LENT: FORGIVENESS, NOT JUSTICE, IS OUR CALLING

In response to the previous post on forgiveness, I received the following question that would not post.

Question: “Part of what makes this sort of forgiveness (lifting the other person's load of injustice) so difficult is that it seems to let the injustice and the unjust person eternally off the hook. Can you comment sometime about whether the forgiven person really does "get away with it"?”

My understanding of biblical teaching:
1) In terms of the human-divine relationship as represented in the atonement system, “Yes.”  Forgiveness is not at all just; it is mercy.  That is difficult.  It is not natural to me to be merciful; I want justice.  However, the Israelite atonement system is not about justice.  (The sacrificial animals were not put to death as a substitute penalty for the one seeking forgiveness.)  Assuming that the Israelites understood the seriousness of the symbolic ritual and their confession was sincere, God allowed the blood of the sacrificial animal to cover/remove the symbolic miasma of sin and restore unimpeded relationship with God.  That is the mercy of forgiveness that we are to show toward others.  (In a sense, asking for forgiveness is asking for justice to be set aside for mercy.  Example: Although Joseph’s brothers are duplicitous when they ask for forgiveness, he does not execute justice in Gen 50:15 – 21.) 

2) Those who remain in a state of rebellion/defiance toward God will not be forgiven – they do not really seek it.  However, their state is not for me to determine. 

3) There are occasions, for example, in which Moses intercedes for the people for breaking covenant, God accedes and maintains God’s faithfulness to the covenant in response to Moses, but there are still consequences for the rebellious people (Exod 32:31 – 38 or Num 14:17 – 25 in which the word “forgive” is salach and probably here has the nuance of “forebear”).  In cases like this “justice” serves its appropriate role for maintaining social order and discipline within the human community – here, the covenant community.

4) Related to #3): Today, within our criminal justice system, we sometimes hear of victims who have forgiven their transgressor but the person still is held societally accountable.  Judges have some, but little, latitude to forgive.  Justice is necessary to maintain social order in a world of chaos.  In that sense, God as a good King (one of many biblical metaphorical titles of attributes), does intervene as Judge for justice on earth, and in eternal matters will always divide good from evil.  However, in our descriptive metaphors of God as a good King, Judge is not the overruling attribute.  That leads to my last thought. 

5)  Well prior to the knowledge gained about the Israelite atonement system through the rediscovery of the ancient Near East in the last 100 years or so, Christians in some theological traditions developed a model of Jesus’ atonement based on a substitutionary, penal, criminal-justice model.  (This has been a successful communicative model since people understand justice so well.)  In this system, there is no mercy analogous to a subject appealing to a gracious king and receiving not justice but forgiveness.  Rather, in this system, Jesus is put to death so that God may be viewed as the just Judge.  The obvious deficit of this model is that it would like a king forgiving his repentant subject only on the grounds of then killing an innocent person (even a self-Triune representative), and all because the king is somehow bound to carry out an abstract model of “justice” and has no freedom to forgive.  More importantly, this is not the model of the Israelite atonement system that expresses God’s nature.  God is not bound by an overruling abstraction of justice.  In the New Testament, in terms of atonement language proper – and not the many metaphors for the salvific work of Christ – Jesus, the Perfect sacrifice, provides the cleansing blood of atonement, expressing once for all divine mercy and establishing “righteousness” (right-relating).  Yes, Jesus dies for all,# just as the Israelite sacrifice was killed for its blood of atonement, but not in terms of some penal, substitutionary “justice.”*

Father, once again, the bottom line is your unfathomable mercy, by which you “cleanse,” “bear,” etc. (the many other biblical expressions) my sins in Jesus in order to restore me back to Life with you.  Help me to show such mercy to others.  Amen.

#If interested, I examine the "died-for-us" texts in “Gathercole’s, Defending Substitution: Why I Am Unconvinced and Concerned,” The Expository Times 129.10 (2018) 458-465.
*Note: NT atonement models should be brought into alignment with the biblical atonement system as we now understand it better; however, this is rather like asking people to exchange their KJV Bibles for ones that communicate in contemporary English.