The first two stories, domination and revolution, are a kind of yin and yang. Where one exists the other will inevitably follow. —Brian McLaren

Gareth Higgins grew up in Northern Ireland, a place haunted by cycles of violence and revenge. His experience shaped a commitment to live out a better story:

Throughout my childhood, nearly 4,000 people were killed and over 40,000 directly physically injured. Countless hundreds of thousands were traumatized or otherwise wounded by a conflict rooted in the domination story but met by the revolution story. I’m not sure that I like the word “revolution” because it’s also been applied to movements for the common good. If we take it literally, it actually means a movement that ends up exactly where it started. It might be better called the revenge story.

Movements that overthrow repressive regimes have not always replaced them with something better. In fact, unless a restorative consciousness is engaged, revolutions run the risk of merely turning the tables, replacing one set of broken relationships with yet more domination, perhaps a slightly less oppressive form of domination, but domination, nonetheless.

Instead of replacing domination with more domination, we need to imagine societies and institutions in which everyone is welcome at the table. The only rule for joining would be to agree not to harm anyone. For that to happen, the table needs to be enlarged, not flipped over, with the widest range of people possible involved in making and setting the table. It’s not my table, nor is it theirs. In the spirit of the Seventh Story of liberation and reconciliation, it’s Love’s table….

These past few years, many of us have felt more concerned than ever about elected politics. It’s felt like we’ve been living in revolutionary times, but really revenge times, times where we pit ourselves against each other and where we believe that the only way to have peace and security in the world is to totally defeat our political opponents. But whether your team or my team was in charge or not, whether they occupy the positions of power in society, there’s only so much that elected politics can do.

Higgins shares his hope for the future:

If you want a better world, tell a better story, even about the possibility of embodying justice without vengeance. If you think that sounds naive, I hear you. But I’m coming from a society where we have enacted significant generational, structural change. We have radically reduced the use of violence and taken some tentative steps toward cooperating with each other rather than just flipping the tables so that the people who used to be oppressed are now the people doing the oppressing. The reason [justice without vengeance] doesn’t sound naive to me is because I’ve seen it work.

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Jesus had strained relationships, too. (From He Gets Us.)

We were thinking about what Jesus’ relationships with friends and family might have looked like and were surprised by what we found. Pastel paintings and imagery of Jesus so often depict him having a peaceful, wonderful time with his loved ones, but a closer look at the text paints a more complex picture.

Shortly after beginning his public ministry, Jesus went back to his hometown to share his message. A whole crowd gathered to hear him speak. By the time he was done speaking, they were calling to have him killed. They even tried to take matters into their own hands and throw him off a cliff. If we read this story too quickly, we might miss the fact that the very people trying to kill him grew up with him. They would have been friends and neighbors that knew Jesus when he was a boy. And that’s not the only example of good relationships gone sour. One of Jesus’ closest friends gave him up to the authorities in exchange for money, and another denied ever knowing him while he was being arrested. His family doubted him, and his own mother likely felt the relational strains that came part and parcel of a full-time traveling ministry.

The point is, Jesus’ relationships were far from perfect. Betrayal, doubt, insecurity, disagreement and distance muddied the waters even for Jesus. He couldn’t avoid relational stresses, but he did give us a model for how to respond to them and work toward restoration. His model? Radical patience and forgiveness.

It might have been best illustrated in a story he told about a father and son. The son asked for his inheritance while the father was still alive—he valued the money more than the relationship. The father obliged, gave the money, and the son went off and spent it until he found himself completely destitute with nothing left. He resolved to return home to his father to humbly ask for a job—not to reclaim his spot as son, but as one of many hired hands. As he was walking up to the house, the father saw him from afar and ran out to embrace him. To forgive him. To welcome him home as a son.

Repairing broken relationships is incredibly difficult, and the forgiveness Jesus both talked about and displayed is often messy and complicated. But know if you feel the pang of hurt in your relationships, Jesus did too, and take encouragement in his resolve to repair what was broken.

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