The Apostle Peter must have felt a touch saintly when he approached Jesus asking, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Equally likely, given the manner in which he framed the question, Peter was anticipating a characteristically outlandish response from the Lord. But Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.”

This dominical injunction—to forgive seventy times seven—is usually taken to be a hyperbolic response, in effect meaning, as often as the offender repents, forgive without limit. Such interpretations are not incorrect. But when one traces the ‘echoes’ of Jesus’s words in the rest of Scripture, one finds that the command means more—much more.

The depth of these particular words by the Lord can be determined through, at least, three scriptural soundings. New Testament scholars have long since perceived that Jesus understood himself to be proclaiming the Jubilee Year, notably in the so-called “Nazareth Manifesto.”(2) The Jubilee was the “seven-times-seventh year” when the guilty, the debtors, the trapped, and the handicapped were set free. The Greek word for “deliverance,” “release,” or “liberty” is also the same word for “forgiveness.”(3)

The language that Jesus uses, both in the Manifesto and in his response to Peter’s question, to forgive “seventy times seven,” reveals how he understood forgiveness to be the central operative principle and practice of the Jubilee. Jesus is in effect saying that, with him, the Jubilee has come, and that his followers are to be a Jubilee-celebrating people, both receiving and giving the gracious and gratuitous gift of the Jubilee: namely, forgiveness.

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Five year-old Samantha was the victim of a cruel and tragic murder, and her own tears were the evidence that sealed the case against her abductor. “[S]he solved the crime,” said her young mother. “She was her own hero.”(1) DNA in the form of teardrops was found on the passenger-side door of the killer’s car, irrevocably making their mark on the crime scene and everyone who imagines them.

It is impossible to hear stories like this, of heinous murders, of calculated school shootings, without retreating to the deepest whys and hows of life. The abrupt ending to these lives is another wretched symptom of a sick and desperate world. The problem of evil is a problem that confronts us, sometimes jarringly. The problem of pain is only intensified by the personal nature of our experience with it.

The first time I heard Samantha’s story my numbed mind was startled by this property of tears. I had no idea that our tears were so personally our own. Samantha’s tears solved the case because there were none others like hers. They were unique to the eyes they came from, intricately a part of Samantha herself. In the pains and joys that cause us to weep and to mourn, we leave marks far more intimate than I ever realized. We shed evidence of our own makeup, leaving behind a complex, yet humble message: I was here, and my pain was real. There are a lot of really bad and unhelpful things that people say in the face of tragedy and to those who mourn. For me this brings new meaning to the wisdom of being silent with the grief-striken, sharing tears instead of advice.

There is something deeply necessary in the Christian hope that pain will one day be removed and tears will be no more. We are rightly comforted by the hope of a God who will wipe away every tear from the eyes of the weeping and the promise that there will one day be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.(2) But perhaps there is something deeply necessary about a God who has marked our tears so specifically even now, declaring that our pain is far from a generic or empty occurrence.

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Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel across the country from Massachusetts to Montana. While I had often traveled across the country on family vacations, I had never driven through South Dakota. But on this trip I was able to see quite a bit of the state that makes up part of the Great Plains in the United States. Having lived near the city, I remember being struck by the vast expanses of what appeared to be uninhabited land. Rolling grasslands, without many trees, offered a view of the landscape that was as far as it was wide. I remember wondering why anyone would make a home in such a desolate place.

Several years after this trip, I read Kathleen Norris’s book Dakota and marveled at her poignant description of this land. Her memoir both enticed me and made me wary of life in the Dakotas. The opening paragraphs of her book explain why:

“The high plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act like a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it, before it bestows a blessing… This book is an invitation to a land of little rain and few trees, dry summer winds and harsh winters, a land rich in grass, and sky and surprises.”(1)

She concludes by saying that “the land and the sky of the West often fill what Thoreau termed our ‘need to witness our limits transgressed.’ Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Spiritual Geography →