"If only I had been there, and seen Jesus and saw what he did myself, then it would be easy to trust him." Maybe you've had a thought like this before. The Gospels may surprise us. Those who saw him, lived with him, followed him in the flesh seem bewildered and struggle with trust and faith as much as any of us living two-thousand years later.

Those who get to payback or peacemakers. We have a choice on which we will be. In a lecture on forgiveness, and its limits, Elizabeth Bruenig described her two children fighting. They knew hitting each other was against the rules, punishable by the docking of allowance. But they also knew there was an exception: if you did not instigate or start the fight, that is, if you were acting in self-defense you were not considered the aggressor. Your allowance would remain.