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Devotionals

Faith to Forgive Grievous Harms: Accepting the Atonement as Restitution

Good morning. I am grateful to Mary for her introduction. I wish I could rebut her point about not being a dating machine but my parents did have to pay for me to take a family friend to my high school prom. At least I had great judgment when I finally got the courage to ask someone out.

It is a great honor to have this opportunity to speak to you this morning. My first trip to Oahu was in the early 1970s and I have loved this area ever since. As Mary said, I grew up on the beach and the sound of waves and the smell of salt air is deep in my veins. Of course, Provo is a long way from the ocean and so it is particularly good to be here. And getting out of freezing weather doesn’t hurt either.

The title of my remarks today is “Faith to Forgive Grievous Harms: Accepting the Atonement as Restitution.” Now, to some, any talk from a lawyer that focuses on forgiveness may seem odd. Don’t lawyers depend upon a lack of forgiveness to function? I recognize that “some lawyers are dishonest, arrogant, greedy, venal, amoral, ruthless buckets of toxic slime. On the other hand, it is unfair to judge the entire profession by a few hundred thousand bad apples.”2 Such quips can be a bit tough for those of us who are attorneys, but how much worse can it get given the number of us whose parents, when we decided to go to law school, scraped off their car the bumper sticker that said: “Ask me about my children.”3

More seriously, although I won’t have time to discuss this today, I am convinced that practicing law with civility and integrity is a noble endeavor and fully compatible with a forgiving heart. Law degrees are instruments of great power. Like every instrument of power, a license to practice law must be used in accordance with the eternal principles described in Section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants—“by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.” If lawyers use their power consistent with these eternal principles, the role of the lawyer does not stand in opposition to the principle of forgiveness.

Today, I want to talk about the principle of forgiveness and why our ability to forgive even the most grievous harms should flow from our understanding of how the atonement makes restitution to us for precisely those harms. Before I come to my main topic, however, I want to take just a couple of minutes on another subject. As my wife mentioned, much of my non-law school time these days is spent in missionary interviews. Those I am interviewing, and many of you, will soon be heading off all over the world. Others of you will soon start new employment or a summer job. Still others will begin graduate or professional schooling in the fall. This is a time of great change and challenge in your lives. As exciting as any of those new endeavors may be, I know they are likely to be stressful. I certainly felt that as my son entered the MTC 13 days ago and then on Sunday flew off to Berlin Germany for his mission. 

The truth is that whenever we start something new we usually feel nervous and inadequate. Learning new things tends to be a little painful and a little embarrassing. My experience is that if we will diligently fight through the early days, or even weeks, of a new job, a new school, or a new life as a missionary, we will find great satisfaction, peace and personal growth. Let me tell one story in this regard.

I began law practice in September 1990 in Seattle, Washington. I had not yet taken a bar examination, mostly because when I left law school for a judicial clerkship in San Diego, I hadn’t yet decided where I wanted to practice law and I certainly wasn’t eager to take the bar exam twice. What this meant is that, once I started working at my law firm, from September until May of the next year, I would not be able to appear in court or sign any court pleadings. In all of my correspondence with opposing counsel my signature read: “James R. Rasband, not yet admitted to the bar.”

That fall, soon after I started, I was approached by a partner to handle an “unlawful detainer” case. He said it was an “ideal” opportunity for a young associate. The basic idea of an unlawful detainer is that a tenant who is in possession of a leased property refuses to pay rent or leave the premises. This particular case involved a western wear store in a small town about 100 miles east of Seattle. As I recall, the tenant had not paid rent in over a year and the landlord had decided he needed the help of the legal system. 

These are straightforward cases, but everything took me a great deal of time because I was so new. I puzzled over every step and would have preferred not to bill most of my time because much of it was wasted. The partner in charge, however, told me to write down all of my time and that he would write off what was unnecessary once the case was resolved.

One early puzzle I remember was filing what is called a “motion to shorten time.” Basically, a motion to shorten time—as the title suggests—is a request for the court to shorten the amount of time normally required for a particular legal procedure. I’d never heard of a motion to shorten time. I read the rules. I thought about the equity. I went to look at cases. I used my Harvard Law training to think about the theory behind motions to shorten time. I can’t recall precisely, but I probably spent 5 hours on that motion to shorten time. Later, I would learn that all I needed to do was call out to my secretary and have her prepare the motion for my signature. It was probably a 30 minute task.

The motion to shorten time was not the only task that took me more time than an experienced attorney. I was young and learning. 

In any event, the case moved forward and we succeeded. It was certainly not a triumph of brilliant lawyering on my part. It’s not too difficult to prove unlawful detainer where the defendant has failed to pay rent for at least a year on a commercial lease.

Once the case was over, the Washington statute under which we proceeded allowed us to seek attorneys fees. The partner in charge told me to draft the motion and seek fees from the other side. Knowing how long everything had taken me, I was a bit queasy. We cut back the request some but plainly not enough because I will never forget the response from opposing counsel.

Opposing counsel dissected the fee request and my billing statements line by line. The motion to shorten time, he said, could be prepared by a reasonably competent attorney in 30 minutes, but it took “James R. Rasband, not yet admitted to the bar,” and he quoted, five hours. And so it went, this task or that task could have been performed by a reasonably competent attorney in X hours, but it took “James R. Rasband, not yet admitted to the bar,” Y hours.

By the time of the fee request, I had been admitted to the bar, much to the surprise of my opposing counsel. Unfortunately, that meant I was fully capable of arguing the fee motion to the court. I headed over to the small town to take my whipping. As luck would have it, the opposing counsel had filed his response brief late and court refused to consider it. The judge, who had done many, many unlawful detainer cases, assigned a reasonable fee and we were done.

Here I was, after three years of law school and one year of working for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and yet I was still learning and still feeling inadequate. So, what is my point with this rather long story? It is that almost every important undertaking in our lives will be hard and stressful when we begin. When you serve a mission, the first couple of weeks in the MTC are usually stressful. If you are assigned to learn a language, your first couple of months will be humbling. When you start graduate school, it will likely feel like everyone around you is smarter—that is certainly how it felt for me. When you start anything new, don’t be worried or ashamed that your first effort takes longer. If you work hard, the task will almost always become easier. Your early struggles at a job or in graduate school will turn to competence and confidence. The initial feelings of inadequacy that almost always accompany missionary service will give way to joy and peace. There is no other way to learn than by our experience.

Now, having given a bit of counsel that has been weighing on my mind of late in sending off so many missionaries, I would like to turn to my main topic—forgiveness. I start with a familiar scripture. Matthew 18:21-22 reads: “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.” 

Have you, or a family member, or a friend, ever been terribly hurt by someone and found it difficult to forgive, even once, let alone “until seventy times seven”? In such cases, do we say to ourselves: the Lord can’t really mean that I should forgive that sort of sin or abuse.

Yet it seems clear that the Lord really does mean it. Our very salvation depends upon us being willing to forgive others. As Christ taught: “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:  But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15).

That our own forgiveness should be conditioned on forgiving others can be a hard doctrine, particularly if the sin against us was horribly wrong and out of all proportion to any harm we’ve ever committed. Even harder, the Lord has indicated in modern revelation: “he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin” (D&C 64:9). This is a very strong statement: if we refuse to forgive, there remaineth in us the greater sin. How can this be? As I hope to explain, our salvation is conditioned on forgiving others because, when we refuse to forgive, what we are really saying is that we reject, or don’t quite trust, the atonement. And it is our acceptance of the atonement that ultimately saves us.

Why is it that we sometimes have trouble accepting the atonement as recompense for the harms we suffer at other’s hands? My experience is that we can sometimes forget the atonement has two sides. Usually, when we think about the atonement, we focus on how mercy can satisfy the demands that justice would impose upon us.4We are typically quicker to accept the idea that, when we sin and make mistakes, the atonement is available to pay our debts.

Forgiveness requires us to consider the other side of the atonement, a side that we don’t think about as often, but that is equally critical—that is, the atonement’s power to satisfy our demands of justice against others, to fulfill our rights to restitution and being made whole. We often don’t quite see how the atonement satisfies our own demands for justice. Yet it does so. It heals us not only for the guilt we suffer when we sin, but it also heals us from the sins and hurts of others.

To help explain the two sides of the atonement, let me try a rather homely analogy. Like most analogies and metaphors, it is not perfect in all respects. I hope, though, that it can aid understanding.

Suppose I find myself in a home built for me by a very generous landlord. It is a nice home. He encourages me to maintain and improve the home and gives me a number of instructions for making the home a nice place to live.

Over the years, I sometimes improve the home, but other times, through my negligence, I make it worse. One time, I flood the home when I fail to set the faucets to drip during a freeze. Another time, my kitchen catches fire because I fail to turn off a burner on the stove. A couple of times, I lose my temper and put my fist through a wall. 

In each instance, the landlord forgives me and encourages me to pay a little closer attention to my home and to his instructions for making the home a joyful place to live. He does not charge me for the damage caused by my mistakes. Instead, sometimes he is patient while I figure out how to fix things on my own; sometimes he sends someone over to fix the problem; and, sometimes, I wake up and things are fixed in ways I don’t quite understand.

This same landlord happens to have a son who is quite wayward. The son is always up to no good and I don’t particularly like or respect him. One night, the landlord’s son, as a prank, sets fire to the shed attached to the back of my house. The fire gets out of control and the entire house burns down. I lose the home. I lose all of my possessions, including some particularly valuable possessions that I can’t replace, such as photos and heirlooms.

I’m angry and distraught. I want the no good son to pay. I want him to fix things and to make me whole. A part of me knows he can't really make it better. He may not have the resources to rebuild the house, and even if he could rebuild the house, he can't retrieve the photos and heirlooms. And that makes me even angrier.

As I sit in anger, the landlord comes to visit me. He reminds me that he has promised to take care of me. He promises me that he is willing to rebuild my house. In fact, he says that he will do more than that. He will replace my house with a castle and then give me all that he himself has. He says that this might take a while but he promises it will happen.

What’s the catch? I say.

Here are the conditions, he says. First, you need to put your faith in me and trust that I really will build you that castle and restore all that you have lost. Second, you need to continue to work on implementing the instructions I gave you about keeping up your house. Finally, you need to forgive my arsonist son, just as I have forgiven you all these many years.

Sounds easy enough and seems like an obviously great deal, but why might it be hard for the tenant to accept the landlord’s offer? Or, to move away from the analogy, why is it sometimes so hard for us to forgive others? Let me suggest some reasons:

First, we are probably angry. We want the arsonist to pay. But if we harbor this sort of anger, we may spend so much time pursuing the person who burned down our house, that we don’t get around to rebuilding our house. As someone once said:  “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”5 

It might also be hard to forgive because we can’t quite believe the landlord will fulfill his promise. He’s never failed us when we’ve messed up the house before, but what about this time? Besides, it is usually easier for us to believe that the Lord will forgive our mistakes. This time it is someone else’s mistake. 

Trust can be particularly difficult if the rebuilding project will take time. We want things fixed now, not later.

Trust may also be harder in the case of losses and hurts that do not seem easily fixable. Perhaps the landlord can rebuild the home, but can he really replace the photos and heirlooms? What if we lost a child in the fire, can he really take away that pain?

My testimony is that the atonement really can make us completely whole, even for those things that seem like they can’t be fixed or repaired. As Isaiah foretold of the Savior:  “the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,... to comfort all that mourn;... to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning” (Isaiah 61:1-3).

I recognize that this doctrine—that the atonement can heal us from the hurts of others—is well-established.6  Yet, in my experience it remains difficult to trust and accept that the atonement serves this purpose. My hope is that I can add to what has previously been said on this topic and help remove some barriers to forgiveness by offering some reasons why we should trust the Lord’s promise.

I turn first to the Mosaic Law and to an insight I owe to my mother whose teaching is the source of so much of my gospel knowledge.7 Remember that Paul taught that the Mosaic Law “was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” (Galatians 3:4). Remember also Christ’s statement to his disciples in his Sermon on the Mount: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:17-18).

Think about Christ’s statement for a minute. Christ was comforting his faithful disciples—those who loved and revered the Law of Moses. He was making sure they knew that his plan was to fulfill all the terms of the Mosaic Law. But what exactly were those terms that he would fulfill?

Our answer to this question typically focuses on the portion of the Mosaic Law that addressed Israel’s obligation to make sacrifices.8 We tend to emphasize the Savior’s admonition that “your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away,” and that instead we should “offer for a sacrifice... a broken heart and a contrite spirit” (3 Nephi 9:19-20). Our usual focus on the law of sacrifice is again on ourselves—what sacrifices we need to offer up to access the power of the atonement and heal our feelings of guilt and remorse.

But the law of sacrifice was just one component of the Mosaic Law. The Mosaic Law also included dietary laws and criminal laws; remember the lex talionis, of an eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth.9 It also included family law, and various civil laws that we today might recognize as tort or contract law.

Isn’t it plausible that when the Savior said he came to fulfill the law, he was talking about more than just the law of sacrifice? Shouldn’t we take him at his word that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled”? Although I am not an expert on the Mosaic Law and surely do not understand exactly how Christ fulfilled the Law in all its dimensions, let me suggest that the atonement did, in fact, answer other demands of the Mosaic Law.

Specifically, I want to focus on the civil law component of the Mosaic Law and its requirement that restitution be made to persons harmed by the wrongful actions of another. I do so because the restitution requirement is so important to understanding the doctrine of forgiveness. Exodus 21 and 22 set forth several such restitution requirements. Consider two of many examples. If a person caused a fire to break out so that the “standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; he that kindled the fire” was required to “make restitution” (Exodus 22:6). Similarly, if someone caused his livestock to graze in the field or vineyard of another, he was obligated to “make restitution” out “of the best of his own field, and of the best of his own vineyard” (Exodus 22:5).  

This concept of restitution remains a key part of our law today. Under tort law, which is just another word for “personal injury law,” courts can award damages to persons injured by the negligence of another; similarly, under contract law, damages may be awarded to those harmed by a breach of contract. In the criminal context, many states allow crime victims and their families to prepare victim impact statements which describe the way in which they have been harmed.

The basic point is that, just like current law, the Mosaic Law was not designed only to punish the wrong-doer. The Mosaic Law also existed to protect, compensate and make whole those harmed by others, whether intentionally or negligently. If Christ came to fulfill all the terms of the law, this part of the Mosaic Law should also be fulfilled by the atonement.

If the Mosaic Law schools us that Christ intended to make full restitution for the harms we suffered, it does not indicate how that could happen. Just like it is difficult to understand exactly how the atonement satisfies the demands of justice for our sins, it is challenging to grasp how the atonement works to make restitution to us for the sins of others. As is the case with most such “how” questions in the gospel, we must ultimately fall back on our faith and trust the Lord that his promises are true even if the mechanism is uncertain. But as an aid to our faith, let me suggest a couple of ways in which the atonement can be understood as making restitution.

First, even for something as horrible as losing a child because of another’s sin, the atonement insures significant restitution through the resurrection. We are promised that “every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame” (Alma 11:44). In addition, just like the wealthy landlord in my analogy promised not only that he would build the tenant a castle but also give the tenant all that he had, in scripture after scripture, the Lord promises us all that he has.

D&C 88:107 states: “And then shall the angels be crowned with the glory of his might, and the saints shall be filled with his glory, and receive their inheritance and be made equal with him.”

D&C 84:37-38 provides: “[H]e that receiveth me receiveth my Father; And he that receiveth my Father receiveth my Father’s kingdom; therefore all that my Father hath shall be given unto him.”

If we can inherit all the Father has, and if all will be restored to its perfect frame, is there a reason we should insist that the person who hurt us pay us back. Hasn’t justice been satisfied?

It is critical to understand that forgiving others is not just a practical virtue. It is a profound act of faith in the atonement and the promise that the Savior’s sacrifice repays not just our debts to others but also the debts of others to us. 

In our live-and-let-live society, we may believe that being forgiving is just etiquette and good manners. It is not. We may think that forgiveness requires us to let mercy rob justice. It does not.10 Forgiveness does not require us to give up our right to restitution. It simply requires that we look to a different source. The non-judgmental worldly phrases, “don’t worry about it,” and “no big deal,” are not illustrations of the doctrine of forgiveness. On the contrary, when a person sins against us, it can be a very big deal. The point is that the atonement is very big compensation that can take care of very big harms. Forgiveness doesn’t mean minimizing the sin; it means maximizing our faith in the atonement.

My greatest concern is that, if we wrongly believe forgiveness requires us to minimize the harms we suffer, this mistaken belief will be a barrier to developing a forgiving heart. It is okay to recognize how grave a sin is and to demand our right to justice... if our recognition triggers gratitude for the atonement. Indeed, the greater the sin against us—the greater the harm we suffer—the more we should value the atonement. Consider Christ’s parable of the two debtors from Luke 7:41-43:

There was a certain creditor which had two debtors: the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? Simon answered and said, I suppose that  he, to whom he forgave most. And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged.

If Simon is correct that the greater sinner will love the Lord even more, doesn’t the same reasoning suggest that our love for the Savior will increase when he pays a particularly large debt owed to us? There is little value in claiming that a wrong against us is slight. Instead, if we give the wrong its full weight, we are better able to give the Lord a full measure of gratitude for making us whole.11 And when we understand that the Lord promises us restitution, we can recognize that our anger at our victimizer is ultimately unnecessary. This in turn helps free us to love our enemy as the Savior commanded (Matthew 5:43-44).

In sum, the principle of forgiveness does not require that we give up our right to justice or that we give up our right to restitution. Christ answers the demands of the law for our sins and for the sins of others. We just have to be willing to accept that he has the power to do so.

The Savior’s promise in Matthew that he will “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” thus describes two sides of the same coin. We can’t have faith in only one side of the atonement. To use another metaphor, we can’t choose to pick up just one end of the stick. To be efficacious—to have saving power—our faith in Christ and his atonement must include both his power to pay for our sins and his power to pay for the sins of others.

Harking back to my landlord-tenant analogy, sometimes we burn the house down through our own carelessness—we play with fire. Sometimes the house burns down through no fault of our own—lightning strikes and there is nothing we can do about it. Sometimes our house burns down because of the sins of others—the landlord’s arsonist son in my analogy. The wonder of the atonement is that it works for all three. But our own receipt of the atonement is conditional on forgiving others. If we do that, accept Christ, and strive to keep his commandments, we will receive the castle and all else the Father has. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

 

 

 

1 Much of this devotional address was delivered in an address of the same title given at Brigham Young University on October 23, 2012.

2 James D. Gordon, How Not To Succeed in Law School, 100 Yale L. J. 1679, 1680 (1990-1991).

3 See id. at 1680 (“[Y]our grandparents will immediately scrape off their bumper sticker that says, “ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN.”)

4 See Alma 34:16.

5 The origin of this quote is uncertain but is sometimes attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo.

6 One of my favorite discussions is Elder Bruce C. Hafen’s classic talk Beauty for Ashes: The Atonement of Jesus Christ, Ensign, April 1990.

7 My mother is the one who first focused me on the idea that the Mosaic Law and its requirements regarding restitution was a schoolmaster to help those hurt by the sins of another to trust in the justice and fairness of the atonement.  She later published some of her thinking.  See Ester Rasband, The Promise of the Atonement:  Cure for Broken Dreams (Cedar Fort, Springville, UT 2005), at 3, 6-11, 18-19.

8 See Exodus, Chapters 1-8.

9 See Exodus 21: 23-25 (“And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”)

10 See Ester Rasband, The Promise of the Atonement: Cure for Broken Dreams (Cedar Fort, Springville, UT 2005), at 26-27 (discussing this concept).

11 See Ester Rasband, The Promise of the Atonement: Cure for Broken Dreams (Cedar Fort, Springville, UT 2005), at 30-31 (discussing the parable of the two debtors).