Do you know what it means to be forgiven?  It is no coincidence that the core of the Christian message, forgiveness, addresses some of the most deeply rooted emotional scars that cripple us as human beings in the world: guilt for past actions and shame that makes us question our worth. At times, we don’t even need a spiritual adversary; our own hearts condemn us, weighing us down.

Jesus offers us freedom. This freedom is experienced through a journey towards a full, deep, rich experience of forgiveness. Forgiveness is too great to be experienced all at once, in that instantaneous exuberance some may feel the moment we are baptized. We need to experience it more than once. Rather, Jesus’s forgiveness is a promise that accompanies us throughout our journey with Him, whether we experience moments of catharsis or not.

Salvation is not merely a one-time cancellation of past debts. Salvation is not a piece of paper we get once we say the sinner’s prayer. Rather, salvation is only found in relationship with the whole, living, person of Jesus Christ. Viewing salvation as a transaction that occurs in a single moment diminishes its depth. Salvation not a technical change in status, a stamp of approval from a cold, bureaucratic agency. Rather, we are invited to experience this forgiveness in every part of our body – our heart, our soul, our mind… 

Salvation is therefore not an alien, theoretical, removed notion of what happens to us after we die. Salvation does not just exist as an idea. Salvation is intended to change us and permeate every part of our being. Jesus’s good news of salvation is a good news of peace that can be experienced. He invites us to enter into this tangible rest, shalom, and to enjoy the stillness and comfort and acceptance of a child resting in his or her parent’s arms. This means that our hearts, burdened and wounded and restless, can begin to heal.

Why Healing Matters

In general, the world increasingly sees the pursuit of mental health, healing, forgiveness, and acceptance as beautiful, good things. They indeed are, because everyone knows that these things are inherently good. No one wants the opposite: to be unhealthy, to hurt others, to be filled with shame, and self-hatred. For Christians, this pursuit has special meaning because Jesus accompanies us on this journey as our Shepherd. He gives us hope that this journey has a destination.

Anyone who has suffered grief or trauma knows that peace is not just a quick-fix, an easy solution that blasts away our wounds as if they don’t exist any more. Rather, healing is a journey of ups and downs. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes accepting the journey and it also takes accepting that like Jesus’s nail-pierced hands, healing does not return us to way we were before.

Sometimes, we want to replace the rawness of this tumultuous, painful, journey to healing with the pretense that everything is done, everything is fixed, and we can go on with our lives. Pretense is easy, but pursuit takes courage. For Christians, some of this courage is already there for the taking because Jesus gives us hope that anyone and everyone can be redeemed and sanctified. No one is too broken, too lost, too scarred, too dysfunctional.

Jesus makes very clear that this journey is for the weary, the broken, and those who long for healing. “Come to me,” He beckons. Being yoked to Jesus means that in the midst of the inevitable falls and stumbles we have His open hands giving us the acceptance and support we need to even want to embark on this journey. Like a parent helping a toddler make those first baby steps, Jesus’s forgiveness gives us the freedom to be imperfect, to get things wrong. And one of the “falls” we inevitably make comes from the inability to love well.

If we think of love as the epitome of God’s nature and His holiness, love was manifested and embodied by Jesus every step of His life, through every experience of humiliation, every act of sacrifice. God perfectly loves. It is immense, uncontainable, incredible. This love was manifest as Jesus died a shameful and degrading death for our sakes. The cross, what Jesus did on it, embodies love for us and we are beckoned to this way: not necessarily to the exact things the Romans did to Jesus, but the way in which Jesus was an expression of God. The gospel promises us that Jesus will transform every part of our internal machinery that gets in the way of love, and that not only within us as individuals but with one another.

How Jesus Heals

When Jesus says, “Love one another”, He’s not giving us a command that we can easily keep, a yardstick to measure our performance by. Rather, Jesus is actually giving us a promise: experiencing His love is going to transform us so that we are restored to being able to love in that way.

Thus, the gospel offers us an alternative to the wounds that the “Pharaohs” of this world inflict, wounds that deprive us of wholeness, authenticity, and connection with one another. 

I believe that the three wounds that the world inflicts as a matter of culture are brokenness, inauthenticity, and alienation. 

• Firstly, we are  emotionally broken. Even little children are harmed, for example, in a culture where adults behave brutally and tell them to “don’t cry”, “be tough”, fight back”, and “prove your worth”. As a culture, we impose shame as a way to control behaviour, to make a child want to grow up to be the toughest, strongest, wealthiest… to be worthy. Boys are taught to feel they aren’t manly enough, girls are taught to  feel they aren’t beautiful enough. 
• Secondly, we are forced to live in this disconnect between inner turmoil and outward cultural expectations by striving to put on the performance. In the church, for example, we can make salvation a cheap kind of performance we call being a “good Christian” who dresses just right, says the right things, and smiles in the right way. Someone who is experiencing hardship, grief, or abuse cannot bring their full selves to the table; someone who is struggling has to tell themselves to seem “joyful” and “grateful” – this is known as “spiritual bypassing”.
• Thirdly, we behave in harmful ways towards others. Disconnection within results in disconnection without, and, as a result, a lack of community and connection. It is an endless cycle of feeling alone yet pushing others away, unable to love others, unable to be loving and gentle and kind to ourselves.

Brokenness, inauthenticity, and alienation are social norms. Everyone is “getting along” with life, even succeeding, all while burdened inside. There are so many studies on how mental health among adolescents, among working adults, among seniors, among men, among women, are at all-time highs. I believe that social media is a reflection of the fact that we are all struggling, and our struggles affect one another. As Christians, we need to understand how Jesus speaks into this reality and how Jesus wants to start with us. Jesus wants us to experience peace in all its beauty and fullness. Forgiveness is a part of this peace, and so is the pursuit of emotional and relational healing.

Firstly, wholeness is Jesus’s promise. We can have it. We won’t be the same as it was before, any more than the broken world will be restored to the Garden of Eden. God does promise that what is to come, after His work of redemption, is even better, more glorious, more beautiful. Satan may seek to destroy, but God can take that work of destruction and turn it into something that is even more wondrous and awesome. That is how amazing and powerful God is, that His work of creation is more powerful than any work of destruction and cannot be overcome by it. Good overcomes evil, every time (Romans 13).

Secondly, authenticity is Jesus’s call. Jesus does not say, “Be this perfect Christian right away!”. Rather, He calls us to worship and serve Him in spirit and in truth. Jesus had a lot to say about whitewashed tombs and religions of pretense. Whatever we do, we should do it heartily. Whatever we do, it should come from a genuine place of joy. Jesus wants us to be truthful with Him, with ourselves, and with others rather than go through the motions of religious service. In the book of Malachi, God was so angry with adulterous and abusive Israelites that He said to close the doors of the temple: despite how important we think rituals and services and sacrifices are, the only thing that God truly wants is our authenticity. 

So many spiritual abuses come from forced inauthenticity. For example, if someone is actively being harmed in their church, to push a message that “you must come to church, you must continue attending, you must not leave; you must not ask questions” is to ask them to pretend everything is okay on the outside as they are hurting on the inside. This is to ask someone to do violence within themselves. Often, spiritually abusive messages to people within abusive situations do the exact same thing: “Pretend everything is okay, go on as normal, try harder.” This is a gross dismissal of what someone is going through and the reality of the wounds inflicted on them in the midst of the situation. It is as if we railed blow after blow on a person and then told them, “Keep smiling. Don’t cry.” Under the burden of these expectations, people break down. Inside, of course.

Then, we are surprised when someone breaks free and is willing to lose everything because they simply cannot keep it up anymore. The more disparate our inner reality and our outward performance, the more excruciating the charade is to maintain. 

I have heard of Christians using bullying, hateful letters, even social coercion to force people back into their churches and communities who have left. What if someone says, “I don’t believe what this church teaches anymore”. Do we truly want people to go on with the motions of “faith” and “obedience” on the outside, despite the fact that it is untruthful, just to please us? Do we shun people for being authentic, for asking honest questions and letting us know where they are really at? Note that at every point in Jesus’s life, the people who encountered Him came to the realization that He was the Son of God at different times. Compare Peter (Matthew 16:16) and the Roman centurion (Luke 23:47), for example. Matthew and Zacchaus were both tax collectors, yet they both came to a realization that they should leave their professions differently. Jesus even said to carefully consider the cost of discipleship before choosing to follow Him. What, then, does it say about us that we want cheap and easy shortcuts to this process, as if someone can follow what we tell them about Jesus rather than come to know Jesus Himself? Manipulating or coercing conversion such as by using fear or trickery assumes that we can corral people into the Shepherd’s fold, as if He did not say, “My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me.”

Thirdly, connection with one another is the defining characteristic of a People belonging to Jesus. Violence not just what we do that physically harms another, but the severance of connection. As people of peace, peace transforms every human relationship.  A sign that we manifest Jesus’s grace is that we are privileged to be safe spaces for others’ vulnerability and honesty.  Jesus certainly was. Churches, in fact, have the responsibility to not only make space but actively invite our raw and vulnerable journeys, a journey of shared confession, shared grace, and the shared pursuit of shalom.

Where estrangement, isolation, loneliness, and rootlessness once ruled, Jesus offers salvation. 

Conclusion

We think that doing “spiritual battle” is some kind of grand political move against the principalities and powers, but the reality is that forgiveness, wholeness, authenticity, and connection strike death-blows to the rule of evil. Satan, after all, hates us. He wants us to hate others and to hate ourselves. Satan loses when we thrive and flourish in the abundance of the Kingdom, where chains are broken, where we are free at last. 

This Holy Week, my prayer is that we continue to experience the depths of this wondrous gift of salvation as the Body of Christ. We cannot experience this just in our minds; it has to be within our whole bodies. We cannot just confess this with our lips; our proclamation and worship must be of what is true. Finally, we cannot be satisfied with salvation and forgiveness as disembodied ideas and concepts. We must want to fully experience the salvation Jesus sacrificed so much to secure for us. We must long for Him to make us whole, not just alone as individuals but together as a community. We must long to truly love and be willing to learn now, imperfectly and brokenly, with the hope that one day we will love wondrously and abundantly in His likeness. 

This is the salvation into which Jesus invites us and says, “Come as you are”.