How Easter helps us embrace the other

In a divided community, could the gruesome death of a Palestinian Jew show us a different way to live together?

One thing you would have to say about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was a victim. But he was a victim with a difference.

Right now, the most effective way to talk in public is to assert your claim to greater victimhood over the claims of others. Being a once-oppressed person bestows a kind of moral sanctity on a person or group, and silences the powerful by drawing attention to their privilege and its oppressive consequences.

This is as it should be. The voices of those who have suffered real evil remind us of the danger we human beings often are to one another. If we now know the human cost of unaccountable institutions and repressive ideologies, then we are a better society for it.

But what we see in the rise of the Right in contemporary politics is a reaction to the use of the ‘I am a victim’ narrative by those who traditionally stand accused by it.

Thus, we have the ungainly spectacle of the Christian churches claiming to be persecuted by gay activists, men claiming to be victimised by feminists, and Anglo-Celtics claiming to be swamped by Asians/Muslims/Indigenous people.

On both Left and Right, we can see the forging of identities that depend on finding a villain. We are a ‘we’ because they are a ‘they’. There’s the good people, and then there’s those others, who are either mad, or bad.  

The narrative of victimhood needs an enemy, an ‘Other’. But telling the story of our selves this way perpetuates the cycle.

Could the idea of forgiveness, and its cross-shaped emblem, be the way towards a new kind of common ground? The central message of Easter shows us a better way – one that the Christian church needs to remember as much as anyone, since it is so grievously tempted to join the rush to victimhood.

The death of Jesus Christ is not a story of victimhood. It’s about forgiveness.

It’s not about feeding the resentment of being persecuted which feeds the cycle of aggression and violence in our world. Not at all: the possibility of forgiveness is a different kind of story altogether.

This was the Christ who taught us to ‘love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you’.

Good Friday remembers the moment at which God himself did that, even though this was not a trivial thing even for God.

Forgiveness is morally serious. It’s not the overlooking of morally repugnant behaviour. It declares it to be what it is. But forgiveness refuses to see the other as a monster.

That is to say: it doesn’t demonise the other. It humanises them, even as they demonise you. Speak for victims, not as one.

As Desmond Tutu once said:

Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering - remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning.

What’s more, forgiveness is actually empowering in exactly the way the victim narrative isn’t, because it refuses to let the oppressor describe me.

How is this possible? It’s possible because, with Christ, human beings are offered a new identity. This identity is about belonging to group that has forgiveness, and not exclusion of the enemy, as its constitution. It is full of ‘others’.

If I know myself as a forgiven person, then I can’t act with anything but humility towards others. And if I know myself as forgiven, I need not fear what others can do.

I am fallible, but free.

Perhaps then the Easter spectacle of a man nailed to a cross, degraded and horribly abused, turns out to be an invitation to pursue our conversations with others in a new way – no less fiercely committed to what we feel is right and just, but always with possibility of ‘a second chance for a new beginning’.