In order to sin against someone we have to re-define them.
We cease to see a person for who they truly are – a person of dignity and worth
made in the image of God, a child beloved of God and precious in his sight. We
de-humanise one another in order to justify asserting our needs and desires
over one another. Lust happens when we objectify someone, we see them as an
object to gratify our sexual desires and not as a person of dignity and worth. In
order to be selfish or greedy I must first justify that my needs are more
important than yours, and I usually do this by diminishing your humanity, by
deciding I am worth more than you. The natural end of this process is murder,
we degrade one another to the point that my needs and feelings are of more
value than your life.
Even when we make an idol out of someone we have to deny
that person their humanity. In a peverse way, by making that person’s words and
actions too important in our lives we actually end up degrading them as we stop
seeing them as a person in their own right and only see them in relation to how
we feel about ourselves.
I’m pretty sure that all sin against one another is a form
of oppression. It is a seeking of power over one another in order to define one
another for our own purposes. Sometimes it is blatant, sometimes very hidden,
but coded within all my acts of lust, selfishness, greed, envy, theft,
dishonesty and sinful anger is the message that you, the object of my sin, are
worthless and your thoughts and feelings are unimportant.
Now I have known for a long time that one answer to ridding
sin of its damaging power in my life has been to refuse to let it define me as
worthless. To meditate not only on who God tells me I am but also his right to
have his definition be the one that I listen to. But I have only recently
learned the power that sin has exercised over my life in silencing me. One
extreme expression of stripping others of their worth and dignity is using our
power not only to hurt others but then to dictate how they are allowed to
respond to the harm we are doing them. It is the oppression that says you are
not a person, you are a thing that exists to meet my needs. Crudely put, I am
going to hurt you and then I am going to make you smile at me. The object of
the sin is silenced, no one is allowed to hear their thoughts and feelings,
they have been objectified and then robbed of the ability to protest their
pain.
For my whole life whenever I have been in pain I have
retreated into crushed silence, it has taken decades to begin to believe that
there are people I can trust who will listen and who will hear. But whenever I
come up against someone who cannot or will not hear me or someone who wants to
silence the expression of my feelings because they don’t suit their purposes or they aren't convenient, the weight of
silence descends again and I feel as helpless and unheard as I did when I was a
child.
Seeing this has started me down a new track, one that has
lifted the heavy yoke of silence from my shoulders. It is simply this – God hears.
So simple, so easy, so life-changing. The feelings I crush down inside as a
reflex to other people’s sinful demands suddenly have an outlet, an escape,
this person does not hear me Lord, but you do, and this is how I feel. God hears my pain, and what is more, he cares.
I am no longer silenced, unheard, diminished, de-humanised.
He hears and it matters to him. Reflecting on this I was drawn to these passages; here is unfolded God’s full response to those being silenced by oppression:
And God heard their groaning,
and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with
Jacob. God saw the people of Israel —and God knew.
(Exodus 2:24-25)
God heard, and God
saw. The cries and tears and pain and suffering of his people are not hidden
from him. He hears me and he sees me.
God remembered. This
is how I know I can trust him, he makes promises and is faithful to keep them.
He will not forget or abandon me.
God knew. He not
only sees and hears, but he knows. But what kind of knowing – I think the
parallel passage in Exodus 3 helps us out.
Then the LORD said, “I
have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry
because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I
have come down to deliver them”.
(Exodus 3:7-8a)
Now he addresses them personally – I have seen, I have heard, I know. All the verbs of the passage
before but now he adds one more, I have
come down. And here is why this post is for Christmas. He has come down. He
sees, he hears, he knows but all that would be no comfort if we couldn’t trust
him, but we can because he remembers and he has come down. Come down to get
involved, to get his hands dirty, to know my pain. To feel it, live it, bear
it. He does not know with an abstract kind of knowing, but with the gritty,
getting your hands dirty, walking in my shoes, experiencing oppression and pain
for himself kind of knowing. Christmas is the ultimate fulfillment of this
passage in Exodus. God doesn’t just hear, he intervenes, he delivers. Jesus
arrives, he comes down into my mess and pain, into the mess and pain of our
world, comes down with a promise to heal and bind up and set free. Comes down
to a cross where he is broken, wounded and condemned so that promise can be
kept. He comes down to declare that whatever oppression may say, I matter
because he has chosen to die for me.
So I will not live anymore in silence, I cannot be silenced,
the yoke of the oppressor has been broken, he has no more power over me. He may
take away my words, my cries, even make me smile when I am in pain, but I am
not a thing. I am a person who God hears and sees, who’s suffering he knows and
for whom he came down. And when I face the person who does not or cannot hear
me I no longer need them to. I am no longer crushed by their rejection of my humanity, my feelings. So I am free to see them as the person they are, a person made in the image of God and desperately in need of him. Being heard sets me free to break the cycle. Being heard sets me free to love.
