“What Is Forgiveness?” with Matthew Potts
Show Notes:
This episode comes out on Maundy Thursday, the day when Jesus celebrated his last Passover meal with his disciples and washed their feet in an act of humble service. Tomorrow is Good Friday, where Christians around the world relive Jesus’ crucifixion and death and wait for the Good News of Easter Sunday--the day of resurrection and the restoration of hope.
Why does this matter? Because in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are not only forgiven, but we are given a new way into offering forgiveness to those who have harmed us. Forgiveness is a complex process, often involving grief and mourning, and should not mean we forget or erase past harms. Today’s guest gives us thoughtful insight into how we experience forgiveness--how we offer it to others and ask for it for ourselves.
Dr. Matthew Ichihashi Potts is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School as well as the Pusey Minister of Harvard Memorial Church. He earned his BA from the University of Notre Dame, and both his MDiv and PhD degrees from Harvard. He is the author of Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories and Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.
Resources:
Buy Forgiveness: An Alternative Account
Transcript:
Eddie Rester 00:00
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today. we're talking to Matthew Potts. He's a
professor of Christian morals at Harvard Divinity School, and he's written a book on a really
important topic that everybody has to think about at some point central, the topic of
"Forgiveness: an Alternative Account."
Eddie Rester 00:20
This week in the church is Holy Week, leading us to Easter. And at Easter, we celebrate
forgiveness, the forgiveness we have received, but it's also the forgiveness that we're called to
live. And I think that's where it gets difficult for many Christians, because we don't understand
what does it mean to forgive? How do I do that and not let somebody off the hook? How do I do
that and not allow that person to continue to hurt me or harm me or others that I love?
Chris McAlilly 00:48
I know no one that is a human being that doesn't need to grow in this area.
Eddie Rester 00:54
Exactly.
Chris McAlilly 00:55
We hurt one another. You know, there's pain, there's violence, there's retribution. There's
cycles of these things. They happen between... I mean, I have three kids, Eddie all under the
age of 13. We need forgiveness in our household.
Eddie Rester 01:11
Well, and if you're in a marriage, if you're in any family system, if you're at work, any group,
anytime more than one person gets together, at some point, hurt happens, betrayal happens,
frustrations happen, disappointments happen, shame happens. And so how do we begin to not
just receive this good gift, but to live out of this good gift? A professor of mine in seminary
wrote a book called "Embodying Forgiveness,
" and he says the great challenge of the Christian
life is actually learning how to live out of the great gift of forgiveness.
Chris McAlilly 01:48
Easter Sunday is awesome, and it is coming. It will be there on Sunday for us. We'll have an
opportunity to remember the resurrection. We'll remember hope, new life, the opportunities
that come because of God's work in and through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But
oftentimes we over, not overlook, but we don't spend enough time really thinking about the
work that Jesus does on our behalf. Jesus, in this last week, goes to Jerusalem, a place where he
knows he's facing opposition. He weeps at the entrance of the city and says that this is a city
that doesn't know the things that make for peace. It's a city where he experiences suffering,
pain, mocking, abuse, abandonment, denial, betrayal. By the end of the week, he will cry out to
God and say,
"My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?"
Chris McAlilly 02:40
And some of us feel that deeply because of the things that either we have done or the things
that have been done to us. And if that's you today, if that's you this Holy Week, this is an
episode for you. It's an opportunity for you to really think deeply about what has happened,
what Jesus is offering you, the healing that can only come by the power of the miracle of grace,
and to really take hold of it.
Chris McAlilly 03:07
You know, it's Thursday, and you're gonna have Thursday, Friday and Saturday to sit with the
work of Christ on the cross and the empty tomb. And maybe this is a year where you need to
do a little bit more work, kind of digging into where you are, either the honest truth of what has
to be grieved. It may be the forgiveness that you need to either receive or to offer. We're not
asking you to move forward to reconciliation today. That's not what this conversation is about,
and it may be that will never come in this life. But this may be a conversation you need to have
today, and it's a wonderful one. I'm really grateful to Matt for really prompting it. Anything that
you would offer Eddie, that we need to be thinking about as we enter into it?
Eddie Rester 03:50
One of the things he talked about is forgiveness is new beginning, and resurrection is the basis
of that, freeing us from death and pain in the past. And so how do we begin to experience that?
And forgiveness, I think, is the door for us. So thank you for being in the journey with us. We
hope you have a Happy Easter.
Chris McAlilly 04:08
Happy Easter. We'll see you next week.
Chris McAlilly 04:10
[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to
navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and
unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
Eddie Rester 04:27
As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy and the marketplace, we all
carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
Chris McAlilly 04:38
But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of
wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
Eddie Rester 04:48
That's why The Weight exists, to create space for the conversations that challenge our
assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
Chris McAlilly 04:58
Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition,
and responsiveness to a changing world.
Eddie Rester 05:06
So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a non
profit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of
Christ centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 05:21
We're here with Dr Matt Potts. Matt, thanks for being with us today on the podcast.
Matt Potts 05:27
Thanks for having me. Grateful and glad to be here.
Eddie Rester 05:30
So tell us a little bit about you kind of paint the picture. You're a professor at Harvard Divinity
School, if I remember reading your bio correctly, but tell us a little bit about what you do and
how you ended up there.
Matt Potts 05:40
Yeah, sure. I mean, I could fill the hour probably. I'm a professor at Harvard Divinity School. I'm
also the minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard University. So I'm an Episcopal priest, and
I've been, I was ordained in 2000 and what eight, I guess? So I've been serving as a minister for
a while. I was ordained the year I started my PhD at Harvard. So I did my PhD at Harvard, and I
was serving churches around Cambridge. And then for my first, like, 10 years on the... And then
I finished my PhD. I was appointed to the faculty here at Harvard Divinity School, and for the
first 10 years on the faculty, I was working part-time as a minister at an Episcopal Church on
Cape Cod and working full time on the faculty here at Harvard.
Matt Potts 06:33
In 2021 I was appointed the minister in the university church. So my family moved from Cape
Cod up to Cambridge. We have a house here on campus at Harvard, and so Sunday mornings,
I'm in the pulpit here at the Memorial Church. And during the week, well, I'm actually speaking
from my office at the church right now, but I teach classes. I still teach classes at the Divinity
School. Yeah, and this is, this is our life here in Cambridge.
Chris McAlilly 07:01
You wrote a book that we want to talk about, and some of your research in the area of
forgiveness. And the title of the book is,
"Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.
" And I just
wanted to ask, you know why do we need an alternative account of forgiveness?
Matt Potts 07:19
Yeah, that's a great question. And that was, I mean, that was not my title, I had a different title,
Yeah, that's a great question. And that was, I mean, that was not my title, I had a different title,
which I can tell you later, maybe if you're curious. But that was, feeling like we needed a
different account of forgiveness, or a different version of forgiveness, was one of the reasons I
decided to write the book. Yeah, at risk of saying too much, I'll just tell you a story. I taught a
class on forgiveness early in my tenure on the faculty, like my first or second year on the
faculty, right after I graduated. I taught a class on forgiveness. And forgiveness has always
been something that I found very personally powerful, spiritually, emotionally, especially
examples of Jesus' forgiveness--Jesus from the cross, forgiving those who are crucifying him.
And then, you know, moments of sort of non-violent resistance and non-violent action, like
Martin Luther King and Gandhi and other things. As a child growing up, I found this incredibly
moving, and so I'd always been fascinated by the topic.
Matt Potts 08:14
And so I taught and read about it a little bit, read around it a little bit. And it wasn't my primary
area of dissertation research. But I wanted to, you know, I'm on the facu now, I get to teach
what I want, right? So I wanted to teach on forgiveness. And I guess what happened when you
teach something happened, that I started to learn more about it, and I learned from my
students.
Matt Potts 08:33
And, yeah, the the example that sits in my mind, that made me rethink the whole class I was
teaching, and made me think that maybe I need to dig into this deeper, was a student from
that class, in that early class I taught at Harvard, a student who was in training for ministry.
She was in formation for ministry, but her ministry was a second career. She had a first career
as a social worker. She worked as a therapist, and she came to my office hours and she said,
"Matt, I did have a question for you.
" She said,
"Because I have a client, a therapy client, who is
a minister. Her ex-husband is a minister. She's recently divorced. They were married for a few
decades, and she suffered abuse basically the whole time, and she has recently divorced him,
and her children want her to forgive him. He wants her to forgive him. Her community wants to
forgive him. And she doesn't wish him any harm. She just doesn't trust him and doen't want to
be anywhere close to him. And she feels this great shame and this immense guilt because she
cannot forgive him.
" And she said,
"As a social worker, I know what to tell her. Tell her, don't
worry about forgiveness.
" But, yeah, but she said,
"But I'm going to be a minister. What am I
supposed to tell her?"
Matt Potts 09:54
And it was really the kind of acute pastoral situation, right? Like what? I couldn't believe... You
know, I pray, I believe in Jesus. I couldn't believe that what was needed was for her to, for this
woman who had just escaped the situation of violence, and who wished no harm to the person
who harmed her, that what was needed was for her to reconcile with him, to be pressured by
him into some kind of reconciliation. It seemed like there's something... The way I thought
about unconditional forgiveness was insufficient to the situation the student described to me.
And I thought, I need to think about this more.
Matt Potts 10:35
And then, you know, after that, there were lots of... There was political action, and, you know, a
lot of the narrative around forgiveness that I had inherited came out of the civil rights
movement in the 60s, and then the teens with Black Lives Matter, the language around
forgiveness shifted, and there were more questions about whether forgiveness was a moral
hazard. Are you letting people off the hook if you forgive them? How do you hold people
accountable if you forgive them? Again, I think there's an answer to these questions from within
the Christian tradition, but they were serious questions that I thought needed some response,
and so that's why I did the research for the book.
Chris McAlilly 11:09
One of the things you write is that,
"Forgiveness, as is typically understood definitionally, defies
our ethical vocabulary and destabilizes our moral foundations.
" And you've already begun to
kind of unpack this a little bit that some of the models, the dominant theological or cultural
models that we've inherited, you know, people have called them into question. Maybe they do
more harm than good, especially to those who are victims. Describe what you... Kind of help us
get in touch with what you would describe as a traditional model of forgiveness.
Matt Potts 11:42
Sure. I think that there are generally two things that we usually think we mean when we say
forgiveness that I think can be dangerous, right? The first is, we think about forgiveness as
primarily an emotional change, right? That forgiveness has to do with anger, or that forgiveness
is the opposite of anger. So when we say to someone,
"I forgive you,
" what we're actually
saying is,
"I'm not angry with you anymore.
" Or when we say to someone,
"Please forgive me, "
what we're saying to them is,
"Please don't be angry with me anymore.
" And I want to ask the
question like, why? Why anger needs to be diminished for there to be forgiveness? Like, can
you forgive someone and still be angry with them?
Matt Potts 12:23
Because this is where a lot of the concern from, especially activists, right? It was, if we forgive
them, we're not allowed to be angry anymore. They're not allowed to? We should be angry.
There's injustice, right? And I think that the way I think about forgiveness is that forgiveness is
the way love resolves conflict, right? And love can be angry. Love is angry. I think love is
affectively complex, and I think forgiveness can be affectively complex too. And so one of the
things I want to do is enable, entitle victims to affective complexity, entitle victims to, survivors
to, anger.
Matt Potts 12:59
The other reason, though, I think that it just like--again, this comes from my experience as a
pastor--which is that any victim of trauma, emotions are volatile. You can't predict what you're
going to feel. Like I might not be angry today. I might be not angry any day for the next 10
years, but I might wake up one morning and remember something, and I'm gonna be angry.
Will that mean that all of a sudden, that day, my forgiveness failed because I'm angry that day?
I, you know, I don't know that's true. And if you look at, you know, well-known examples of
public forgiveness, the Nickel Mines shooting in Amish country, or the Charleston AME
Emmanuel church shooting, the folks who offer forgiveness, some of them said explicitly,
"I am angry, I will always be angry, but I forgive. " Right?
Matt Potts 13:40
So to me, this means there's a possibility for something like forgiveness that doesn't involve
suppressing one's own anger. That doesn't mean that anger is not something we need to
manage carefully, but it might not be a corollary to or the opposite of forgiveness, or contrary
to forgiveness in every case. And the other thing that forgiveness, I think too often means, and
this is maybe more more obvious from the example, the pastoral example that I started with, is
that the subtext to when I say "I forgive you,
" or "Will you forgive me?" is, "Let's restore relationship," right? Let's be reconciled. Right?
Matt Potts 14:15
And I think, you know, I think we are meant to be agency reconciliation. That's part of our
commission as disciples. But you know, especially when the person who has harmed me has
not shown any sign that they're going to stop harming me, reconciliation is not always
warrented and not always wise, right? So if I'm in a situation where I can't reconcile, I can't love
myself or my neighbor and reconcile with my enemy, like, how do I? Can I still forgive them? I
think there must be possibility for me to still forgive while not yet being ready to restore
relationship, especially to someone who might still wish me harm or who's not ready to make
some kind of meaningful amends.
Eddie Rester 14:51
I think, as I think about forgiveness, and this is one of the topics, as a pastor, that preaching is
always... When you preach on forgiveness, it awakens a conversation in people that's
important.
Eddie Rester 15:03
And I think the church has done a lot of, has offered a lot of spiritual abuse around this,
because they've conflated the two things that you just talked about forgiveness and
reconciliation, and they've folded them into one thing. And one of the things when I talk about
forgiveness is that forgiveness does not always lead to reconciliation. It can open the door to
reconciliation, and it can provide a path to reconciliation, but it doesn't always mean that you
go back to being married. It doesn't mean that you go back to being a child of a parent in the
same way you were. It doesn't mean that you just go back to normal in that friendship. That it's
okay. And that's hard for people, because, you know, oftentimes they're told, if you forgive
them, you have to go back to the marriage. If you forgive them, then it's okay for y'all to
resume the way things are.
Matt Potts 15:03
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 16:02
In all of your writing and thinking, has that always been the thread or the danger around
forgiveness, or is that something that you've seen just kind of accumulate on top of it over the
last centuries? Where does that sense come from?
Matt Potts 16:20
That's a good question. I mean, I'm not a historian, even though I pretend to be one of them in
some parts of this book. My sense is that it's more recent. It's a more recent development. I
mean, I think this the sense that forgiveness has something to do with emotion. That's tricky.
You know, Jesus didn't really tell us how to feel. He told us what to do.
Eddie Rester 16:40
Yeah.
Matt Potts 16:40
You know?
Eddie Rester 16:41
Say more. Say more about that. Say more about that.
Matt Potts 16:44
Yeah. I mean, Jesus says,
"Love your enemy. " He doesn't say, "Have warm and fuzzy feelings towards your enemy. " In fact, he also doesn't say,
"Your enemy is not really your enemy. He's actually your friend." He says, no, this person is still your enemy, which means to presume that
you have to negotiate that relationship carefully. You have to keep yourself safe. This person
still wishes you harm.
Matt Potts 17:05
But what I think Jesus is opening up the possibility for is my enemy is still a beloved child of
God, even if they're a threat to me... This is the thing I have to negotiate and navigate
carefully. I can't just treat them as if they're not what they are, which is another child of God. I
might be angry at them. They might deserve my anger. I might not be able to reconcile with
them, because they could harm me, right? But like I said, like Jesus isn't saying feel warmth
towards them. Jesus is saying, treat them with a kind of dignity that child of God deserves, even
if you have to, you know, even if this is a complicated moral situation and you have to protect
whatever. It gets into complicated things.
Matt Potts 17:46
In terms of reconciliation, I think, you know, I don't know where it arises. I think it's easy to
conflate the two, you know. I mean, one of the Christian leaders I respect most in the last
century, Desmond Tutu really famously conflated the two, right?
Matt Potts 18:05
He, in his country, they had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The purpose of
reconciliation commission was just to avoid civil war, basically, and it was successful in doing
that. But also, you know, compromised in a lot of other ways, and has received its criticism. But
when he went out and spoke about it, he spoke about forgiveness, and I think it's because he
was a savvy person, and he knew forgiveness was really powerful, and he knew that
forgiveness would really... Because, as you said, Eddie, because I think forgiveness is probably
a necessary step towards reconciliation, and because I think we as Christians are called to
strive towards reconciliation, it gets easy for us to conflate the two. But I think there is a
difference. I think we're commanded to forgive, and we're commanded to strive for
reconciliation, but achieving reconciliation, that might be beyond the scope or agency of
human power sometimes.
Eddie Rester 18:05
Right.
Matt Potts 18:13
And so I think it's, yeah, I think it's... I don't know at what point in history it happened. I think
my own kind of relatively half informed historical sense, is that when religious experience turns
inward, in the Protestant Reformation, when what it means to be in good relationship with God
or the church has a lot to do with an interior experience of faith and not about, like, you know,
your outward ritual behaviors in the church, then moral acts become sentimentalized and
become more about your emotions, right? And then the reconciliation thing follows.
Chris McAlilly 19:35
Yeah, that's one of the things that you challenge or that you kind of invite us into a
conversation about, in this recent article that you wrote in Comment Magazine. You're talking
about literary displays of forgiveness, particularly within the writings of W.H. Auden. And in that
piece, you kind of help draw a distinction between Auden, who didn't think that forgiveness
could be displayed in art. And I think it was Hannah Arendt who talks about forgiveness in
maybe a slightly different way. Can you describe a little bit about what you're trying to do in
helping us understand forgiveness? The difference between forgiveness as a public action like
pardon or forgiveness as an interior experience.
Matt Potts 20:29
Sure, so Arendt wrote this beautiful thing on forgiveness, in a very important book she wrote
called "The Human Condition." Arendt is a Jewish philosopher, but she wrote about forgiveness,
and she said that forgiveness is the sort of genius of Christianity, that Jesus Christ was the
savant of forgiveness and realized that this thing that everyone thought that only God could do,
that it was Jesus who said, No, humans can do this too, right? And what she, and she actually
said that forgiveness is the most, the most fundamentally human thing, because what's
important about humans, she said, is that they have the capacity to begin things right?
Matt Potts 21:05
What she said is that in cases of violence, retaliation or reciprocal violence is almost as
necessary as gravity. It's like a chemical reaction. If you harm someone, they harm you back. If
you harm someone, they harm you back. She said it's, you get into these vicious cycles of
reciprocal harm. You know, look around the world. We know that that's the case. Or in our own
lives. And I have kids, right? One smacks one, the other one smacks them back. That's the way
it looks, right?
Matt Potts 21:30
But she said that humans have this capacity to choose to do something else. So I can be
harmed, and then decide to just start something else. And that capacity to begin, she says,
that's the distinctive trait of human. She said that capacity to turn away from violence and not
respond to harm with harm, that's what she calls forgiveness. Right? Now, sorry. You're gonna
ask...
Chris McAlilly 21:52
No no, go for it.
Eddie Rester 21:53
Finish your thought, and then both of us, we're both fighting over who's gonna ask the next
question. Yeah.
Matt Potts 21:59
So Auden loved this book. Auden was an Anglican poet and a wonderful poet of 20th century.
He loved this book of Hannah Arendt's, and he wrote her and he said, "I love everything you
have to say about forgiveness, but I think you're wrong because you're talking about something
that has to do with punishment and that has more to do with pardon and pardon's a formal,
legal thing that can be displayed outwardly." And he said, "forgiveness is something that
happens inside a person. It's an act of charity, and charity is an emotion. It's something that
you feel inside." And he wrote an essay, you know, because he was a literary scholar, he was
writing about all the comedies of Shakespeare, and saying, you know, forgiveness happens in
all these Shakespearean plays, but Shakespeare is all bound up because he doesn't know how
to show it, because he can't show what an inward transformation looks like.
Matt Potts 22:47
But then Auden writes this poem called "The Shield of Achilles."And in his, "The Shield of
Achilles" is a poem written in the wake of World War Two. And you know, according to ancient
Greek myth, Achilles' shield was made by Hephaestus, and it was like supposed to be
decorated with all these, like, these themes of martial glory. It was like the most important
shield that Achilles had, this beautiful shield that Athena had watched Hephaestus make, or
whatever. And when, you know, in the wake of World War Two, when W.H. Auden writes a
poem about Hephaestus making this shield, instead of all this martial glory, having just
survived World War Two and all its horrors, he said, what's all over the shield are just the
horrors of war. Like all these awful things of what war is and what violence is, and what
reciprocal violence leads to.
Matt Potts 23:37
And you know, Thetis cries out and beats her breast and Hephaestus stumbles away and and,
you know, the poem ends saying, Achilles will die too, or whatever, right? But there's one line in
the poem where he says that one of the scenes is a scene where no one would weep because
another wept, or something like that, right? And actually, I think, you know, Auden's a smart
guy. I think he's actually referring to a scene in the Iliad with Achilles, where Achilles has just
wasted the Trojan army, and the old King Priam comes to him, to beg to bury the body of his
son, Priam does. And Priam comes to him weeping. And Achilles sees the king weeping, and he
begins weeping too.
Matt Potts 24:25
Exactly the opposite happens. One weeps because another does weep. And then they stop the
war, and they have a meal together, and they have a truce. And Simone Weil, who's
commenting upon this, says, like, that's grace. That's what's stopping reciprocal violence. It's
like gravity. It's like force. She calls violence a force in the Iliad, which is ineluctable. It just
redounds one to another, one to another. And then there's this moment when someone, just
because he sees another reaping, decides not to return with violence, to respond with violence.
And there's this break.
Matt Potts 24:55
So I think that, yeah, Auden is showing, even though he argues that you can't show
forgiveness, in this poem about this obscure moment from the Iliad, he's actually saying we
humans have the capacity to have empathy for others and to restrain ourselves from even the
vengeance that feels necessary and and inevitable.
Eddie Rester 25:15
In a way that stops the vengeance of others. I mean, it's a moment of where it's not just the
internal redemption of one human, it ripples out into the lives of other people. I jumped in,
and...
Chris McAlilly 25:28
No, you're fine. And it really is this question. I love the way you frame it. Does forgiveness
make nothing happen? Or is forgiveness something that can stop something from happening?
In this case, the cycle of vengeance and retribution, which seems like gravity, like a natural
cycle that has to happen if there's a break. You know, and I think what's powerful about the
discussion that you kind of invite at, I guess, the end of the book, and the excerpt that was in
the magazine, is this question around, is forgiveness weak and sentimental and really this kind
of interior reality, or does it, is it a miracle of grace, as Simone Weil begins to kind of articulate.
That it is a force or a power that could break a cycle, or it could be an alternative force, or, you
know, the kind of force that could insert itself into a reality, within a family or community or a
nation, or between nations, that could actually do something.
Matt Potts 26:34
I think 100% does something. I think it's the only thing that does anything. Right? That's
probably to overstate it, right? But this is the thing. We can either be confined to the cycles
that we're in or start something new.
Chris McAlilly 26:34
And I think that that's the thing that perhaps, on the backside of world wars, at this distance
from the Civil Rights Movement, and, you know, I guess in the wake of some of the realities
that feel more... It feels like we're in a more polarized world and a more contentious world
where the only thing, the only gravitational force, is between this side and that side. It does feel
like we're in this ever increasing cycle of retribution, and it's rhetorical at this point, but you
could see how it could spill over into real acts of violence. And I think really, what I hear you
driving at is, you know, do you believe that? I mean, I guess I really just wanted to get you on
here and ask you. Do you believe that forgiveness makes nothing happen, or do you think it's a
miracle of grace that does something in the world?
Eddie Rester 27:37
Right.
Matt Potts 27:38
And start something new might look like restraint, right? It might look like doing nothing. But, I
mean, one of the ways I describe it in the book is that, is that forgiveness is the way. It's a
posture towards the future. How are we going to build a new world? How are we going to move
into the new world? We can only build a new world upon honesty about the ruins of the old. We
can't pretend that what happened never happened.
Matt Potts 28:03
One of the things that I another kind of, you know, ersatz for forgiveness that goes around is,
you know, forgive and forget, right? Like that. Oh, just put the past behind you, right? Like, I
think erasing... When forgiveness is kind of erasure,this is another thing that survivors of
violence can't abide. Like, if I forgive you, does that mean nothing happened? No.Right?
Forgiveness is realistic about what has happened. It says I have been harmed. You have
harmed me. I mean, if you just think logically, that I can't forgive nothing. If I say to you, "I
forgive you," part of what's implied in that statement is I would say you have harmed me. It's a
judgment. To forgive someone is an act of judgment, because you can't forgive a virtue. I only
forgive a wrong.
Eddie Rester 28:43
And humans don't forget. We simply don't forget. But forgiveness allows us a way, I think, to
live with what remains, the truth that remains.
Matt Potts 28:54
Exactly. If we're going to build a future together, if we're going to build, if I'm going to build a
future for myself, if we can't build a future together, because we're not ready to reconcile, the
only future I can build has to be one which is honest about the past that I have. Right?
Matt Potts 29:06
Another analogy, and this is one that I do think that I don't think is a wrong kind of stand in
forgiveness is I think of forgiveness as a kind of mourning, or almost as a lament, an act of
grief. If something has been taken from me, or something in my past is broken, my forgiveness
isn't necessarily going to restore it, but being in a forgiving relationship to what happened to
me can provide me a way to live anew, right? I mean, you know if, but the truth is, nothing that
that I do can risk... You know, if you kill my brother, forgiveness won't bring my brother back,
but neither will vengeance. That's not going ot bring my brother back either.
Matt Potts 29:46
The question is, this loss that I cannot restore, at least not in this world, how do I live with it in a
way that builds the best life moving forward? And, yeah, so I think it does absolutely make
something happen. What it makes happen is thepossibility for new life, a life unfettered by the
kind of gravitational force of vengeance in the past.
Chris McAlilly 30:08
So if forgiveness is not--and thank you so much for all of this. This is so rich. But if forgiveness
is not just a feeling, it's not just an interior emotion, and it's not a decision to forget, you know,
and it may not lead to reconciliation, but I love the way you're reframing it as an act of grief
that's honest about what has been broken, honest about the ways in which harm has been
wrought. How does that change the way that we talk about forgiveness, either in the church or
in our public life?
Matt Potts 30:45
Yeah, I think for me, forgiveness is, it's a, I mean this doesn't a sound very Harvard professor,
right? Which I hate, because I wish there was a better way for me to phrase it. But forgiveness
is just the Christian posture of non retaliation. Right? It's the commitment that I think Jesus
gives us in the Sermon on the Mount that the way you respond to harm is not with reciprocal
harm. Harm does not even out harm. Harm does not. That's not what justice looks like, I don't
think, for Jesus, right? That's not the way our institutions work, and that's not the way our lives
work. And as I said, it's not the way our instincts work. That's why my kids smack each other
when they smack each other, right? But I think that determining that we will not retaliate, I
think that's what forgiveness means, that we are not going to base our response to harm upon
retaliation.
Matt Potts 31:36
Now the word retaliation comes from the Latin for "like for like.
" That means if you hit me, I hit you back, right? That doesn't mean that there won't be some, you know, force or constraint
that might be necessary, right? I mean, it may be that the way I love my enemy is going to
require some constraint, right? But when it does...
Eddie Rester 31:56
Or consequence.
Matt Potts 31:57
The logic behind my response is not going to be purely mathematical or arithmetic. It's not just
going to be like, you killed this many, I'm killing this many of yours, or you killed this many
mine. I'm killing twice as many of yours, or whatever, right? It's going to be something else. It's
going to have a different logic, which is not based upon a kind of balance of harm, but on
something else. And, you know, maybe we'll talk about this. There are scriptural warrants for
this, like for like, yeah. Both of you are nodding.
Eddie Rester 32:23
We're just trying... Yeah, I'm gonna jump in.
Eddie Rester 32:27
The, I think that the math, it's not purely mathematical. And one of the things that Jesus shifted
was the law of retaliation, the lex talionis. It was an eye for nine, which was an evening out,
because before then, the law was "Matthew, if yo take out my cow, I'll take out your family."
And that was kind of the retaliatory posture, until the law was eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
And I still cringe when Christians quote that, because Jesus says forgive 70 times seven. The
math gets changed. And sometimes I think that the math now is not you have to repeat the
same, you have to keep forgiving the same thing if they keep doing it to you, it's the length of
time it may take your soul, your spirit to really begin to have release about someone. So I really
would love, I had just written down, "scripture." For someone who really wants to begin to
sense what does scripture say and how do I live what Jesus is teaching about forgiveness? What
are some of your favorite passages, stories, parables?
Chris McAlilly 32:27
Do it.
Matt Potts 33:43
Yeah. I mean, if I can just say a word about, you know, Exodus, right, the like for like. I mean, I
think it's really important. This is crucial. And what you said, Eddie is crucial, too, that the law
given at that time was already, like, a law of restraint. Like, if someone takes off your hand, you
don't get to kill them.
Matt Potts 33:59
Right? And also we, you know, we just don't have any evidence that this ever happened. Like,
as soon as the laws were written, they had fines instead of people having their hands cut off,
right? But it was just an act of restraint. But I think the reason why, when Jesus says, you know,
"I say to you, bless those who curse you, love your enemy,
" all these things, and then he quite
radically, like almost impossibly, says,
"And by the way, this fulfills..."
Eddie Rester 33:59
Right.
Eddie Rester 34:23
The law.
Matt Potts 34:23
This doesn't undermine anything. It's fulfills what Moses said. How can that be true? I think the
reason it's true is because, why would God give this law to the people? Why would the person
who harmed me, why wouldn't there be some, if it's equal harm, like what's the equality? The
equality between me and my enemies is that both of us are beloved of God. Like my God loves
my enemy just as much as me. The sense of our equality comes from our mutual relationship
to God, right? And when Jesus says this is the fulfillment of the law, I think what he's saying is,
if we're actually take the logic of this ancient law to this conclusion, that God loves your enemy,
then what it actually means is when your enemy harms you, you need to respond to them as if
God loves them, and you need to think about what you're going to do.
Matt Potts 35:42
Now, it may be that there needs to be some kind of restraint, but that whatever you do in
response has to be governed by the fact that the person is beloved. So you asked about
favorite scripture passages. I mean, for me, it's the prodigal son. I mean, my church school,
when I was growing up at a little Episcopal church and outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan, I still
have the little booklet. I got it in second grade, which was just a little story book telling of the
prodigal son. And I just, that the father in that story is running to meet, running to meet the lost
child. I mean, the lost child has this decision to come back home, right? But he doesn't get a
word out. He's not even home yet, right? Maybe we're supposed to repent. But he never says
anything to the father. Before he can get a word out of his mouth, the father has thrown his
arms around him and embraced him.
Matt Potts 36:02
That sort of, like, reckless and encompassing and embracing and run out to meet you on the
road before you even get here love, that, that's, for me, that's a forgiveness tale. But what's
important about it to me is that, you know I was the good kid. I was the one that stayed home.
Right, right? For me, it's really important to identify with the child who stayed home, and to
think about how much the father I love also loves the one who betrayed us, and how much his
heart was broken over that loss, and how much he's willing to do to bring him back in, and how
much I much I also need, even in my anger, because that other brother's angry, right? In my
anger, need to accommodate and try to bring in the possibility of maybe a reconciliation, right?
Chris McAlilly 36:56
Yeah, and I think that bringing in the prodigal son, I think, is a kind of, it's a way to talk about
one of the other ways in which I feel like you're reframing dominant understandings of
forgiveness, or maybe offering an alternative account. Because one of the ways that
forgiveness is commonly framed is in terms of debt and repayment. You owe me. It's an
economic framework, and that's it's within the parable, because you got the younger son that
runs out and the older son who's harmed economically, you might think. And so there's this
way that I see you showing that that economic logic, this transactional way of thinking, it
certainly emerges out of, you know, things like the atonement theory, substitution, atonement
theory of the death of Christ.
Chris McAlilly 37:46
And you're arguing for something different. That's not transactional, but you describe it as
movements, this movement of mourning into... And the prodigal son story also kind of helps to
display this, a little bit, this movement, you know, out towards the individual who's done harm
to the family, and the inability of the older son to move back into the feast. There's this ongoing
estrangement there. So talk, would you maybe unpack that? Because I also think it's one of
these rich ways in which you're helping us kind of reframe our understandings of forgiveness.
Why is it that these economic metaphors distort our understanding?
Matt Potts 38:29
Yeah, I think they do. And I mean, I think they may be of some use, right? Just to help us
thinking about sin. Debt is maybe a metaphor for sin, but it's not a perfect metaphor for sin,
and I think if we lean too heavily into it as a metaphor for sin, we might run into trouble.
Precisely because debts can be paid, can be repaid, right? Whereas, as the example I gave
before, if you kill my brother, there's nothing we can do to bring him back. Like that debt can't
be repaid. Something about repair after that sin, at least in this world, is going to require some
different kind of metaphor.
Matt Potts 39:03
The metaphor for sin that I lean more deeply into in the book is one of distance. And I draw on
this not just, you know, from parables, like the prodigal son, like the prodigal owes his family
money, but he's also in a far away land, right? And he's far away, even when the father runs
out to meet him. It's a distance from the father. And I also lean on this in that, you know, I'm,
my PhD training was in mostly 20th century theology and the big mid 20th century thinkers in
both Catholic and Protestant thinking, Karl Barth and Han Urs von Balthasar, who influenced
each other. They talked about, you know, Barth's thing was the way of the Son of God in the far
country. Like, the son goes away from the Father and like, there's this distance, and thinking
about sin as a distance between us and God, rather than a debt that we owe God.
Matt Potts 39:55
Yeah, I think that becomes a better way for me to think not only about forgiveness, but also
about atonement. Because, as I said, at least, when we think about the wrongs that we have to
forgive, some of those debts can't be paid, but distance, distances can be crossed by love,
right? I mean, even when we think about not reconciling with somebody, I can love somebody
from a distance, right? Some folks, it's easier to love them at a distance.
Eddie Rester 40:24
Right, yeah.
Matt Potts 40:26
Right. And also, we can think about God's love that way, like, you know, maybe I can love my
enemy only so far, and so I need to keep my distance from my enemy, but God can love the
rest of the way and close that distance in God's own time, when God reconciled all things to
God's self and in God's own judgment, right. Those are things that I can of relinquish, or
whatever. So that, yeah, that language of distance becomes, I think, better for me, because it
also allows me--and this is maybe an atonement theology conversation that we don't have time
for today, but you can call me back if you want to talk atonement theology.
Matt Potts 41:02
It, I think it helps draw us away from a logic of redemptive suffering, which I think has also been
a kind of abused by the church. And I think that the logic of redemptive suffering is of suffering
itself as redemptive, the suffering itself as what restores us from sin. That kind of overlaps with
the kind of Christian practice which is said to people, said to survivors and victims,
"Oh, you should forgive and go suffer more." Because that will be the thing, right. Like...
Eddie Rester 41:41
That's right. That'll be the sign. That's where you'll find that will be salvation.
Matt Potts 41:44
Exactly, exactly. So the fact that the idea that, like suffering itself would pay or compensate for
a debt, that's something I want to move away from, not just because it troubled me thinking
about the atonement theology generally, but also because, in a narrow pastoral sense, it is the
logic under which people have been told to forgive their abusers and keep suffering under their
abuse, because that will be the thing that redeems the two of you. And I don't think that's right,
and I don't think it's Christian.
Eddie Rester 42:13
I love this conversation about distance, because I'm even sitting here thinking about the older
son out in the field. His issue is distance.
Matt Potts 42:23
That's right.
That's right.
Eddie Rester 42:24
His distance, he has also, in a different way than the younger son, has distanced himself from
the love of the father and the reconciliation that might be possible. And that, yeah, I'm gonna
have to think on this one for a while.
Chris McAlilly 42:40
One of the things I'm thinking about is, just after the Protestant Reformation, there's this well
worked out system of confession, pardon, you know, return to the sacramental table, that was
kind of worked out in Christian practice. And that's collapsed both for a lot of Christians that
that aren't in a, perhaps, like a Roman Catholic space, but also just for the broader culture. We
don't have a moral landscape, or practices, public practices, to kind of navigate this trajectory.
Chris McAlilly 43:12
And so it makes me think back to this idea. I mean, back to Arendt, like, you know, we have to
be creative in some ways, like understand the moral landscape, but then also, there's an act of
creativity that would allow for something new to happen in this space. And the whole
conversation, I've been thinking a lot about Brian Stevenson, who is an attorney who works in
Alabama with death row inmates, and trying to offer folks... The book is "Just Mercy," is his
memoir. At the end of that book, I'm just remembering and thinking about this woman who is
there at the courthouse, who sat quietly every day, and he, you know, Stevenson. It's a long
story of he's in and out of the courthouse a lot of really hard work. She wasn't there related to
any of the defendants or the legal team. And after a long, hard day, Stevenson says, you know,
asked her, like, why are you here? And she says,
"I'm," you know, "I came here because I'm a stone catcher," is the way that she describes herself. She really, she lost someone to violence. I
think it was maybe a grandson.
Chris McAlilly 44:18
And she said, you know,
"I used to come here thinking I was going to throw stones at other
people, and now I come to catch the stones when they're thrown." You know, and just like so
she embodies this creative role and posture within our community of being a stone catcher
who's not retaliating. She's not shouting. She's not saying nothing happened, but she's catching
the stones as they're being thrown around the room and around the community. I've been, I've
thought about her through the years. And she's grieving the reality, even as she's trying to
disrupt the cycle of pain and retributive violence.
Chris McAlilly 44:18
You know, we're kind of nearing the end of our time. I wonder, is there another example for you
that inspired you as you work? Students, or as you preach, as you think about, maybe an
example of something that gives you hope that this is possible in a world of a lot of pain, a lot
of violence.
Matt Potts 45:12
Yeah, I mean the civil rights movement. I think the things, the examples I've already given
right, or the more recent examples. I think that, but they're hard examples. I mean, they're not
happy examples. I think this is the thing about forgiveness. I think we want it to be kind of it is
a miracle of grace, right? But I think when we call it a miracle, I think we want it to be magic,
and we want it to be happy.
Eddie Rester 45:37
Yeah.
Matt Potts 45:38
And, you know, if you look closely at the Nickel Mines shooting, which your listeners may
remember, but in the mid aughts, I think 2005, 2006. I don't know the exact date. I probably
should. There's a shooting in a small Amish community, and several young girls were murdered
and the Amish community rallied around and then the shooter killed himself, and the Amish
community rallied around his widow and his mother, and in the wake of that, you know, the
mother became a caretaker from one of the the young girls who was disabled because she was
shot. They developed relationships and the community just kind of rallied. It can be this
beautiful story if you just look at the surface, but if you read much deeper, you know, talk to
the Amish, who did, you know, who forgave, they'll say things like, you know,
"I struggle with this every day. I struggle."
Matt Potts 46:32
There are all these stories written about how great the Amish are forgiving. And they said,
"This is hard every single day. It's a struggle every single day." But the relationships also, they shore
each other up, and they become meaningful and important. It's not... The forgiveness does not
make the pain go away, but it does provide opportunities for care in the wake of that pain,
which is why I liken it to mourning, right? And mourning isn't, mourning doesn't feel good. We
don't like it, but it's good for us because it's the way we come into into fruitful relationship with
those things we can't restore.
Matt Potts 47:09
And, yeah, something like the Nickel Mines example is one place, one place I look, but we need
more of them, right? I think you're right, Chris. I think that because forgiveness has too often
become associated with say, when I say I forgive, it means,
"Oh, it's okay. That's fine. It's all
over. Now, keep doing what you're doing." That kind of language in public discourse where we
can say, like, it's not okay. We need to take some serious action together to figure out how
we're going to move forward into the future, right? That we don't really have the language for
how to do that, which doesn't look like a reciprocal or retaliatory justice, right? And we need
that kind of language. I really think we do.
Eddie Rester 47:54
Well, thank you for helping us think about that language and maybe helping, pushing some of
us towards stories that others can see and know this redemptive, new work that can happen
when we don't let the gravity pull us in. So thank you for your time today, Matt. We really
appreciate your work, and we really appreciate your ministry and speaking with us today.
Matt Potts 48:17
Well, I appreciate yours. Thank you so much, and thanks for having me on Chris and Eddie.
Eddie Rester 48:20
[OUTRO] Thank thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to
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Chris McAlilly 48:29
If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you
can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]