What If it Is Our Fault?

One of my main tasks each Sunday during worship is to pray. Some Sundays, I pray extemporaneously; other Sundays I like to have something more formal, a scaffolding upon which to hang the various things we wish to bring before God and one another during worship. Last Sunday, for example, I used a formal prayer from the back of our hymnal. It was a good prayer. It covered a lot of territory from the global to the personal. It highlighted various aspects of God’s nature and character. It contained the familiar refrain, “Lord, in your mercy… hear our prayer.” Good stuff.

But even when I use the prayers of others, I almost always find myself editing a bit. Occupational hazard, I suppose. There’s always some line or phrase that I’ll want to tweak for theological or literary reasons. Nope, don’t want to say it that way… Should have said this instead… That sounds awkward… I’m not sure I really believe that, so not saying it out loud… Etc., etc. One of the edits I did last week was in a section where we were praying for “all who suffer in body, mind or spirit.” Included in the list that followed was “those who are incarcerated.” To this, I appended “and those they have hurt.” It seemed important to me as I was preparing for worship on Sunday. It still does.

I find it easy to pray for the guys I meet in jail every week. I do it often. I drive by the jail every day on my way to work and I say a prayer each time I do. I know some of the stories housed within the concrete and barbed wire and they are often appalling tales of neglect, abuse, addiction, and poverty. I often wonder—entirely unoriginally—what my life would have been life if I had faced their obstacles, their upbringing, their influences. I don’t find it terribly difficult to see a victim inside of a prisoner. My heart is easily broken.

But I also remember that there is a vast array of precious human lives out there that have been profoundly damaged by the actions of the men that I share and pray with every week. I tend to see these guys (and occasionally girls) at their best, their most reflective and remorseful, their most spiritually open, their least belligerent and destructive. At minimum, I see them when they’re sober. But they have hurt people. Sometimes terribly so. Sometimes permanently so. I prayed with a person last week accused of murder. Which was sobering to consider (to put it mildly). So, yes, pray for the incarcerated. But also pray for those whose lives have been shattered by what the incarcerated have done.

Today, I came across a piece by Alan Jacobs called “Good News for Victimizers.” He, too, affirms the instinct toward mercy, toward at least attempting to see the victim inside the prisoner. He gets the impulse to say, “it’s not all your fault,” to look at the story behind the story of every human life. But he also asks the important question, “But what about when it is your fault?” Theologically, we affirm that we are all sinners in need of grace. These are the lines we’ know we’re supposed to say, and we tend to say them. But I suspect we sort of believe that they apply to some more than others.

Jacobs puts it well:

Divine grace is mercy to the undeserving, because if we deserved it then it wouldn’t be mercy. But in my secret mind and heart I will always construct a spiritual spreadsheet in which I am less undeserving than others.

I think he’s right. I certainly do so. I will often say to the guys in jail, “we’re all sinners in this room and we all need God’s mercy” and I absolutely believe it. But in the back of my mind, I’ll be maintaining that spiritual spreadsheet Jacobs speaks of. Yeah, I need mercy, but you really need it. God help me.  

Jacobs asks us to look with bracing clarity and honesty at our moral situation and at the ways in which we conceptualize victims and victimizers:

Suppose that the one who victimized me was not himself a victim. Suppose that he was raised by thoughtful and sensitive saints, who always did exactly the right thing, struck precisely the correct note, never erred through severity or laxity or indifference — but still he sinned, and sinned grossly. In that case his situation before Jesus Christ would be … in no way different than my own. In no way whatsoever.

This is the scandalous truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is actual mercy for people who actually don’t deserve it. Not for people who did bad things but couldn’t really help it. Not for victims whose actions were rendered inevitable by their genes or their parents or bad drugs or systems and structures that seem almost tailor-made to produce desperation and violence. Not for boring, generic sinners whose deeds don’t make the news or land them behind bars. Not for romanticized sinners or downgraded saints.

The mercy of Jesus Christ is and has always been for real human beings who sin against each other and against their Maker. It is for all of us.

No spreadsheets.