Merchants of Resentment

Is it possible to sow the wind and reap the whirlwind (Hos. 8:7)? Well, of course it is. We live in a world where disproportional effects can follow hard after trivial causes. Not only so, but the disproportional effects can be unevenly distributed. Two toddlers disobey their mothers in exactly the same way, and one of them dies while the other gets a scolding and his family gets a cute story.

It is not my purpose here today to defend the justice of God given the fact of this unevenness. That is another task for another time. I simply want to take that unevenness into account as a fixed given. It happens. Whatever we think of it, we have to deal with it. We have to factor it into our calculations. All mothers warn their toddlers of certain things because some mothers lose their toddlers.

Sometimes the disproportionate effects are the result of sinful, human actions. Sometimes the trivial causes are also sinful, but not nearly as heinous, and other times there is no sin involved at all. The combinations of responsibility are varied and many.

Here is a (made up) example of the former scenario. Suppose a young teen-aged girl has been warned by her mother and father about her circle of friends, and she has been warned repeatedly. There have been scores of discussions about it, and the young girl has rolled her eyes in all of them. Suppose one night she disobeys them by sneaking off to a forbidden party, and suppose that while she is there some vile husk of a human being slips a drug into her drink and rapes her. So her parents were proven right in all their concerns, and she has been proven wrong. But in addition to being proven wrong, she has also been wronged. The consequences were not commensurate with her offense — but they nonetheless happened. I am afraid that it is a fact that the effects of such disproportionate consequences tend to fall heavily upon women.

Now suppose it is years later, and you are a counselor trying to help this woman. She is now a married mother of two lovely daughters of her own. Her life is generally together, but she has this raw place in her heart, and it still affects a number of things negatively — her relationship with her parents is still strained, her sex life with her husband is affected, and so on. It has gotten to the point where she feels like it is some spiritual form of that flesh-eating bacteria, and so she has sought your help.

Suppose further that civil remedies are out of the picture, for whatever reason. Let’s take a definitive one — her rapist was killed three weeks after the rape in a meth deal that went bad. No remedy can be found by arresting him, or charging him, or confronting him (despite countless mental confrontations over the years), or doing anything whatever to him. He is in the hands of God. But the fact that he is out of the picture does not mean that his sin is out of the picture. He is dead, but his sin lives on.

We live in a time when there are two basic options presented to women in such a position. The first is to politicize it. The rapist is gone, but men aren’t. The vile man is dead, but the patriarchy isn’t. So the problem is addressed (addressed, not solved) by therapy-speak, venting the story, making accusations, finding scapegoats, shoring up a solidarity with the sisterhood, grooming the status of victim, and cultivating an aggrieved bitterness like it was the rarest of orchids.

The second option, because of the ubiquity and authority of the first option today, is very difficult to say without creating an uproar. But it needs to be said. Without in any way defending or excusing the behavior of the vile husk of a human being, the woman needs to learn how to confess her own sins — disobedience, disrespect, and so on. God will judge the man who violated her, and that is not likely to be pretty. He is in Hell, and we can’t fix anything on earth by advocating hotter fire for him. It is not going to get any worse for him, and being perfect justice it doesn’t need to. But the fact it is perfect justice for him does not remove the mess that his corruptions left behind, and which still need to be cleaned up.

So in the meantime, she can go over the nature of his evil a thousand times, and it will not be any true solace for her. To say that she needs to repent and confess the sins that set her up for this terrible event is in no way a justification of the perpetrator — and in no way does it make their sins equivalent.

When someone is working the victim angle, it is easy for her to see herself as the victim “over here” and all the censorious “church ladies” over there. But that is not the real nature of the divide. “I am the hurting woman here, and all the finger waggers are over there.” That is not how I would describe the two groups at all. The “church ladies” live in the same screwed up world, and more than a few of them know what some men can be like. Many of them have had terrible things done to them — but they are dealing with it differently. They have seen that the blood of Christ can do wonderful things. What recriminations and accusations and rationalizations cannot do, the gospel does do, and can do. The gospel liberates in a way that nothing else can. As Justin Holcomb put it in the wonderful title of his book, a woman can be set free to be able to say, Rid of My Disgrace.

One of the things that bitterness and resentment do, and do very well, is tie themselves up in a rat’s nest of emotional contradictions. But none of it makes sense. As someone once wisely noted, bitterness is like eating a box of rat poison and then wondering why the rat won’t die.

But even though a gospel approach offers no justification to the perp whatever, this does not keep certain people from emitting shrieks of outrage, claiming that it does in fact, do exactly that. And many times the outrage is directed at people who were victims of the same kind of violations, but who are guilty of the additional offense of having been set free. So instead of giving these sexual politicians the time of day, we should respond the same way the apostle Paul did when dealing with a similar kind of slander. “And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just” (Rom. 3:8).

Forgiveness, cleansing, and grace are the mortal enemy of every form of bondage — including the perpetual bondage set up by the merchants of resentment.