“The Only Way Out”
Oops!
Most of us are familiar with the story of Les Misérable, “Les Mis.” In it, Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew, and for that he spent nineteen years in prison. When he finally gets out, Inspector Javert spends the rest of his life hunting him down. Javert isn’t evil — that’s what’s so unsettling about him. He’s a man of the law, a man of justice. He believes, with every fiber of his being, that a man who did wrong must pay. An eye for an eye. A debt is a debt.
And we understand him, don’t we? Something deep in us says: that’s right. That’s fair. When someone wrongs us — when someone lies about us, betrays us, wounds us — something in us rises up and says: they should pay for that. It’s not a small impulse. It may be the most powerful impulse in human history.
Jesus sees it. He’s been teaching the Sermon on the Mount, and he turns to this directly: “If you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” He says it plainly and he says it twice, as if he knows we won’t want to hear it the first time.
And honestly? We don’t.
Ugh!
Here’s what makes this so agonizing. We are not always Javert. Sometimes we are Valjean. Sometimes we are the ones who were genuinely wronged. Sometimes we are the oppressed, the betrayed, the wounded. And Jesus still says: forgive.
The theologian Miroslav Volf knows something about this. He grew up in the former Yugoslavia and watched his country tear itself apart in ethnic violence — neighbors killing neighbors, entire villages erased. He wrote his landmark book Exclusion and Embrace asking: how do we live in peace with one another when the wounds are that real and that deep?
And he noticed something that Jesus does which surprises us and maybe even offends us. When Jesus speaks to the oppressed — to the poor, to the marginalized, to the victims — he doesn’t only offer comfort. He also calls them to repent. The victims have to repent too? Yes. Not because their suffering was their fault. But because of what suffering can do to a soul if we aren’t careful.
Volf writes that victims can too easily be shaped into the mirror image of their enemies — dehumanizing others the way they themselves were dehumanized, answering hatred with hatred, until the oppressed simply become the new oppressor. Revenge is not a solution. It’s a reaction that demands another reaction in an endless cycle, with each side convinced they are simply taking justice for what was done to them.
We see this in families, in marriages, in nations, in communities. We see it inside ourselves. Someone wounds us and we rehearse it. We nurse it. We build a case. And meanwhile — and this is the quiet tragedy — we hand our enemy the keys to our soul. We let them continue to shape us, to diminish us, to define us. As Volf puts it, if we aren’t careful, we let our enemies destroy us from the inside.
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. So what do we do with the wound? What do we do with the rage?
Aha!
The Psalms show us something remarkable. The Psalmist doesn’t suppress his rage. He doesn’t perform a polite, tidy forgiveness. He brings his rage before God. He screams it. He weeps it. He says things that make us uncomfortable to read aloud. And Volf points out: that is exactly where rage belongs — before God, who is large enough to hold it — not directed at other human beings in an endless cycle of wound and counter-wound.
To bring our rage before God is a cathartic act. It is an act of faith that says: I am not the judge of the universe. God is. It releases us from the exhausting, impossible work of securing our own justice. And it frees us to do something that only the forgiven can do: forgive.
Jesus addresses two sins in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, and Volf names them plainly: envy and enmity. Devotion to wealth and hatred of the enemy. These are the two great obstacles to the Kingdom of Heaven. And notice — they are both relational. Both of them define us by what others have or what others have done. Both of them chain us to the past, to comparison, to grievance.
The only way out is through forgiveness. Not because the wrong didn’t happen. Not because justice doesn’t matter — Volf is emphatic that it does. But he argues this: only a confession of truth draws our attention to the injustice, and only those who forgive can prevent justice from curdling into new injustice. Forgiveness doesn’t deny what happened. It refuses to let what happened have the final word.
And here is the heart of it: repentance is not primarily about the other person. Repentance is an I statement. Not they did this to me. Not look what they made me do. Just: I have sinned. Lord, have mercy on me. It is the refusal to explain ourselves by accusing someone else. It is the hardest sentence in any language. And it is, Jesus says, the door to freedom.
Whee!
This is why we begin Great Lent the way we do. Not with a diet. Not with a checklist. We begin with a rite. In a few moments, we will do something that is either the most countercultural act imaginable or the most empty religious gesture — depending on whether we mean it. We will look one another in the face. We will bow. And we will say: forgive me. And the other will say: God forgives. I forgive.
We are practicing, in this room, what the whole Lenten journey is moving us toward. We are rehearsing the shape of the Kingdom. Not Javert’s world, where every debt must be paid. Not the endless cycle of wound and counter-wound. But something new — something that breaks the cycle entirely.
Jesus didn’t speak these words from a comfortable distance. He spoke them and then he went to a cross. And from that cross — from the place of ultimate victimhood, from the place of total innocent suffering — he said: Father, forgive them. The one who had every right to demand an accounting refused to. And in doing so, he broke the cycle that has trapped humanity since Cain and Abel.
That is what the cross offers us. That is what we are walking toward in these forty days.
Yeah!
At the end of our Lenten journey, at the very close of Pascha Matins — after the darkness has become light and the fast has become feast — the Church sings something. We will sing it at the end of this long road, when we have arrived at the empty tomb. And it goes like this:
“Let us embrace each other. Let us call ‘brothers’ even those who hate us.”
Even those who hate us. That is where this journey ends. Not in our triumph over our enemies. Not in their punishment. But in an embrace. In a word — brother, sister — spoken to the very person who wounded us.
That is the destination. Today, the Rite of Forgiveness is the first step. It is the first small movement in a long journey toward that embrace. It will feel awkward. It may feel undeserved — on both sides. It may even feel like a lie.
But do it anyway. And mean it as much as you can. And trust that God, who is large enough to hold all of our rage and all of our wound, is also powerful enough to make it true.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not coming by accident. It is coming through people who choose — against all instinct, against all Javert-logic — to let go. To forgive. To embrace.
Let us begin.
Amen.