MIPodcast #181: What is Seventy Times Seven? Featuring Chad Ford and Guest Host Jeremy King

Jeremy King: Welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. Today we'll be discussing what C.S. Lewis calls the least popular of all the Christian virtues. It is a virtue we are to practice freely with both our friends and our enemies, perhaps especially our enemies. It is the Christian attribute of forgiveness. Our guest on the show today is Dr. Chad Ford. Dr. Ford is the author of Seventy Times Seven: Jesus's Path to Conflict Transformation. He is a professor who has taught peace building courses and workshops in classrooms around the world, including war torn Israel and Palestine. Dr. Ford served for 16 years as the director of Brigham Young University's Hawaii's McKay Center for Intercultural Understanding. He is a mediator, a peace builder, and a disciple of Jesus Christ. We approach today's discussion prayerfully with the shared hope that the Lord will consecrate this effort to the welfare of many souls, or at least one soul, and that you the listener will find your faith illuminated and strengthened. Welcome Dr. Chad Ford.

Chad Ford: Jeremy, thanks so much for having me here and starting with that great introduction.

King: Chad, I really want to dive into forgiveness today. Why it's so hard, why it's unpopular, and how we can better learn to forgive. But first, would you please tell us a little about your work and what inspired you to write a book about something so unpopular as forgiveness and conflict transformation?

Ford: Yeah, Jeremy. So, I have been a conflict mediator and educator at both BYU Hawaii and now at Utah State for the last 20 years. And I have been personally deeply influenced by Christian peace builders, whether that's Howard Thurman or John Paul Lederach or Martin Luther King and non-Christian peace builders that also employed Christian principles in their peace building, like Mahatma Gandhi, for example. And when I was a graduate student studying this, I was navigating two paths simultaneously, learning the academic research, best practices of conflict mediation, but also trying to develop myself a spiritual practice for it, because I found it was very difficult, if not impossible, to do both without doing both at the same time, right? So I felt like I had to both find within me a resource to do the work that I was trying to do and at the same time learn the skills that I needed to learn to be able to really help other people do it as well.

And so, it's been a real journey and most of my work frankly, has been leaning into the academic side of that, both as a professor and as a mediator working around the world, navigating that. But the last few years, especially as I began to focus on work in the United States, because so much of my work has been focused internationally, I keep coming back to the question about Jesus and what Jesus taught, what I've learned from my experiences following that practice and wanting to really have a conversation with Christians and non-Christians about what we might be able to learn from Jesus.

And I'm not the first person to have this conversation. I've learned from others who have had it, but I especially was interested in having it with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my faith tradition that I come from, where we've had recent counsel, even you might want to say a command from Russell Nelson to be peacemakers and to do that work. And what I find is that lots of people believe in peace, lots of people when they hear that call, it resonates with them. They see the conflict swirling around them. Many people feel stuck. But the tricky part is how do I do it? Right.

King: Mm-hmm.

Ford: Not whether I should do it or whether it's the right thing to do. Most people are agreeing on both of those points, but how do I do it?

And so writing Seventy Times Seven was meant to be motivational and inspirational, but mostly it was meant to give people very solid techniques in which they could navigate their own conflicts in their lives following the pattern that Jesus did so well.

King: Thank you. I'm wondering, why aren't we hearing more about peace building? We certainly hear a lot about conflict, but why does it seem that peace building isn't always spoken about or at the center of the discussion?

Ford: One of the first things that I get, Jeremy, almost every time that I'm talking to other people is, yeah, but, and then, you know, there's going to be a name, my husband, my teenager, my boss at work, my bishop, right, that my neighbor across the street that has a political sign in their yard that I just deeply disagree with, it won't work with them. And because it won't work with them, I have to look at conflict and thinking about how to protect myself or how to protect others and doing conflict well. And now look, I don't actually disagree with people about the idea of doing conflict well, I actually think we need to get better at doing conflict. But what I often find is that the tools that we use--either fighting or fleeing or running away from conflict--that's how we typically do conflict. Those aren't effective ways of doing conflict and so I think what happens is people don't have the skills. They also don't necessarily have a full vision of what peace might actually look like.

And then the final part, which I think is the hardest part and why I named the book Seventy TImes Seven, is I think Peter recognized really early on in Jesus's ministry, wait a minute, this stuff is really, really hard. In fact, Jesus, you might be going a little too far here, right? Do you not understand the situations that we're in?

King: Mm-hmm.

Ford: Or the sort of challenges and trials that we're facing, we need to put some limits on this stuff, right? Because what you're asking us to do frankly sounds irresponsible. It may sound a little dangerous. And I don't see the path forward where this is going to be effective. And that's why I centered the title of the book right there in that moment of the exchange, because I think Peter's all of us there. If you've really read the Sermon on the Mount and didn't have a reaction that was similar to Peter, I'm not sure you've actually read it carefully or literally, right? It is extremely hard what Jesus is asking us to do there.

And so when Jesus responds to Peter's suggestion, right, that maybe seven times might be a limit on the number of times that we forgive--and probably was having a deeper implication for lots of other things that Jesus was teaching in the Sermon to the Mount--when he says seventy times seven, what I don't hear is, I don't hear 490. What I hear Jesus is saying is, look, Peter, you don't understand. I am here to reconcile you to the Father, but I'm also here to reconcile us to each other. And we do it until it's done, right? As long as it takes, as hard as it is, we do it until it's done.

And I don't know about you, Jeremy, but that's scary to hear. Wait a minute, what are you talking about until it's done? Because right now it feels like it's never going to be done or it's going to take forever. Are you telling me that I have to love my enemy regardless of whether they love me back or see me back? Do I have to keep turning the other cheek even after I've warned them and been polite and kind and forgiving that I have to do it again and again? And if we take Jesus literally, and I think we should,

The answer is yeah.

King: Absolutely. I love this idea of forgiveness. I wanted to ask you as a mediator and a peace builder, how would you define forgiveness? You've had this long career doing these things. You've been involved in all kinds of conflict resolution. How has your understanding of forgiveness changed over time? And yeah, if you could define it for us, how do you think about forgiveness now?

Ford: It's a great question. I have gone just like you through probably lots of different definitions of it. But I really think that there was a turning point for me when I was in graduate school and was studying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. And that commission was led by a Christian, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who looked at 100 years of apartheid in South Africa, looked at the deep physical, economic, mental, spiritual cost of apartheid, especially towards blacks in South Africa, but also towards whites (it was the Afrikaner church that often justified this legal apartness and this mistreatment of black people in South Africa)--and came to a really difficult decision: What we could do now that we've gotten democracy, now that we've gotten political power, is reverse things now for the white people in South Africa, right? We can do to them exactly what they did to us. And in fact, there's multiple examples in Africa of post-colonization, those civil wars breaking out, and in certain cases, millions of people dying in the resulting wars.

Or we can reconcile.

And he had four concepts that he used, pulled them straight from the Psalms, Psalms 85, right? Truth, right? We can't reconcile without truth. We have to actually talk about what happened. We have to do it without justification. We're gonna have to do that really hard work.

Mercy or forgiveness, we're going to have to respond to the truth, not with anger, not with retaliation, but with mercy.

Justice--but not the sort of justice that destroys or punishes, but the sort of justice that rebuilds or reconnects people together.

And then we have to build new structures in place to keep this from ever happening again. And so there's this quote from Tutu that I love in forgiveness, because I think it really captures all of this. And we want to talk about a hard definition of, if forgiveness is hard, I'm about ready to make it a lot harder. When you hear Tutu say that this is, in his view, what forgiveness really is: “In the act of forgiveness, we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to make a new beginning on a course that will be different from the one that caused us the wrong. There is no future without forgiveness.”

And the thing that I love about that definition is, I'm removing the barrier between you and me, whatever the breach, whatever the sin, whatever it was that caused us harm in our relationship and caused it to break. When I forgive, I remove that barrier. And I open myself back up to a future, ongoing relationship with you.

And so, one of the questions I get all the time is, yeah, I forgive, but I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore. I forgive, but you're out of my life and I'm cutting you out of my life. And Tutu says, look, there's no future without forgiveness and the future really matters, right? It's what Jesus is talking about as well, right? There is no future in doing what we are continuing to do to each other, both as Jews, as the Jews, the Romans, you name it. There's no life in this. It's all a dead end. If we're going to have a future, the only path forward is to break down those barriers and reconcile. And then he does that between us and God, and then gives us the tools for us to do that with each other. And the question is, are we willing to use them?

King: Thank you. So we've been told that we need to forgive everyone. And that is hard doctrine. It's been said that forgiveness is nice and we like it until we actually have something to forgive. I wonder if you have any experience that you'd be willing to share from your travels, your working with so many different people that stands out as a great example of forgiveness.

Ford: You know, so many and so beautiful. And by the way, some of my own, right, as well. I don't know anybody that I've ever met in life that hasn't been hurt or hasn't been wronged and hasn't faced the real difficult decision of, do I hold onto this hurt? Do I hold onto this offense? Do I use it to continue to fuel my sadness, my rage, my anger, until they get the justice that they deserve, which is typically some sort of punitive type of justice, or do I open up my hand and do the hard work--and it is hard work--of reconciliation. Not just blind forgiveness, not just, hey, no matter what, here it goes, but the sort of forgiveness that says we're going to get back into relationship with each other and it's going to include some hard conversations and it's going to include me doing some very difficult things in response and it's going to require us trying to make each other whole again to the best that we can and it's going to require us to change our behavior towards each other in the future so that this isn't just repeating again and again and again.

And one of the places and sources that I drive, derive so much inspiration, Jeremy, is that I've been working with Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem, in the Middle East for 20 years right now. And in my mind, of the people that I've visited and worked with in my life, their justifications to not forgive, their justifications of pain and suffering and sorrow that they have are among the highest of any anybody that I've met, right? I sometimes come home from these trips and I'm like, why am I being so petty and holding this grudge against my teenager when these folks out there are forgiving much, much deeper sins in many ways.

And there's this young woman that… her name is Doha and she's Palestinian and there was an encounter that I had with her once. It may sound small, but it's one of the stories that always sticks with me when I think about this. We were bringing together young Palestinians, Israelis to play basketball together. And we had a camp and it was up in Tel Aviv, which is primarily Israeli folks at the time. And we were actually, our camp was in an outdoor park, and we had rented out several gyms and reserved them or several basketball courts and reserved them.

But on one court, there was a number of Israeli men who were playing basketball. And when we came up and politely told them that we had the court, they refused to vacate the court. After a while of being patient, we asked again. They said, no, we actually had to call the park security. The park security had to come down. There was an argument with them. But eventually the men stepped off the court so that we could play basketball.

But they didn't leave. They surrounded the court and began jeering and making fun of these 13 and 14-year-old girls who were playing basketball. And I had steam coming out of my ears at the time, Jeremy. I was so upset and angry and the dad in me wanting to protect these young people. At the same time, we kept going because we knew this is the reality. This is in some ways what these young people have to prepare for. And as the game went on, they were especially harsh towards the Palestinian girls. Every time they missed a shot, every time they had a turnover, every time they made a mistake, you would just hear the howls of laughter and jeering. And in Hebrew, saying really derogatory things to the girls, probably not fully understanding that actually many of those Palestinian girls also understood Hebrew at the time.

After the game was over, we huddled together, and I wanted to praise the girls for their composure, for their professionalism. But Doha wasn't in the circle. As I looked up, she was walking straight towards these men. And she went one by one, stuck out her hand and told each of them, thank you for letting us use your court. I know that I'm a visitor here in your community, but I really appreciate that you let us do this court. And one by man, these men couldn't even make eye contact with her at the time she went, but their hands went out and she shook their hands one by one.

And by the time she was done, tears were rolling down my eyes. The other children were watching in awe. And I asked Doha, what prompted you to do that? I had not instructed anybody to do that. We had not prepared anyone to do that. Like, what prompted you to do it? And like a miracle, she quoted, though she didn't know the quote from Bishop Tutu and said, “There's no future without forgiveness. There's no future for us. There's no future for them without forgiveness.” And it was one of those moments where I saw the power of grace, the power of forgiveness, the visible move towards the men who had been so vile to her before.

It got me really thinking about how hard this is and how important it is that we initiate grace, that forgiveness isn't something that we always have to do in response to contriteness, in response to a sense of remorse. That when we initiate grace, it's often the very trigger that starts the process of remorse within someone else.

King: That's a great story. Thank you for sharing that. It reminds me of a quote by Mahatma Gandhi who said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” I wonder if you could help us understand why is forgiveness seen as weak in some places?

Ford: I have this friend, she's a restorative justice practitioner in New Zealand. She's Maori. And if our listeners aren't familiar with restorative justice, these are people who are actually practicing these forgiveness tools inside prisons. And so they often represent the victim of a crime or the families of victims of the crime in really serious crimes, where maybe the victim has passed on and the person who has been incarcerated or put in prison because of the crimes that they have committed. In most penal spaces, what is going to happen is the punishment, is whatever you're sentenced to. The victim and the victimizer will not have any contact. There won't be any attempt at reconciliation. You committed a crime. You're punished. Your healing--if you're the victim--it comes from knowing that the person is locked away and was punished for the thing that they've done. And there are many people that are now seeing.

That those have really poor outcomes for both the victim and the victimizer, right? That if there isn't a sense of closure, a sense of forgiveness and truth and justice that comes, people are left with those scars and frankly, sometimes not even scars, they're open wounds that just continue to fester. But there's now a power imbalance that goes the other way, Jeremy, right? Like one person's in prison, they're clearly in the wrong, right? And are clearly suffering. The other person is visiting the person in prison. And you can imagine that the power imbalance now shifts, right? I'm free. I'm free to go what to do. You're bad. It's clear you're bad. You're in prison. You know, now apologize to me.

And so she came up with a really powerful question that she's able to ask both the victim and the victimized. She asked them both simultaneously, these two questions. Can you tell a story of a time when someone's really hurt you, and how it affected you? And believe it or not, even the victimizer has stories like that, of times that they've been hurt. And then she reverses the question, can you tell a time or a story about when you've hurt someone else? And what was that like? And it turns out one of the things that all of us as humans have in common is we've been hurt and we've hurt others. And then her question, it's so powerful, is: in each of those situations when you've been hurt and when you've hurt others, what did you need to be able to heal? What was it that helped you heal? And then what comes of that are very powerful discussions of human beings together in a room who have been hurt and who have hurt others, who need to heal both of them and are now trying to navigate what that process looks like where both of them can heal.

And the amazing things about restorative justice practices are the outcomes are incredible. There's been lots of academic research done on this. They're incredible for the victims and their ability to heal and move on and feel a sense of wholeness again, and incredible in the lack of recidivism that happens in prisoners. Going through this process, heals them in such a way that they are much less inclined to commit more crimes in the future. They are more likely to actually change their behaviors towards other people and they too heal. And I just hear Jesus' voice again and again, Peter, until it's until we are reconciled. This is the most important thing.

And so, we do even hard things like going into prisons and forgiving our enemies. We do even hard things. And I know for some people with this won't feel like hard, but if I'm in prison, I admit that I hurt someone. I take responsibility for the harm that I've caused, but I do it so that we can heal.

King: Thank you. I'd love to drill down into this idea of what we can expect from forgiveness. What can I expect and what shouldn't I expect?

Ford: Let's start with what we shouldn't expect because I actually think that those are sometimes bigger barriers that are there. I have so many people and really my first book, Dangerous Love was on this point, right? Say, I will do it when they do it first, right? Like I expect that because of the way that I see the conflict and how I was mistreated in it, that it's their obligation, it's their responsibility to make the first move, and until they do, I'm not doing anything. The problem is, and I can tell you this because I hear both sides of this as a mediator all the time, the other party feels exactly the same way. And you may feel it's ridiculous. No, it's really clear who started it. It's really clear who was hurt more from that. But I've actually found that it's actually not clear to the other side about it. We both have habits of telling stories about our pain, about our mistreatment, that privilege our pain, that privilege our mistreatment, that privilege our understanding of what happened. we're often blind to what's happening on the other side.

I tell a story in Seventy Times Seven about a married couple who are on the precipice of divorce, that both are telling stories, conflict stories to themselves, that squarely place the blame on the other person and therefore they're waiting for the other person to change. And because the other person won't change, it's actually more evidence to them that this is actually a marriage that isn't going to work. But when they start to reverse the question, they find actually quite quickly and quite deeply that they're part of a pattern in conflict, that maybe they didn't start it, but there are things that they are doing that are fueling it, that are contributing to it. And when they change those things, it creates an environment for reconciliation.

And so the biggest thing I say to not expect is that you can sit back and the other person is going to do the heavy lifting for you. They're waiting for you to do the heavy lifting. And at some point, there's two options. No one does it. And it just keeps getting deeper and heavier and heavier. Or you choose to do it.

Ford: And with that will come a Seventy Times Seven level of patience sometimes because the other thing that you can expect is just because I reach out, just because I open up my arms to the other person, even when I actually think that I'm more in the right than they are, and even when I feel like I'm doing the Jesus thing here and they're not, that they're immediately going to come running into your arms, right? People who are in conflict patterns lack trust a lot of times. They're skeptical when they see the other side reach out or ask for forgiveness. And sometimes they're going to test you by even coming back and saying, well, that's nice, Jeremy, but I don't think you worded that apology correctly. Or I don't think you took full responsibility for what you've done. Or why did that take you so, so long? Or what's your angle here? What are you trying to get from me? They're actually trying to trigger it back into a conflict dynamic. And you're going to have to be the one that says, OK, that's a slap on the cheek. I just apologized first. That's a slap on the cheek. They're still hurting. Here's the other one.

What can you expect? Two things. Forgiveness doesn't have to be two way. The very act of forgiving someone, the very act of removing the barriers between you and them is healing. It changes our hearts and the way that we see others, even when they don't respond the way that we'd hoped they would or that we wish they would. The very act of offering it is redeeming and it's helpful. The second thing that, well, just one other thing that I think that you can expect is that it's a process. Peace to me is not a noun, it's a verb. Reconciliation, restoration, not nouns, they're verbs. We are constantly reconciling. We are constantly restoring. We are constantly peace-ing. This will not be a one-time event. It will take time and energy. And even when you get to a good place, it's likely to happen again because we're human beings.

And so I have to enter this mindset of reconciliation in that it's not a destination. It's not a one-time thing that I get to. It's a way of life. It's a way of interacting with my brothers and sisters and that it's going to be ongoing.

King: I love that. And I especially love that you mention how this is not necessarily a two-way street and that forgiveness offers us a path to healing, regardless of how the victimizer may be acting.

There's a quote often attributed to Buddha, you've probably heard this one, he says, holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. And you've spoken a little about this. Why is it so hard, Chad, to let go of that anger? Why do we want to hold on to anger?

Ford: It's complicated question and my guess is Jeremy that it's not the same answer for every person. I think there are multiple reasons that I might want to hold on to it. I think the most powerful one and frankly the hardest one to hear is because it gives me justification for the way that I'm treating and thinking about others. Whenever I think about someone and I think about their offenses towards me, or I think about their weaknesses or their flaws, it gives me permission and justification not to love them the same way that I love other people. It gives me permission to treat them differently than I might treat another person, whether that's on an online forum or whether that's in my family, right, or in my community. And we like to think of ourselves as moral people, and so we often need a justification when we act in immoral ways, right? So when I am mistreating someone else, I need powerful justifications which tell me it's okay in this particular setting.

Part of the book, one of the chapters I write is about the early Latter-day Saints in section 98 and 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants when they are facing significant conflict in Missouri. And as Joseph Smith and an army are marching towards Missouri to liberate and protect the members of the church that live there, he receives a revelation in section 98. And what's so interesting to me about this is it's one of the greatest of LDS scriptures that exist. It really walks through in detail, in some ways in detail that doesn't really even exist in the Bible or the Book of Mormon, the method by which we respond to mistreatment and we respond to hate. And the Lord lays out in great specificity, sometimes even including numbers, what the Latter-day Saints are going to do. But there's just this one chapter, or sorry, one verse where he says, look, if you've done all of this and they still haven't reconciled, then you're justified to return their mistreatment with mistreatment. But then interestingly enough, after that the Lord says, however, if you continue to respond with love and peace, I will be pleased and you will be more blessed.

But it's so interesting when people read that scripture, that sometimes the only thing that they see is that one verse that says, right here, it says that I'm justified. It says right here that I can respond this way without understanding that the whole section, section 98, was about how to become sanctified, how to become reconciled, not about how to go to war, but actually how to not go to war, how to actually make peace with our enemies. That's the entire thrust of the entire section. But we often read in it, here's the moment where it says that I can go to war. So I think that that's going on for a lot of people.

I think the other thing that's going on for people, Jeremy, is a sort of reverse thing where I feel like I deserve the mistreatment. I have told a story about myself, of being unworthy, of being unlovable, of being the sort of person that deserves whatever mistreatment comes my way. And when the mistreatment comes, my reaction to it is, well, I have that coming, or I don't blame them, right? I don't love myself either.

It's heartbreaking, but I see it so often. And I see it with victims of abuse who justify their own abuse again and again and again, who justify their own unworthiness in different ways. And so, for some people, it's love of neighbor that they're lacking. It's a deep misunderstanding of how Jesus actually sees our enemies and how much He has died and bled from every pore for them exactly the same way that he has for us, that they too are part of the plan and that they too are here to find the same sort of redemption that we are. And then for some of us, and I fall in this category sometimes, Jeremy, I can be very merciful to other people, but the person who doesn't deserve mercy or the person that the atonement doesn't apply to is me.

King: Wow, you've hit on so many points there that I think are worth exploring. In particular, you seem to have alluded to earlier about wanting to hit the 490, right? You talked about the verse in Doctrine and Covenants about now you're justified, and this attitude of wanting to get to the point where I don't have to take it anymore, right? I've taken it, I hit my 490, now here we go.

But then you went on to say that there is something better that if we're willing to always move forward in a spirit of love and forgiveness, that there's something better waiting for us.

So, you touched also on forgiving ourselves. I wonder if there's anything more you might want to say about that.

Ford: I've struggled a lot with this concept of loving myself or forgiving myself, depending on how you wanna frame it. Another way that I hear it framed sometimes, Jeremy, is that I'm not enough, right? There's some bad bone in me, right? That keeps me from God's grace or others for that part.

King: Yeah.

Ford: I think it comes down to, I believe Jesus when he says that he loves me? Did the leper believe Jesus when he said that he loved them? Did the adulteress believe Jesus when he showed love and forgiveness towards them?

My unbelief in Jesus can be that I don't think Jesus' way is right towards enemies or I just don't believe that it's going to work that way. But the unbelief can also go in the other direction. And there's this line, we know it well from the New Testament, when this man brings his child to be healed by Jesus and Jesus asks him whether he believes and he says that he does, but then really quickly after that he says, help me in my unbelief. And I have often found that prayer going up from me.

And so one of the things that I find that can be really helpful, and it sounds so simple, is to get on my knees and ask Jesus, ask Heavenly Father at times, do you love me? Can you help me? I don't feel that right now. I feel like I've messed up. I'm ashamed. I feel like I've disappointed you again and again. And I can't feel it, not because it's not there, but because I've actually built some sort of barrier or wall that's blocking me from feeling it because it's an uncomfortable thing to feel in those moments.

And I've seen reconciliation happen in one particular case and something I was mediating between a woman who had been abused and her father who had done the abuse and had denied it for years, had made her feel crazy and what have you. And she was angry by that and felt estranged. But she asked if I would be there to help her in a moment where she wanted to have another conversation with her father. And when she started it, by telling her father how much she loved him and how grateful she was for the good things that he had done in her life while still at the same time acknowledging, and you hurt me. And this is how it's hurt and how it's affected me, but I love you. I saw the father quaking, shaking and kept telling her no, kept trying to cut her to cut off. Like actually couldn't hear the words that I love you. And she kept inching closer and closer to him. And it was like he was seeing a ghost. I mean, the reaction to this was so powerful and so strong.

And then when they finally embraced--the weeping and the sorrow and the bellowing and the pain that came out of this man, knowing that he had hurt this angel of a human being, knowing that he had actually hurt somebody who had this level of capacity to forgive and to love. I know lots of different definitions of hell, but I had to feel like in that moment he was in it, right in this moment, recognizing maybe for the first time the real humanity of the person that he had hurt, but needed more than anything now to actually to feel that love.

If that's what you're struggling with right now, and I know so many people are right now, my conflict isn't between other people, it's between me, it's between God. I just would ask you two things, get on your knees and ask.

I have found as hard as that answer is for me to hear that every time that I've done it, the answer has come. And the second thing is a lot of us have an inner voice in our head that sometimes speaks really poorly of others. We don't always vocalize it, but it speaks poorly of others. But some of us have an inner voice that speaks really poorly about ourselves. And we hear it a lot. And every mistake that we make, every time we say something, that voice gets loud in our head. To ask ourself, is that the voice of God speaking to me right now? Is that the voice of Jesus in my head? And if it's not, why would I listen to it?

King: Chad, you've seen these incredible successes. You've been a witness to both sides of this, right? The failures, you've seen the miracles, you've seen the anger. It seems to me as I've listened to you that you've experienced so much across such a wide spectrum. What has that done to your soul to be a part of all of that?

Ford: You know, I've been thinking a lot about Jesus in Gethsemane this week. We're recording this on Holy Week. Those last three days of Jesus's life to me are the most remarkable of days. It actually starts with him raising Lazarus from the dead, which is beyond my comprehension. But the people that saw it, if they were doubting whether Jesus was the Messiah or not before, it led to a furor of belief. As he is entering Jerusalem, he knows on one hand, this is the largest my ministry has ever been. This is the height of popularity. People are thronging the streets with palms, shouting Hosanna, which literally means save us, right towards him. And as he's trying to describe to his disciples what's about to happen in the next three days, they cannot comprehend it. They can't understand this is the moment. Jesus is coming to take Jerusalem, right? The Messiah has come.

If you wanted a military Messiah, this was the moment that people were behind him. They were cheering. The religious authorities at the time are freaked out by it. They're actually telling his apostles to calm the crowd down. They're getting too rowdy. And Jesus responds by saying, even the very stones will cry out, right, if you tell them to stop.

And there's this simultaneous thing that's happening, something amazing, something beautiful, something joyful is about to happen here, but Jesus is weeping. The weight of it is crushing him simultaneously as he gets to the upper room where he asks his disciples to prepare for the Passover, they're bickering about who gets to sit where next to each other, right? And I have to wonder with Jesus knowing there's just hours left in his mortal ministry, with the 12 people that were closest to me here, they don't get it. They still don't get it. Three years with me and they still don't get it. So, he washes their feet and then tells them four times, four times, Jeremy, as I have loved you, love one another by this, so people know you're my disciples.

It's like he's distilling it down to like a kindergarten level. Okay, I'm gonna take my whole ministry and I'm just gonna repeat one thing to you over and over again because I'm about ready to leave. Love each other. If you want people to recognize me in you, this is what you're gonna do. They still don't get it. As Jesus is leaving and goes to the Gethsemane and he's asking them to watch and stay with him through the night as he's concerned, rightfully so, about what's going to happen there.

In a place that literally translates into olive press, where olives are violently squished and the oil seeps out of them and it's blood red, Jesus is going through the olive press right now and they fall asleep, not understanding the sort of importance or the agony that he's going through. As he leaves, he's arrested and Peter pulls out a sword and chops off the ear and I'm sure Jesus had to look at Peter and say, Peter, like, have you learned nothing? Right? And he has to heal the ear until Peter again, you you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Peter is gonna deny him. Three times after that, the crowd is going to choose him over Barabbas.

And Judas, one of his closest disciples, is going to hang himself in part out of, and we don't often talk about this, but in part out of remorse for what has happened to Jesus. And it's clear from the scriptures, he didn't quite understand what was gonna be the outcome of his actions. On the cross, people are gonna be gambling for his belongings, and he is still teaching.

He is still praying to the Father that they forgive them because they don't know what they've done. And then he goes after that, after he's resurrected, to apostles who are locked in the room, locked from the inside, terrified about what's going to happen. And even after they meet a resurrected Jesus, even after he shows them the nail prints in his hands and in his feet, they still decide to give up the ministry and go back to Galilee and fish. And Jesus has to come again to them on the seashore and call them again and ask Peter a question that I know is annoying to Peter. Do these fish matter more? Do you love these fish more than you love me? Peter, feed my lambs. Teach them to love one another.

I think about it a lot because what Peter does next is amazing. And the apostles, they get it. They drop their nets for the last time. They literally go out and change the world. They conquer Rome peacefully, nonviolently through teaching a God of love. They finally get it.

And I think all the time as a mediator, I know 1 % of that. The other 99 % I can't comprehend, but I know what it feels like to be with people who are struggling and feel lost and feel pain. I know the desires to help them find joy and happiness and healing. I know the agony of hearing their stories of pain and suffering. I know the frustration when they can't get there
at times and it just doesn't fall short. They just aren't ready to forgive. I know the joy of embrace and have seen people do it every time. And then I go home, Jeremy, and I wrestle with all this stuff inside myself at the end. One of the lessons from Jesus, again, it comes from Bishop Tutu, and I wanna get this quote right, because I think it's a really important quote. He's through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He's talking about the pain and suffering, the forgiveness, the reconciliation that's going on inside. And he says this about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Jesus knows suffering from the inside and is overcoming, not by waving a magic wand, but by going through the annihilation, the destruction, the pain, the anguish of a death as excruciating as the crucifixion. That seems to be the pattern of true greatness that we have to undergo to be truly creative. Religion is what you do with suffering, yours and that of others. And to me, this is, this is what Jesus has taught me, what mediation has taught me. My religion is what I do without suffering. It's not about avoiding conflict. It's about what I do with the conflict. It's not about avoiding pain. It's what I do with that pain and that suffering because we're meant to be reconciled together as brothers and sisters. And with that will come suffering. With that will come pain. The only question is what I do with it.

And Jesus gave us the perfect example of exactly what to do.

King: Thank you for that moving account of the final week of the Savior's life. As I was listening to you, it occurred to me this deep irony, even in the midst of Christ overcoming death and truly claiming the victory through the atonement, what a failure it must have looked like to so many around him, right, who had other expectations, who saw things differently and who, like you said, at the height of his ministry, the height of his power, here he is being put to death. And what a terrible failure it must have felt like.

And it occurred to me how very similar that may be to how we perceive forgiveness in our own lives and in the lives of others. And it may look to us, we may see someone who has forgiven something terrible and it may look to us like, what a failure. They're weak, but they know, right? Just like Christ knew in his heart that the ultimate victory was being completed, was being accomplished there.

 Thank you so much for sharing that.

Ford: Jeremy, that's a beautiful point. I really love that, right? We all as Christians recognize today the victory that was Gethsemane, that was Calvary, that was the empty tomb. We now celebrate it as victory, but you're absolutely right that I don't think the apostles saw it that way in the moment. that his followers don't see it that way. And we're stuck sometimes not seeing it that way as well. And we need to see it that way. There is victory in reconciliation. There is victory in restoration. The only type of victory that can really save us.

King: Absolutely. Chad, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today.