A couple of weeks ago we explored the topic of reprisal, retaliation.
After the reflection, if you’ll remember, there was robust commentary… sharing personal experiences of opportunities to retaliate against someone at some level – significant or trivial.
Clearly this topic struck home with many of us. It was evident that our minds were still churning after the service, because a couple of great questions were posed to me during coffee time.
One person asked, “What about accountability? Where does that fit in? Accountability is usually good, is it not? But doesn’t holding someone accountable look a lot like revenge at times?”
Great question!
What first came to my mind in response to this question was Jesus in the temple when he knocked over the tables after becoming angry upon seeing that commerce had permeated the walls of the sacred temple.
We heard about this in our first reading. Interestingly, the gospel passages don’t go into, or even mention at all, Jesus’ emotional state during this experience.
We just surmise that he was angry, but scripture doesn’t indulge us about it.
Given his behavior (as told by biblical authors) I think it’s safe to say that Jesus was outraged by what he saw.
Here’s why this story is relevant to the accountability question from a couple of weeks ago.
Experiencing the human emotion of anger is not a bad thing. How that energy and the intensity of those feelings is channeled and then manifested in the external world is where the question lies.
The bottom line question then becomes…
what is the motive behind the expression of the anger?
What outcome are you gunning for?
In the case of Jesus in the temple, his expression of anger was about devotion to the sanctity of the temple.
It wasn’t about belittling anyone for the sake of shaming them.
It wasn’t even retaliatory, but instead it was unapologetic resoluteness.
With retaliation the goal is to hurt the other for the sake of inflicting hurt.
The goal, what drives it, is void of a redemptive quality.
It’s dog eat dog, eye for an eye, which only produces dead dogs and blind people.
The redemptive aspect was that Jesus’ actions were in the name of restored sanctity, born of a love of reverence, of worship, of prayer, of God.
And yet, at first glance, if one beheld his anger and the resulting destruction he created in the temple that day, it wouldn’t look remarkably different than if somebody felt slighted by, say, a bar owner, and then decides to go back to the bar to trash it, smashing bottles and flipping tables, to get back at the business owner.
While the actions may appear similar, the motivations are vastly different.
One is about accountability with sights set on a bigger-picture outcome.
The other is about causing another’s suffering because they’ve caused yours.
So, we are called to assess our intentions when the urge to strike back beckons.
Anger is often such a 0-60 experience, that we don’t tend to make these internal assessments prior to moving into the self-expression stage.
The infrequency of such evaluations doesn’t diminish their importance.
Here are some possible self-appraisal queries:
– Is there any gratuitous dimension to my desired actions?
– What is the gain beyond my personal satisfaction, or
is a larger truth being served beyond my personal ‘truth’ of displeasure?
– If you possess the courage to loop back to someone with your displeasure, do you first have the courage to really get underneath what your motivations are for wanting to loop back?
– Can you make peace with the fact that serving the idea of fairness doesn’t
always serve the ways of love?
Here’s a story, this time not biblically based, but from life as we know it, to help illustrate.
I have a male friend from seminary whose wife had an affair with my friend’s married brother while we were in school together some 10 years ago. It was quite an unexpected bomb in his life.
My friend and his wife then split. They have two now young adult-aged kids.
While my friend was going through this, back in school, his kids were middle school aged, and he decided not to tell them the real reason he and their mom were getting divorced.
He couldn’t find a bigger-picture gain of disclosing it.
Would it be satisfying to let the truth be known, especially since it was the truth, and it had brought big time ramifications on the family? Yes, very much so.
But the question that he reported asking himself with over and over was….
Does the personal satisfaction of my own vindication, armed with the truth created by others – all these rationalizations and manifestations of fairness –
did any of that (or ALL of that) make it worth the dis-ease that it would cause his kids….and not only his, but with his brother’s kids as well?
Striving for love, looking beyond his desire to speak of the truth (and of his pain), he decided not to.
Years have now gone by, his family secret remaining in tact. My friend has tucked it away, moving forward in his life.
None of the family members in his kids’ generation have ever been informed of this foundation-rocking occurrence that changed the course of my friend’s life…not only the ending of his marriage but also creating unwanted and uncomfortable dynamics in his family of origin.
It doesn’t come up much these days, but back when we did frequently discuss it, he’d say it’s about values, what he most values. As a seeker of light and love and liberation, he would say that it boils down to that.
And after looking and looking at himself and his motivations, he came to understand that he valued the well-being of his kids and nieces and nephews more than he valued his own personal vindication.
And his kids, according to his perception, had nothing to gain by it, except pity for him and discomfort in some family circles.
As strong as the pull was to expose the betrayal (which he believed betrayed his all the children involved, as well as the adults), there was no true up side.
You might remember from our discussion last time that the issue arose about what we value most.
Specifically, revenge researcher Dr. Meredith Thompson exhorts us to examine the feelings and then determine whether or not their inclinations underscore what you value.
And this centers around the other question that was posed after that first reprisal service…how do we know what we value?
That’s not a question that can be answered by anyone but you.
But I can tell you that, because you’ve hitched your wagon to this NCC horse, it’s likely that you value a way of life that resembles the way Jesus lived.
Faith, love, generosity, reverence, honesty, and yes, thoughtful accountability apply here.
It is a part the challenge of your call as a Christian… to figure out what you value, and embody it, and to understand the delicate difference between wielding reprisal and exercising accountability.
Does it seem unrealistic, far-fetched, to ask yourself if your vengeful aspirations align with who you know your highest self to be, or what you aspire to?
Making the leap from the convenience of the theoretical to actual application in your life is no small thing.
But if we don’t, we not only do injustice to the Covenant Statement we recite every week, but we also tee ourselves up for regret.
And regret, my friends, is a hard thing to undo. The actions and words can never be sucked back into non-existence.
When I do and say things in the heat of the moment, I’m stuck with the lingering effects of my actions into perpetuity, long after I’ve returned to my baseline emotional state.
That’s not to say that I can’t release myself from the grips of regret.
But the challenge of prying my mind and heart and conscience out from under the burden of regret far outweighs the internal process required to simply take pause on the front end to assess what’s behind my drive to connive.
Yes, we’ve come full circle, back around to those that pesky question of the impetus of our inclination.
I invite you to sit for a moment or two, to let the juices simmer, and if you have something to share about motivation assessment or the relevance of one’s values, I look forward to hearing them!
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