Summer’s heat, Autumn’s light: overlap, as we multitask, two steps forward, one step back, two steps back, one step forward, as we tread water and eye the shore, not sure if the trees we see are the trees we saw before we went under and surfaced last time, selfless for our loved ones, selfish for our selves.
“Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, Whose service is never furthered through the Top Seven Deadly Sin of anger.
If someone says, “It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing,” they snicker, the self-styled learned, who wouldn’t recognize a man without guile if Jesus Himself pointed out such a person.
A victim wants justice, and that will almost always include ostensible harm to the perpetrator, who will then point the finger all around in accusation that the victim merely sought revenge.
When one has forgiven someone, and taken much credit over many years for that maturest of actions, one can be quick to accuse one’s self of a secret desire for revenge, so secret that he himself hadn’t even been aware that it had lurked in his depths for decades.
Then trouble comes, and the old sibling patterns assert themselves, and the junior of the old pattern realizes he now has the upper hand, and needn’t relive the toxic episodes of the past. He swiftly and brutally, with no preamble, cuts off the head of the snake, before the other person knows what happened.
The explanation quickest to hand is that this is his long-awaited revenge.
It was a switching of roles: the balance of power had shifted, and the younger no longer had to suffer at the hands of the older.
The older had to understand that the old relationship was over. As equals, the younger no longer had to endure the drunken abuse and fights. He could simply walk away, and leave the other to wonder why everything had changed, and he was no longer welcome in the society of the younger and his family.
Someone who was powerless had wanted revenge, but that person, much older, hadn’t wanted revenge. He wanted compassion, understanding, peace, wisdom, and understood that the sudden, ugly turn of events might look like revenge, but it was more complicated than that.
He wanted people to grow, and wanted to help that along, but he could only do so much.
Vengeance is God’s, as is mercy, and forgiveness.
The “vengeance” of God? A figure of speech. God’s way of saying, “You want your enemies to suffer? Maybe they will, but I will decide what happens, and that may very well seem like vengeance to you.”
Jesus advises us to settle with our enemies on our way to court, because the judge just might side with our opponents, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Turn the other cheek. The first will be the last.
Why not decide for ourselves what is right?
Justice, vengeance, compassion, mercy, selflessness, selfishness: like Summer heat and Autumn light, our younger selves and present-day selves inevitably, and sometimes uncomfortably, through the darkest of glass, overlap.