When you think about it, the unexpected return of the bruised and battered recipient of your own victimization would normally give you cause to hold your breath and grit your teeth, in trembling anticipation of a justly deserved torrent of hostility and retribution, particularly if your victim now has the upper hand. In the modern world, it would probably mean a writ for false arrest and a huge compensation payout .if not imprisonment. But when that does not happen, when he comes instead in appeasement and love, generously forgiving, and in no way condemning then one can breath again and that experience is salvation and life. Forgiveness when it is experienced as salvation, liberation and relief, is necessarily a forgiveness that is mediated to us from one who by any worldly reckoning, could be expected to deal with us in precisely the opposite way, by kicking back in hostile revenge. When that treatment is not meted out to us, especially when we anticipate and expect it because we feel we deserve it, out experience is an experience of salvation.
Salvation comes only via one's own victim.
Only those whom we have wronged can forgive us in this immediate and poignant kind of way. I think we can identify them, like those in Jerusalem, as those who belong to two categories - active and passive. We do not have to look far for people whom we in one way or another judge and thus victimize - by making them our victims. These are those whom we write off or put down or think of as incompetent, those who challenge us and disturb our peace or just plain fools. There are plenty of those around - those whom we would not think it worth spending time with, whose social status or background or interests, after all, are not ours.