The families of the dead black victims facing the racist young man alleged to have murdered them after being welcomed as their guests and having studied the Bible and prayed with them for an hour can easily be misinterpreted as the naivety of well-meaning, grieving folks who even in this extremity do not comprehend the reality of evil and its ability to take human form.
In fact, the forgiveness extended to the alleged killer by the victims' families is the only radical response that can be made.
In this world, the only true enemy is death and that enemy ultimately comes to and destroys every living thing.
In our fear of death, we use our power to inflict death - or tokens or anticipations of death such as physical pain, confinement, ostracism, poverty, etc. - to ward off or delay our own death.
In this case, the natural response of revenge merely ups the ante of the game by inflicting pain on one's enemy.
The families' act of forgiveness can also be misinterpreted as some fuzzy-headed, liberal weakness that fails its societal duty to protect its members from aggression and accepts such evil and may, in fact, even be complicit in it. [This charge has now been explicitly made by an NRA board member.]
In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Charles Cotton confirmed writing that "innocent people died because of (Clementa Pinckney's) position on a political issue." The post appeared Thursday in an online discussion board about concealed handguns.
Charleston shooting the fault of slain pastor Clementa Pinckney, NRA board member writes (Associated Press in The Times-Picayune)
Forgiveness has no part in any of that. It recognizes the legitimacy of a representative government's monopoly on the use of force in the face of aggression from sources both foreign and domestic so long as that use is subject to checks and balances and so long as the rights of minority or unpopular people and groups are protected.
But true forgiveness is a radical act transcending violence.
In both revenge for evil or submission to evil or complicity in the evil done to others, the unstated premise is that death is the ultimate power in the universe, that death is humanity's true sovereign.
Forgiveness refuses this unstated premise and makes the explicit claim that humanity's true sovereign is a power beyond death: a power with authority over death.
In the Christian tradition, the foundation of that claim is the belief that God incarnate in the impoverished, despised, and ultimate crucified Jesus Christ suffered the full fury of death and, in so doing, disarmed death for us.
So biological death endures, but the terror of death, what the Apostle Paul calls the "sting of death," is unmasked as the impostor it is.
References
As the young white man charged with murdering nine people inside an historic black church in South Carolina stood silently and expressionless at a court hearing on Friday, relatives of the slain worshippers faced him one by one, offering tearful words of grief and forgiveness.
20 No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”
thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head] This phrase has been explained (1) of burning shame produced by requital of good for evil; (2) of the melting of the evil-doer’s heart by such conduct, as of metal by fire; (3) of the result of a spirit of love as producing at length the “incense” of prayer and praise (as from censer-coals) from the conquered heart. (The last is suggested in the Speaker’s Commentary, on Proverbs 25) A simpler, yet more inclusive, explanation is Alford’s: “in thus doing, you will be taking the most effectual vengeance;” the idea of vengeance being, in the Christian’s view, transformed, so as to become in fact the victory of love.
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