How Easter helps us embrace the other

Good Friday remembers the moment at which God himself did that, even though this was not a trivial thing even for God.

Forgiveness is morally serious. It’s not the overlooking of morally repugnant behaviour. It declares it to be what it is. But forgiveness refuses to see the other as a monster.

That is to say: it doesn’t demonise the other. It humanises them, even as they demonise you. Speak for victims, not as one.

As Desmond Tutu once said:

Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering - remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning.

What’s more, forgiveness is actually empowering in exactly the way the victim narrative isn’t, because it refuses to let the oppressor describe me.

How is this possible? It’s possible because, with Christ, human beings are offered a new identity. This identity is about belonging to group that has forgiveness, and not exclusion of the enemy, as its constitution. It is full of ‘others’.

If I know myself as a forgiven person, then I can’t act with anything but humility towards others. And if I know myself as forgiven, I need not fear what others can do.

I am fallible, but free.

Perhaps then the Easter spectacle of a man nailed to a cross, degraded and horribly abused, turns out to be an invitation to pursue our conversations with others in a new way – no less fiercely committed to what we feel is right and just, but always with possibility of ‘a second chance for a new beginning’.