Maybe a short example from The Year of Living Biblically will help to clarify, and perhaps justify some of my previous raving about this book (and at the same time, it may offer some food for though in its own right).
On Day 270 of his journey of following the Bible as literally as possible, A. J. Jacobs tackles 1 Corinthians 13:4-5: "love keeps no record of wrongs." In this case, he has to tackle things quite literally, because he violates this commandment quite literally. He keeps, as he humbly confesses, a file on his Palm Pilot innocently labelled "stuff," where he keeps a running record of times when he remembered something correctly and his wife remembered it wrong. Apparently his wife is always accusing him of having a poor memory, to which he responds that he has a decent enough memory and that she remembers things wrong a lot, too. But when she asks for an example he can never think of one-- hence the mnemonic list of "stuff" his wife got wrong. The story of the only time he ever put his list "into action," during an unsavory dispute over "who left the microwave door open," was quite hilarious and involved him sneaking into the bathroom to consult his list in secrecy (Julie, until Day 270, knew nothing about "the list"). He reemerged with an example of a time she locked the keys in the car.
Freely admitting the irony of needing to consult a list to prove he has a good memory, he also freely admits that this is probably the exact thing Paul was preaching against in 1 Corinthians. So in keeping with his "literalist" project, Jacobs deletes the stuff list, but not before showing it to his wife, who just laughs at him: "How could I be angry?" she says, "It's just so heartbreaking that you need this."
And as I'm reading, I'm laughing, too; but I'm also convicted about my own "stuff" list. It's not on my Palm Pilot, perhaps, and maybe not as literal as his, nor as specific to marital disputes, but I know about that "list" that I keep filed away somewhere in the corner of my heart, that record of times I was in the right and "they" were in the wrong. And I realize that, for all the seriousness with which I take the Pauline authorship and canonical authority of 1 Corinthians 13, I have yet to wipe that record completely clean.
If only it were as easy as clicking the delete button.
Jacobs says this about following 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 as literally as possible: "I know it may seem like a small thing, but the 'Stuff' incident made me realize my worldview is too much about quantification. It consists of thousands of little ledgers. ... When I forgive, I file away the other person's wrongs for possible future use. It's forgiveness with an asterisk."
Wow. May God grant his church a reading of the Bible so literal that we discover what it really is to love without the asterisk.
The Stuff List
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2 comments:
This is funny and poignant. I'd really like to read that book. Thanks for sharing.
I'd be curious about what you think is the relation of forgiving to forgetting. I just read Volf's "The End of Memory" and he basically says that forgetting (or non-remembering he calls it) is a stage that comes later than forgiving, ultimately at the eschaton, since we need remembrance of wrongs to keep us from perpetuating wrongdoing, whether we've forgiven wrongs or not.
Something seems common sense and at the same time wrong about that.
good thoughts. i like volf a lot. if the resurrected body of jesus is any indication of what we can expect at the eschaton, then i wonder if forgiving will ever entail forgetting. he did bear the scars of the cross even on the other side of the grave, after all, and, if John's vision of the lamb-who-was-slain in heaven is any indication, even beyond the grave. maybe the point is not that we will ever "forget wrongs" but that in Christ there is possible a forgiveness that comes from a redeemed and honest knowledge of ourselves, and others, and the circumstances that led to this or that trespass in the first place, and so allows us to remember without guilt, shame, regret or blame.
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