What is your reaction to pain? If anyone reading this has ever hit your thumb with a hammer or laid claim to an epic (or not so epic) story to accompany the huge and awful bruise on your body, you know what it is to guard your wound. If you perceive a threat that might poke at or apply pressure to your injury, it is natural for you to protect it, even to build some distance between you and the perceived threat.
Horses are natural flight animals so when they experience the fulfillment of their natural fear, like being chased and then beaten, the stakes become higher in their mind. With higher stakes come bigger reactions. Once a horse is hit in the face, they will automatically jerk their head back and away from you when you lift your hand toward their head. We can understand this and even have great compassion flow for the animal having experienced such terrible circumstances.
What about internal pain? Not the physical internal world, but the place where emotions, memories, nightmares, fear, and flashbacks live? Believe it or not, we guard those too. In fact, the reactionary responses in the first two examples are tied to the internal pain directly. You experience fear and remember pain when your bruise is threatened with potential further damage. The horse has a flashback of a scary experience when a hand is raised to his eye. The reaction that follows is varying degrees of involuntary and can even be hostile. Depending on the reaction, the percieved offender may become indignent and may even respond with violence. In other words, a natural reaction to guard internal pain can create conflict.
It is true, isn't it? The person at the grocery store that snapped at you for not moving out of her way kind of upset you and made you resent her. The man who flipped you off as he floored the gas petal in his truck to get around you pretty much ruined your whole morning, and you hope to see him pulled over before you get to work. Any number of deficits and wounding present in the lives of these two human examples would explain their reactions which they are taking out on you. However, because of our own deficits and wounding getting poked, we react right back in a mirid of different ways specific to us and our own story.
This is one of the principles of a fallen world that brings to light perhaps the greatest contrast in scripture between the wounded human in a fallen world and Jesus, the Son of God who is perfect in His example. Even in moments when He was being beaten, sneered at, ridiculed and then of course in the very moment He was completely rejected and nailed to His cross, His famous words are documented: "Father, forgive them; for they know now what they do." Luke 23:34. Typically, this example that is used over and over again by the Church will cause a deep shame to overcome the congregation and the hope of the message is to get you to shape up and change your behavior-- act like a Christian. But I remind you of the scripture: "There is now therefore no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Romans 8:1. So then, how do we reconcile this because I feel like a terrible person right now... right? Well, let's get to know Jesus a little bit.
Jesus was able to see the world from every perspective because He is one with the Father. He did not simply control His behavior and say all the right things all the while burning with hate inside. We know this because He said when we hate our brother in our heart, we have committed murder (1 John 3:15) but Jesus never sinned or broke the law. Like the Father, because Jesus only did what He saw His Father doing, Jesus saw the world in its fullness. He did not just see the behavior, He saw the "why" and the generations upon generations before it that compounded the "why" behind people's behavior. He also knew what was created in the Garden of Eden and the potential of every man who would receive Him after His death. His eyes were open to the vastly complicated experience that man is caught up in. Without our eyes being open, humans cannot see beyond our own noses. We live in a very small box of understanding without the Spirit of God, and we need Jesus in us to "open our eyes" to unlock the ability to walk in compassion and true forgiveness-- and this is what separates Christianity from every other experience.
Let me give you an example of what this looks like for life after Jesus: in Acts chapter 7, Stephen was given the Spirit of God and his eyes were opened to see as Jesus sees. Through the boldness of the Holy Spirit that filled him, Stephen gives a thorough defense of the truth of Jesus Christ in front of the religious council of the day. He ties the prophecies of old to the events that fulfilled them as Jesus walked with the people. He then calls out the hardened hearts of the religious council members for their rejection of the Holy Spirit trying to speak to their heart in Acts 7:51-53. The stiff rebuke was absolute truth as it was ministered by the Holy Spirit and we see in verse 54 that "When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth." The religious leaders reacted to this word of truth much like someone who perceives a threat to their physical injury might react to their offender. They were cut to the heart where wounds fester and the wound that they were protecting was their sense of worth.
The religious leaders had risen to their ranks through their own performance. When we perform to feel worthy, the motivating force for this behavior is shame-- that is to say that their whole lives were a futile attempt to become worthy of love by being enough in their own strength. That means that without their performance, striving, and honestly suffering this way, they were raised up believing that they alone were not worthy of love. Shame breeds pride. Pride guards the wound of feeling "not enough" and that wall is built very high so as not to allow anything in to touch the original pain. Perhaps you can imagine, or you can relate to, receiving the message at a young age that you are worthless, and you are not loved. You are taught that the way to become worthy and loved is to memorize books obsessively and keep 613 laws perfectly. Years of striving for an impossible standard will require you to measure your success against others' ability to fill that hope for worth. Your lens will remain focused on being better than someone else and when you see that you are falling short, that old wound of being worthless will rise up again. It is a painful cycle to live in.
It is important to remember that how others treat us is exactly how they treat themselves. When we look through this lens, this sad reality, at the religious leaders, we see that they lived in constant condemnation and hatred toward themselves desperately clinging to the hope that they could be enough. Small successes begin to accumulate, and false righteousness begins to soothe the old painful wound of being unworthy of love. And then, in an effort to prevent any damage to the facade, control is established to keep the walls of pride from being tested. The enforcement of that control looks like some form of violence or punishment. As you can see, one message, one wound, is the beginning of tyranny. Everything is built up as a fortress to protect the fragility of one's humanity.
Here is the real tragedy in the story of the religious leaders: "He that loveth not knoweth not God; For God is love." 1 John 4:8. The deficit that existed in the religious leaders was birthed from circumstances that were generations deep. They had been established as tradition that did not take into account the perfect love of God. God IS love-- it is not an attribute of Him, love is who He is. We see His love and faithfulness before and after the law was given, in all of the kicking and screaming that His people demonstrated. We see how He loved David, the adulterer and murderer. And we see how the traditions and doctrines of man did not include this detail about God's intentions and we arrived at the hardened, wounded hearts of the religious leaders generations later.
This different perspective of the religious leaders no doubt brings a new set of emotions to you. There is no right or wrong reaction but only notice if it feels different from your original reaction. That experience is the proof that our lenses can be challenged, and we only see what little we understand. Now, consider God is all-knowing, infinite and perfect. How many more perspectives is He aware of? We begin to experience the reality of His perspective when we receive Jesus and our spirit is made new, and compassion flows from that.
Finishing up back in Acts 7, we see that Stephen was stoned to death. He challenged that wall of pride that the religious leaders carefully fortified, and he experienced the "punishment" for testing that control. But before he dies, he demonstrates a familiar reaction: "And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep." Acts 7:60. Stephen's eyes were open. He received Jesus, his spirit was made new, and he had the mind of Christ and the perspective that comes with that. Because Jesus is aware of the wounds that drove the religious leaders to make harsh decisions, so was Stephen. In a moment when he was brutalized to death, the substance of compassion flowed from him.
The truth is, if we meditate on "who is to blame" in any situation honestly, we find out that only one is truly to blame. That is the devil, the father of all lies. We can go back in our history and blame our offender for their transgression, but then we learn about the betrayal that our offender experienced which established their own wound to which they react. So, then we can continue down the line and blame our offender's betrayer... until we find out the person who betrayed him was deeply wounded by another. This will go all the back to one point in a beautiful garden when the first human was deceived and wounded by the very first offender.
You see, compassion comes easy when we understand things fully. God sees it all, because He is love and He wants us to be His children in this world to represent Him. But we cannot do it in our own strength or by simply modifying our behavior. Receiving Jesus is required to be able to see things as He does. Once we have done that, the rest of the Christian life is learning from Him. To me, this discussion shows an illustration of what God already knew when He told us to forgive our neighbor and to love one another. In our own strength, through our own small lens, this feels hard and really impossible. But we see here that when we have the understanding that He has, it makes a lot of sense. The foundation of trusting Him is believing that even when we "don't get it", we know His word is true and our prayers become "show me how" instead of "make this change."
I love you!
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