Restoring Relationships Requires Relinquishing Righteous Rigidity

Over and over and over again in the Gospels Jesus hints, cajoles, teases, lectures, and otherwise encourages his followers to grasp one simple, but simply confounding basic premise:

to be able to love we have to have a sense of being forgiven.

In order for me to accept you as you are, I need to realize that God accepts me in my imperfection and brokenness. When we are so rigid about our perceptions of righteousness, no matter how in tune those perceptions may be with our covenantal history as Christians, we are quite unlikely to believe that God is anymore tolerant of us than we are of others. The most common misreading of Jesus has always been a misreading of God’s love as something that is earned by rigidly righteous behavior; the irony is that Jesus spends his entire ministry among us telling us that God’s love is poured out in spite of and because of our propensity for imperfection and brokenness, and not as “compensation” for “correct living.”

To be even more blunt about it, it may just be that those of us who are so rigid about our righteousness are simply deceiving ourselves; psychoanalysts will contend that rigidity comes not from an inability to deal with the “deviant” behavior of others, but from a refusal to recognize that even the most righteous among us harbor thoughts and fantasies that we would never admit to because they are so unrighteous.

The nagging sense of urgency we feel about some things in our lives has been explained, confronted, analyzed, dissected, overhauled, bemoaned, and celebrated, but it has never left us. Even the most arrogant among us are accompanied by a sense of dread that has been called insecurity, or a lack of sense of self-worth, or a fear or death, or the immaturity or fallenness of humanity, and no amount of psychotherapy or Tony Robbins or Dale Carnegie or “correct theology” or libraries full of self-help books seems able to shake it. So we become rigid about our righteousness, effectively denying to ourselves and anybody else that we are, too, are broken and in need of repair. We find all that hard to admit, so we find it difficult to believe that others whose are seem less concerned than we about the correctness of things deserve forgiveness.

We talk about this a lot with one another. Jesus' focus on forgiveness is not primarily about the person being forgiven, but for the one doing the forgiving. About whom do you carry that ancient anger? What ancient hurt do you carry around, do you revisit on at least a daily basis? What great things could you do with all the emotional and spiritual and physical energy you have invested in nurturing those angers and hurts? What if you and I would think of those great things instead of worrying about whether or not we let someone off the hook? Jesus' focus on forgiveness is not primarily about the person being forgiven, but for the one doing the forgiving.

So it kind of follows that when we are so rigid about our righteousness that we cannot be open to the notion that God forgives broken ones, even broken ones like us, we are also unable to share God’s love in any meaningful way. Though we may do all the “righteous things” connected with what loving people “ought” to do, we’ll still be utterly incapable of understanding a love that gives itself away.

And if we don't get our imaginations wrapped around the idea that we are indeed forgiven, and therefore can't get past our own notions of righteous rigidity, we often find ourselves unwilling to forgive, unwilling to be forgiven, wondering how all those others got all the goodies of life, and how we’ve been left standing with nothing more than our uneasy smugness.