Madoff and Forgiveness

I was completely absorbed into the Bernie Madoff documentary this past week on ABC. It is just intriguing to me how this man got so many people to invest in him over such a long period of time. He did it because he played hard to get and he had the trust of people. So few people suspected what was going on. And then it came crashing down.

After the documentary aired, they interviewed some of the people that had lost money and some much of their life savings. They also interviewed Stephanie Madoff, Mark Madoff's wife and daughter-in-law of Bernie. Two years after the scheme broke, Mark Madoff committed suicide. Stephanie Madoff told of her hate for Bernie Madoff and said she would "spit in his face".

It is so easy to play armchair quarterback and dismiss the reactions of people who placed their trust in a man who so calculatingly betrayed that trust. However, hate of this kind hurts the victim a second time. It creates an incipient, festering wound that grows and grows over time. It can't change the circumstances and the hate can't change the other person. It seems counter intuitive that forgiveness would actually heal someone but it does. And forgiveness is not dependent on the repentance of the other person. To be clear, I am not talking about justice. Bernie Madoff needed to pay for his crimes. But for the sake of the victims, they can only heal if they forgive.

The standard by comparison is the forgiveness of God. A fully just God could come at me with full wrath for all of the times I have sinned against Him. But that same God is infinitely merciful and He forgives my sin. He cannot forgive my sin without justice for He cannot just overlook sin. So the justice is meted out on His Son. Therefore when a human being faces betrayal, he cannot look at the debtor and see the size of the debt circumstantially, but he must look at the size of the debt relative to the larger debt that God has paid on his behalf (Matthew 18:23-35).

Something weird happens when forgiveness happens. It heals the person. The reality of the debt is still there, but the offended person can somehow move on. I think that change can only be explained supernaturally. In our natural tendency, vengeance and hate just seem right when in fact it is so wrong.