First Sunday in Lent, February 22, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

For the Long Run

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Genesis 9:8–17

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, on justice and forgiveness:
“Without these, no group can survive in the long run.”

As you may know, on Friday the White House wrapped up a three-day conference on violent extremism. Speaking at the conference, President Obama called on all nations to renew their efforts against terrorism. Like President Bush before him, President Obama argued that, if peace is going to be possible in the long run, all nations would need to expand human rights, religious tolerance, and peaceful dialogue. Using force alone to combat terrorism would be insufficient, because force is incapable of putting an end to “the cycle of hate.” Force, he said, only feeds into terrorist narratives, perpetuating “cycles of fear,” “cycles of resentment,” and “cycles of suspicion” (New York Times, 20 February 2015, A1).

We know, just as the president does, that the perpetual cycling of hate, fear, resentment, and suspicion is an age-old phenomenon. The desire for vengeance has been and always will be universal. At work in this phenomenon is another principle that also is age-old and universal. It is the principle upon which our legal system is built: the principle of retributive justice. It is the idea that, measure for measure, one deserves to get what one gives.

In the late 1970s a competition took place to develop a computer program that best modeled this principle. The winner, Canadian Anatol Rapoport, designed a computer program that he named “Tit-for-Tat.” Very simply, the game proceeded according to a tit-for-tat strategy. Whatever you did to me, I’ll do to you. A player, using this strategy, will first cooperate, then subsequently replicate an opponent’s previous action. If the opponent was previously cooperative, the player is cooperative. If not, the player is not. A positive and surprising outcome to some was that in most cases of playing this game, the players cooperated. Of course, when even one player thinks only of his or her gain in the short run, the game spirals downward with one retaliatory act causing another, and according to this game theory, there is no way out (Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings, p. 59).

In order to avoid this downward spiral, a Polish mathematician, Martin Nowak, developed a slightly different computer program. It followed the strategy of “Tit-for-Tat” with one exception. Every now and then, at random times, the program would forget the last move of the other player, allowing the relationship between the players to begin anew. With this significant intervention of forgetting, the players could avoid the downward spiral of retaliation. Appropriately, Nowak gave this game the name “Generous” (J. Sacks, Genesis, pp. 59–60).

In his book Genesis: The Book of Beginnings, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks likens the intervention in the game “Generous” to the covenant God made with Noah and his family, all future generations, and every living creature. By his covenantal promise, God gave humanity and all of creation a chance to begin anew. God’s promise never again to destroy the earth by the waters of a flood is the intervention by which a new creation is made possible.

Up until then, God was on a path of retribution. Humanity had become so hopelessly wicked and had so perverted God’s original intent in creating the world that he was resolved to destroy it. Earlier in chapter 6, God says, “I will blot out,” “I will destroy,” “I will bring a flood.” So grieved was God by all that had gone amiss that he set out on a devastating course of just retribution. Only Noah, because he was “a righteous man, faultless in his generation,” and his family would be spared (Genesis 6:9). Listen to this description of the flood:

The waters swelled so mightily that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. . . . And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings. . . . He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. (Genesis 7:19–23)

Like any apocalypse, so cosmic was the devastation, so impersonal, that it comes as a surprise that God remembered Noah and those with him on the ark. And yet God does remember him. And in remembering him, God has a dramatic change of heart. God says to Noah, “As for me, I promise you that never again will I destroy the earth, never again will I destroy all flesh, never again.” God repents. He turns from retribution to forgiveness, from justice to mercy. Promising never again to be provoked, God disarms himself and lays down his weapon against the world, and so that he will never forget, he suspends a bow in the sky. Twice God says, “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh.”

Unlike the game “Generous” in which forgetting past actions is what makes new beginnings possible between players, it is God’s acts of remembering and forgiving that make a new creation possible. There is nothing impersonal about how God relates to us when he recreates us. God remembers us and forgives us; he does not forget us.

Perhaps more even than we would with a vengeful God, we would fear and lament an indifferent God, a God who removes himself from the world and leaves human beings to their own devices, a God who stays hidden for so long that we wonder if he has forgotten us. Throughout the Bible, this is what concerns the people of God most, especially in dire times when they cannot make sense of why they suffer. “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” the psalmist laments (Psalm 10).

Not surprisingly, these questions often reverberate in Holocaust literature. In one of the most spiritually powerful books I have read, a very short work of fiction entitled Yosl Rakover Talks to God, written by Zvi Kolitz, the narrator Yosl Rakover leaves us his last thoughts, written during the last hours of fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto. He has already witnessed all the horrors of the Ghetto, as he is the last surviving member of his family and the last man alive in it. So extreme has been his suffering that all the ways he used to think about and perceive the world have been turned on their head. “A strange thing has happened to us,” he writes. “All our ideas and feelings have changed.” Because he has seen how base human beings can be, he now looks upon the animals of the forest as noble and dear. Coming upon a wild dog, he writes about feeling shame for being not a dog but a man. And unlike the rest of humankind who worship the sun, for him the sun is a searchlight to be used by criminals in their hunt of fugitives. “Life is calamity—death, a liberator—man, a plague—beast, an ideal—day, an abomination—night, a comfort” (p. 5).

More than anything else, his relationship with God has changed. He writes,

In earlier times, when my life was good, my relation to [God] was as if to one who gave me gifts without end and to whom I was therefore always somewhat in debt. Now my relation to him is as to one who is also in my debt—greatly in my debt. And because I feel that he too is in my debt, I consider that I have the right to admonish him.

In his last hours of life in the Ghetto, Yosl Rakover talks to God. He does not talk to God as Job talks to God, demanding justice. No, the principle of retributive justice does not even apply here. He writes, “For greater and better men than I are convinced that it is no longer a question of punishment for sins and transgressions. On the contrary, something unique is happening in the world: God has hidden his face” (pp. 9–10). “But then, God, I wish to ask you, and this question burns in me like a consuming fire: What more, O tell us, what more must happen before you reveal your face to the world again?” (p. 19).

That God may be indifferent to our fate, that God may have forgotten or abandoned us—these fears are familiar to people who have lived faithfully and yet have suffered greatly. They were familiar to our Lord Jesus Christ, who from the cross cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When suffering is so great that it cannot be explained in terms of just retribution, the only conclusion to draw is the worst possible one: that God has forgotten us. For people of faith, what could be worse than a God who no longer knows us or cares to know us?

The good news of this story is that God remembers and will go on remembering us. God has promised it. In his book The Eternal Now, theologian Paul Tillich writes, “Is there anything that can keep us from being forgotten? That we were known from eternity and will be remembered in eternity is the only certainty that can save us from being forgotten forever” (p. 25). In the midst of suffering or at the end of life, there is no greater consolation than this.

For those of us in the middle of living, there is also no greater reason for hope. Nothing, not even our sin, will keep God from remembering, loving, and forgiving us. Though God will continue to demand justice from us, he will also forgive us. This is how God recreates us. Not overnight, but by each regret felt and each lesson learned. God will recreate us not out of nothing, but out of who we already are and what we have already done. There is no reset button or periodic forgetfulness that frees us to begin again. God does not forget us but forgives us so that we can become who God intended us to be.