just what is forgiveness?

The past week has been tough for our local high school with the band director being caught in a promiscuous relationship with a student.  This incident has added to the lowering of the student body’s self-esteem that was initially challenged be racial problems this past fall. 

Our students didn’t want to talk about the issue which was the same response they had to the racial incident; they were tired of talking.  There seem to be varying perspectives as to the guilt of the parties involved and what kind of punishment they should receive.  Some feel that the girl is just as guilty as the teacher.  But, what I find most intriguing is that there was more concern about the publicity the incident would bring and the resulting shame that they would feel than the moral violation that had happened (I’m possibly overstating this but various personal conversations with some of the youth confirm this to some degree.)

In our market/media driven society image is everything.  If the image of a person or group of people is negatively portrayed in the media it doesn’t raise questions of moral decay but evokes feelings of shame that the image is not revealing a positive or, at least, a cool group.  Forgiveness, is there is any at all, is about restoring a healthy image of the person or group.  It doesn’t focus on the sin or cause of the problem but on portraying a good image (what is known as PR Spin). 

This change in understanding and thinking on the part of youth is important to grasp if we want to effectively communicate the gospel and find ways to enable youth to work at forgiveness within their context.  Perhaps we need to acknowledge that the image thing isn’t totally bad IF it is truly iconing the reality of the individuals heart or the reality of the group.  Therefore, to truly repair the image there needs to be an acknowledgement of what is distorting it so that it can reflect goodness.  A failure to heal the things that distort the image will only bring more false images or bad PR in the future.

~ by rodmarmis on January 31, 2008.