“It’s Okay”

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I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that. I’m sorry I hurt you. Now, if somebody says that to you, how do you normally respond?

Many people will say “it’s okay.” But is it really okay? I mean, if it was okay, why are we talking about it? Why are we having this conversation? The truth is, it wasn’t okay. And now we might say it’s okay as trying to say like we forgive you. But the reality is, for many of us, it’s hard to forgive. And we struggle with it. Partly because when we say it’s okay, it’s kind of like we’re just letting them off the hook. Or in some ways it feels like we’re devaluing ourselves.

And then when you just say it’s okay, it kind of just leaves things almost like there’s this tension between us, or almost like one of us is maybe better than the other now. And this isn’t just something we feel individually when you look at the world around us, when something happens, there is this outcry for justice. I remember a few years ago there was a crime that had been committed. The eventual sentence that he received was not very severe. And there are so many people calling out, there’s got to be justice for this.

Or when we see injustice in the world, people will call out loudly, come on, there’s got to be justice. This has to be set right. There’s something in us that knows there needs to be justice. And this is something that really, I think, sunk into me a few years ago. And also when this sunk into me, the hope of the gospel really became more real to me as well. When it sunk in, I was having a conversation with someone who was sharing with me in vivid detail how they were abused as a child and then going up into their adult years. And as they were sharing this with me, they were expressing such anger over this, over how they had been wronged and rightly, rightfully so. It was then, as they were saying this, that I really, in a new way, understood our need for justice. And I also understood the cross of Jesus.

Sometimes we may wonder, why do we have this ugly cross? Why do we talk about Jesus’s blood being shed? Like, it’s kind of intense, right? But it’s intense for a reason. It’s intense because when we’ve been wronged, it causes hurt. It causes pain. Sometimes people, when they’re wrong, it causes death. And so how do you deal with that? Well, in the cross, Jesus took all that sin, all of that pain, all that death on himself. On the cross, God condemned sin itself and he pointed there. And he didn’t say, sin is okay. He said, sin is terrible. It’s awful. It needs to die. And it died there with him.

All the justice for anything ever done wrong in this world was placed in Jesus. All the justice or anything you’ve ever done wrong, all the justice for anything anyone has ever done wrong to you was all placed on Jesus, and it was paid for. All the righteous anger that it deserves was sent there, was directed there to the cross and met so that now you and I can know that we are forgiven. And it’s not God just saying it’s okay. It’s not a big deal. He’s saying that wasn’t okay. But we can be okay because Jesus took it away. He paid for it. The justice has been met.

And in that same way, now we can look at others and we can look at things going on in this world, and we can say, I forgive you. Instead of saying, it’s okay, I forgive you is not saying it’s okay, it wasn’t a big deal. I forgive you is saying that wasn’t okay, but I don’t have to try to find the justice. I don’t have to hold this against you. God is taking care of it. And we may not experience the healing right away. We may not experience the renewal of friendship right away, necessarily, but because of Jesus, someday we can be okay because Jesus took it away. We can find real forgiveness because the cross brings real justice.