An outstanding post from Dr. McKnight. I would also encourage you to pick up his little book, 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed. Our small group used it during Lent two years ago and it is very meaty. You might even recognize the guy who wrote the study guide for it.

There are a lot of misconceptions about forgiveness and what it entails. Scot hits the nail on the head here for anyone who currently needs to forgive (or be forgiven). This is hard stuff and quite costly. See what you think.

From the Jesus Creed blog:

Loving our enemy begins in the mind with our memory, and it is a hard memory to travel. Remembering that we have been wronged leads us to two options. We can choose to stew in our memories of the wrong and enjoy a feast of condemnation, the feast that never satisfies, and we can choose to dwell in this stew of condemnation. If we do, we sadly let the wrongdoer define us.

Or, in the grace of God, we can let the cross of Jesus Christ – where the Innocent One was mortally wounded but who nonetheless offered grace through that moral wound – define us and our relationship with those who have wounded us. First, we offer the wounds and the one who wounded us to the cross by condemning the wrongdoing. Enemy-love doesn’t casually dismiss the wrongdoer or the wrongdoing; it condemns the wrong.

In God’s grace, enemy-love then remembers not only the wrong and the wound but that God has absorbed all wounds in order to turn them around into grace. Once we face God’s gracious reversal of wounds, we seek the grace of reconciliation by remembering that, in spite of our own wrongdoing, God loved and forgave us. In that work of God, we turn our memory of wounds into the hope of grace and offer that grace to those who have wounded us. In offering the grace that genuinely acknowledges wrongdoing, we unleash God’s cycle of grace by living out the cross of Jesus Christ.

We need a cross-shaped memory to practice the enemy-love of the Jesus Creed. At the cross not only did God forgive us but he established the cycle of enemy-love. Jesus said “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). As Volf expresses his own experience, “The memory of the Passion urges … me to place the memory of suffered wrong in the service of reconciliation” (125).

Read it all.