other but are not joined at the hip. We can forgive and not reconcile. For instance, I can forgive my father for ways he hurt me when he was alive. Yet we cannot reconcile because he is dead.

We can reconcile and not forgive. Think of all those office squabbles. If we had to go to the mat and explicitly forgive every small breach of trust, we would never get any work done. We would spend many days tromping up and down the Pyramid. Yet because we must work together, we find ways to rebuild trust.

Table 9.1. A Quick Comparison of Forgiveness and Reconciliation

	Forgiveness	Reconciliation
Who?	One person	Two or more people
What?	Gift granted	Earned, not granted
How?	Emotional replacement	Behavioral replacement
Where?	Within your body	Within your relationship
How to?	Pyramid Model to REACH Forgiveness	Bridge to reconciliation

Feeling forgiveness can motivate reconciliation. Even though forgiveness and reconciliation are not joined, they are clearly related. When we forgive, we are often moved to pursue reconciliation. Let me go back to shortly after my mother’s death for an illustration.

After I returned from Tennessee and my mother’s funeral, I talked about my feelings only to my family. I was emotional whenever the subject of her death came up, so I tried not to talk publicly about the murder. I passed along the basic information to my friends and colleagues and accepted their condolence. Then I changed the topic fast.

Only with Kirby could I really let my hair down. I could talk safely about the pain that I felt. We spent many hours on long walks, with her listening, me trying to make sense of the murder. How did it fit into my world? What would it mean not to have Mama alive?

Almost four full months after the murder, I spoke about it publicly for the first time. I was to receive an award for teaching. I was slated to speak to about five hundred students, parents and university faculty.

I talked about the noble privilege of the teacher. “Character,” I said, “is often more difficult to develop and to maintain than is an inquiring mind. As teachers, we have the noble yet often humbling task of helping students develop positive character traits.” I talked of how my own character had been tested by the death of my mother, and I described the events of her murder. I shared from the heart how I reacted: first with rage, then with the lust for murder and finally with peaceful forgiveness of the murderer. I concluded, “Life often throws a sudden test of character before us. Will our students, and will we (as students of life), be able to pass our tests of character?”

At the end of the night’s award program, at least fifteen people moved forward and shook my hand. Most shared their own struggles at forgiving people. Several made a passionate vow to find the person who had hurt or offended them to make things right—to reconcile.

I was amazed. I had hoped to help teachers want to teach positive values. Yet the effects of sharing that I could forgive my mom’s murderer extended far beyond my hoped-for effect on teachers. Teachers, parents, students and administrators were moved to try once again to enter into the difficult task of forgiving those whom they had tried to forgive many times before. Even more, several wanted to reconcile with those who had hurt them. They wanted to restore their friendship. Hearing about forgiveness had unleashed a desire in them to restore trust in a trust-scarred relationship.

Encouraged, a month later I talked again about forgiving the murderer. This time I was speaking to a conference of professional counselors. At the end of that talk, people again moved forward and shared their personal struggles and stories of forgiveness. They wanted to know how I forgave. They wanted to test their character with a challenge to forgive. Again, knowing that I could forgive a tragic murder helped them want to make things right with people they had hurt and with those who had hurt them.

Yet sometimes, despite a desire on each side to reconcile, the trust gap widens like the earth opening up during an earthquake. An innocent remark ignites an explosion. A not-so-innocent jibe exposes an angry fire that has been smoldering beneath the surface. Talking about forgiveness and seeking to reconcile are risky. We’ve all tried to reconcile with people, only to have the conversation blow up in our face. If only there were a foolproof way to restore trust.

What Scripture Says About Reconciliation

Remarkably, Scripture gives us almost no direct guidance about reconciliation. The Hebrew Scriptures have zero references that use the word. The New Testament isn’t much more complete. The primary passage dealing with reconciliation is about reconciliation of humans with God—which is the main thrust of scriptural guidance about reconciliation. In 2 Corinthians 5:17-21, we find the main passage on reconciliation.

Therefore [because Christ, who died for all, showed a love that compels us (v. 14)], if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

That passage is completely focused on human reconciliation with God and on the way that people are called to help reconcile others with God.

We find the same emphasis in Colossians 1:19-20 (“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things”), Romans 5:10 (“For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him [God] through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”; see also Rom 5:11) and Romans 11:15 (“For if their [Jews’] rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?”). The primary concern in the New Testament is reconciliation of people to God.

Interpersonal reconciliation—of people to each other—is seen in only three passages. In Ephesians 2:16 (“and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God”), Paul argues that Gentiles and Jews have historically seen themselves as two separate people. However, when people become Christians, the two people are joined in Christ into a single reconciled people—reconciled with God and with each other. In 1 Corinthians 7:10, Paul mentions that a woman who becomes separated from her husband must be reconciled to her husband or remain unmarried.

The main teaching on interpersonal reconciliation is in Matthe...