Corrupt Clergy and Forgiveness

In New Jersey this week, the news is corruption. Forty-four people, including three mayors, a state assemblyman, and five rabbis, have been arrested on various charges, including bribery and organ brokering. Shocking, even for New Jersey, many say. Ho hum, others sigh. For victims, the news is as fresh as an unexpected slap in the face. Imagine being the guy or girl who finds out that a rabbi was going to pocket $150,000 on the sale of your kidney. Imagine being one of those who learns he already has.

As Christians, we're fond of moral equivalence statements designed to inspire us to forgiveness. "There by the grace of God go I" is one. "The ground is level at the foot of the Cross" is another. I hate moral equivalence arguments. They impede the ability of victims to truly forgive. In this case, it is not the same thing for an impoverished father to sell a kidney to feed his family as it is for a member of the clergy to buy it for $10,000 while charging a desperate patient's family $160,000. One behavior, unchecked, may lead to another, but we empathize with the desperation and rightly deride the exploitation.

Still, corruption threatens its victims' souls nearly as much as its perpetrators'. The path of least resistance is to give in to bitterness and self-absorption, especially when expressions of anger at the injury or injustice draw condemnation from friend and foe alike. When our fellow believers hold up as models the Amish who immediately "forgave" the deranged Nickel Mines killer, for example, victims struggling with anger feel doubly violated. As one journalist discovered, even for the Amish, forgiveness is a complicated process.

In my own journey with forgiveness, the most helpful writer I've encountered is theologian Miroslav Volf. I read his book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace after being victimized by corrupt clergymen. Volf writes, "Condemnation is not the heart of forgiveness. It's the indispensable presupposition of it." Now there's a statement I can embrace.

Ah, but not so fast. He goes on to explain: "Forgiveness cuts the tie of equivalence between the offense and the way we treat the offender. I don't demand that the one who has taken my eye lose his eye or that the one who has killed my child by negligence be killed. In fact, I don't demand that he lose anything. I forgo all retribution. In forgiving, I absorb the injury - the way I may absorb, say, the financial impact of a bad business transaction."

Don't misinterpret Volf, though. In his view, systems of discipline are consistent with forgiveness. Criminals should go to jail. Offending clergymen should be defrocked. Our laws rightly prohibit murder, not anger, even though Jesus said its source is the human heart. Volf delineates between discipline and retribution, stating that we "ought to forgive rather than punish because God in Christ forgave."

Having recently served 18 months for a bribery conviction, the former mayor of my New Jersey town, like these others, should be welcomed back into the community. He should not, in my view, hold public office any time soon. Neither should those corrupt clergymen who victimized my church communities still be in pastoral ministry. Where does that leave me?

Volf writes, "Forgiveness places us on a boundary between enmity and friendship, between exclusion and embrace. It tears down the wall of hostility that wrongdoing erects, but it doesn't take us into the territory of friendship." He asks, "Should those who forgive stay in this neutral zone?

"If they did," he answers, "forgiveness would be the generous act of a person who wishes to stay away from the offender. Often that's all we can muster the strength to do, and all that offenders will allow us. Yet at its best, forgiveness hopes for more."

Yes, it hopes for more. It hopes for repentance, reconciliation, and restoration. It hopes for loving reunion and very often doesn't get it. So, how do we love the offender who keeps on offending? Do we "love the sinner and hate the sin"? Does anyone other than God really hate sin? How about Love the sinner, obstruct the sin, uphold the good, protect the innocent? Will that work?