You don’t have to be part of a church for long to realize that division and arguments happen. As a pastor’s wife, I am perhaps exposed to more of the church’s underbelly than the average church-goer. It no longer surprises me when these bitter feuds pop up. I’ve come to realize that it’s really hard for us to be “of one mind”, as the Apostle Paul commanded the church at Philippi (Phil. 2:2). Our natural inclination is to make ourselves the hero or martyr in every conflict–and when both parties indulge in this practice, fireworks happen.
A pastor-friend of ours once said that in marriage counselling, he often finds that one or both of the spouses have a jaundiced eye; an eye that views everything their spouse does through pain and bitterness of past hurts. This is not unlike the church. Wounds from past situations prevent us from seeing the grace of God at work in another person and our pain makes us feel justified in lashing out at them. When we spin an altered reality to justify our actions, we not only harm the church, we also misunderstand the very gospel that we claim to believe.
The Hero-Martyr Syndrome
One of my favorite books is “Till We Have Faces” by C.S. Lewis. It’s a retelling of the myth of Psyche, a beautiful princess, who marries Cupid, the god of love. The protagonist of the story is Psyche’s older sister, Orual, who tells her story through a tangled web of lies and misconceptions–only you have no idea that her view of reality is warped until hints begin to emerge half-way through the book.
At the beginning of the book you are fully on Orual’s team. You feel every injustice right along with her. But as the book progresses you begin to see hints that Orual is quite bitter and that she may not have a right understanding of her situation.
It isn’t until Orual faces death that the veil is finally lifted. She stands before a crowd of dead souls, and brings her charge against the gods. In her hands she holds a book–it is a lifetime of well-argued complaints that she has carefully written down– and she begins to read it out loud.
After a time she realizes that she has been forced to say the truth. She hasn’t been reading her large book of elaborate arguments that she thought she believed, instead the gods have forced her to say what she actually believes.
With her eyes now open, Orual reflects, “The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered.” Orual heard herself say the true complaint of her heart, not the spun version that make her the hero of her own story, and the truth humbled her because she saw her own culpability.
I’ve read this book 2 or 3 times and each time I feel gutted when the truth finally dawns on her because it’s true of all of us. Our self-justification response is almost like a knee-jerk reaction. We don’t know how our leg extended; it just happened. The narrative is spun. The altered reality is stamped in our memory.
Self-justification is easy for us. It scratches an itch. It quenches the longing. Like long repressed shout of anger or a long overdue pity party. It feels good to indulge. But is it good for us? Is it good to live in a false reality; a reality that makes us the morally superior protagonist of every story?
Christ’s Example in Suffering
By contrast, God’s word paints a far different reality than the one we are naturally prone to spin. In it we find a God who is perfectly holy and a people desperately in need of a Saviour. We have no moral superiority to stand on. Our salvation is all of grace (Ephes. 2:8-9), and God’s own Son paid our debt with his blood.
Those who make Spirit-empowered effort to rein in this self-justification impulse are forced to feel the humbling and pain that forgiveness requires. Tim Keller in his book, Counterfeit Gods, writes,
“At every point in the Bible, the writers are at pains to stress that God’s grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator. If you have been robbed of money, opportunity, or happiness, you can either make the wrongdoer pay it back or you can forgive. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.” [1]
Forgiveness then is a conscious choice to imitate our Saviour, Jesus Christ, who “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:8). It requires us to choose a position of weakness and humility over the exaltation of moral superiority. The first step is always the hardest. It requires us to consider that we might not be the hero of this story. It forces us to admit that our bitterness may out of place and our jaundiced eye may be blinding us.
I wonder how many quarrels could be avoided if we took Jesus’ words in Matt. 7 more seriously? “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?…You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” (Matt. 7:3-5)
I don’t mean to trivialize the pain we feel when someone hurts us, or to imply that we should be a doormat, but if we are not willing to tame our hero-martyr mentality, how are we any different from the world? Even Jesus who “committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth…did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:22). He never sought to vindicate himself, instead he entrusted himself “to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).
I have found that when my heart is throbbing from a painful encounter, taking time to pray and meditate on the gospel changes my perspective; many times I find that I haven’t been wronged as much as I first assumed.
Over time we, like Orual, may compile books worth of well-ordered arguments explaining why we are both the martyr and hero of our story. But when we consider Jesus Christ, and His redeeming work in the gospel, our well-ordered arguments turn to senseless scribbles. They don’t make sense in a Christian worldview.
[1] Keller, Timothy, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, p. 89.
