Can You Do This?
Uncle Iroh's forgiveness of Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender
“The ones who love us least are the ones we’d die to please.”
Paul Westerberg
Uncle Iroh gave his nephew every opportunity imaginable to be a better man—and all Zuko ever did was blow it. Raised and then cast out by a cruel father, Zuko carries with him extraordinary insecurity and shame. Even though Iroh loved him for who he was, Zuko would have done anything…disgraced himself ten times over…to win his father’s approval. Iroh knows that Zuko is wounded, even when Zuko betrays his loving uncle and sees him carted off to prison as part of a gambit to please his father.
I think about their relationship often….Zuko’s neededness and Iroh’s grace.
When Zuko finally sees the light, he sneaks into Uncle Iroh’s quarters and kneels behind him. Watch.
We need forgiveness like daylilies need the sun, and often the thing stopping us from seeking it out is fear. You game out what they’ll say—you go over the conversation in your head and weigh if it’s worth it—and all too many times, slink back into the darkness to wait longer.
On the other end of the equation, where Iroh sits, is a model of the truly clean slate. A fast embrace. No revisiting what happened. Grace. Relief that Zuko was out of the forest after years of wandering in pain.
Something that comes up often in Stoicism is how alike we all are, and using that fact as a basis for forgiveness and grace given in good faith. “None of them can harm or infect me with immorality, nor can I become angry with someone related to me. Because we were born to work together,” says Marcus Aurelius. Cooperation is their goal, and our sameness is the axiom on which it rests.
In Seneca’s On Anger, which addresses forgiveness in the strongest terms as part of an alternative to the vengeful life, he says, “The man who nurses resentment is poisoning himself to punish someone else. “How much better to heal injuries than to avenge them.”
Stoics and Christians approach the reason for grace from different angles, and the distinction matters quite a bit. Stoic forgiveness is fundamentally about your own inner freedom—sort of how people say, “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” You forgive because it’s good for you. Not bad reasoning by any means, but….
Christian forgiveness is also about restoring a relationship and honoring the fact that someone else, Christ, paid the tab on this person’s debt already. You are not in a position to be the debtholder—you must free them, as you were freed.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”Jeremiah 31:34
“Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” asks Peter to Christ. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”
This is the way.