Go to any festival, carnival, or perhaps even amusement park and you will likely find an artist creating caricatures. Caricatures are unique in that nobody really expects them to be an accurate depiction of the subject being drawn or painted and yet in many ways, they do have characteristics that reflect their subject. Many years ago, I was talked into letting one of these pictures be made of me and the results, as you might respect, were both accurate and exaggerated.
The artist of my picture decided to focus on my need for glasses as the way to exaggerate my features. This feature became the focal point of the entire picture and all the rest of the detail really wasn’t that significant or distinctive. Just my glasses. They were huge in size and thickness and even the pupils of my eyes were rendered very small to emphasize my need for glasses.
When my family and friends saw this picture they laughed and said, “it looks just like you!” Really! That’s what I look like. We all had a good laugh and I put the picture away, probably in some closet never to think about it again.
To look at people in a one-dimensional way is really not the best way to see them and really is to make a caricature of them. What if you were to go through life being known for one thing and it alone? I suppose it would be fine if that one thing was a shining moment in our life. What if the one-dimension people choose to see in us was when we made a bad choice or said something inappropriate or failed in something. All of us have been there. We have all made bad choices. We have all said something inappropriate. We have all failed at something. But to have that be the thing that people think of when the think of us to the exclusion of all the rest that is true about us would be really difficult to bear and totally inaccurate.
As we focus on Forgiveness as a congregation, I was reminded that being unwilling to forgive a brother or sister when they sin against us will tempt us to instead view that person as a caricature. We emphasize the one thing they have messed up at and refuse to see them as a whole person. We make a caricature of them. Sadly the reason we often do this is to justify our lack of forgiveness and to further punish the other person. When we do this, we neuter the potential power of God’s forgiveness of us. Instead of God’s forgiveness transforming us, we become further entrenched in our positions and beliefs and even more unwilling or able to forgive and seek reconciliation.
The inability or lack of desire to forgive can appear in subtle yet damaging ways. Let us all be careful as we relate to one another to not see each other with the tunnel vision of a caricature but rather see our fellow brother or sister in Christ as they really are: a sinner saved by God’s grace.
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