Forgiveness and Osama Bin Laden

Right now our church is in a three week series on forgiveness called Chipped.  Given the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, I’ve been asked several questions about forgiveness and Bin Laden.  I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts on the issue.

My own initial reaction was one of celebration.  I’m not a very demonstrative person, but internally I was cheering and celebrating.  I was glad because that’s what the story-line of our culture has taught me is the right response.  Almost every Hollywood action movie has told me that this is how the story is supposed to end.  Bad guy does big time damage.  Hero goes after bad guy.  There’s a lot of chase scenes and carnage.  In the end, hero kills bad guy, preferably at point blank range.  Audience cheers.  That’s how the story goes, and that story has created a kind of habit within me that came out in that first moment that I heard that Bin Laden had been killed by a courageous group of elite American fighters.

My initial reaction did not stay for long.  Very quickly another story began to impede on the Hollywood story.  It is God’s story of salvation.  That story begins with God creating and calling it all very good.  Immediately the plot takes a twist.  What began as very good soon turns awry when Adam and Eve disobey.  The rest of the story is a wooing story: God wooing humanity back to God.  First with the Hebrew people.  Then the Torah.  Next the prophets.  And finally the author, God’s very self in Jesus Christ, stepped into the story.  The characters didn’t like the author very much and so they (or at this point should I begin saying “we”) killed him.  His perfect love was a little too much for us.  Thankfully there was a surprise ending: the grave couldn’t hold him and God raised Jesus from the dead.  This story produces some different habits in me.  Habits of forgiveness.  As the story unfolds Jesus teaches about forgiveness, forgives his executioners, is raised from the dead to show that forgiveness wins, and passes on that message of forgiveness to the community of people who follow him.

God’s salvation story is very different than the story that Hollywood tells me.  It is a story that makes me pause at the news of Bin Laden’s death.  It makes me ask some questions about how forgiveness and justice fit together.  Is justice truly full without reconciliation?  Does justice include confession?  Conversion?  I think of Martin Luther King Jr. who believed that the civil rights movement must win the day by the exceedingly courageous method of active non-violent resistance.  King used this method so that in the end, blacks and whites could be friends and live in community together.  If King had used violent means to attempt that goal, he realized that he would have put even more obstacles in place for creating that ultimate goal of a beloved community.  King had a deeper view of justice than just winning.  Winning meant keeping open the possibility of friendship.

Augustine, a fourth and fifth century church leader, certainly had it right when he said, “Let [Christians] not pray, then, that their enemies may die, but that their enemies be corrected; then the enemies will be dead, because when converted they will no longer exist as enemies.”  When that happens, I will be able to fully celebrate.  Until then, I will continue to pray that God’s kingdom would come here on earth as it is in heaven.

For another great reflection on this issue, check out my good friend, Mark Aupperlee’s blog.