Of his many famous characters, Miss Havisham is among Charles Dickens’ most vivid. The chief antagonist of his 1861 Great Expectations, she’s compellingly repulsive. We also find her vaguely familiar: like the rest of us, she’s a victim. What’s unsettling about Miss Havisham is that she’s made victimhood her identity.
Consider the ghastly interior of Satis House, her home that ironically reeks of dissatisfaction. Here blinds are drawn, rooms are dark, and all clocks are fixed at twenty past nine– the moment, on the morning of her wedding, that Miss Havisham learned she’d been jilted. Her groom had wooed her in order to rob her, and in the twenty-five years since, she’s defined herself by this loss. She wheels around the darkened house in her now tattered and yellowed wedding gown, overlooking what appalls every guest: the wedding feast decayed in the dining room, shrouded in webs and attended by scurrying spiders. She’s made her life a mausoleum of her victimhood.
In advance of meeting her, Dickens’ protagonist has great expectations of Miss Havisham: the spinster’s money, social status, and– he hopes– personal regard for him could be the means by which she helps to advance the suffering, orphaned hero. But these hopes aren’t met. Pip is instead dismayed to realize that, far from helping him, Miss Havisham plans him to be a tool of revenge. She has reared her adopted daughter Estella with the express intent of enticing young men only to reject them, and Pip is her first victim.
Miss Havisham is a character who was inarguably victimized. She also stands as tacit warning against creating an identity based on that victimhood, a status always destructive to the very person who was victimized in the first place.
In a 2020 article, Scott Barry Kaufmann summarized what he terms “the mindset of victimhood,” which is chiefly characterized by that identity: an abiding sense of the self as victim. It’s a crippling state in which the affected individual fixates on harm done to her and what caused that harm. These consume her such that she fails to (or can’t) think past them to possible solutions or healing. Instead she sees herself as at the mercy of fate, luck, or the whims– kind or unkind– of others. In these ways, the initial victimization arrests development.
At the same time, the mindset also harms the person’s relationships. Obsessed with her own suffering, she persistently seeks that it be acknowledged and becomes blind to the suffering of others. Perhaps due to the forced vulnerability of her initial victimization, she adopts a posture of self-protection. In this, she refuses to acknowledge her own failings and instead projects her negative impulses and behaviors onto others whom she views as threatening. Kaufmann calls this a kind of “moral elitism,” in which the victimhood mindset sees itself as “persecuted, vulnerable, and morally superior.”
Ultimately, the victimhood identity is stuck in what happened to her, forcing her life, perceptions, and relationships through the sieve of her pain. She’s bound to her suffering, which damages her relationships and radically curtails her capacity for growth. The initial harm has become what John Webster might call “an unresolved evil.”
The Church is best situated to answer this evil, first in offering compassion: we worship the God who identifies himself as compassionate (Exodus 34, Psalm 103) and who calls his followers to be the same (Matthew 7:12, Col. 3:12). One of Jesus’ most famous parables– that of the Good Samaritan– is famous for exemplary, surprising, and rich compassion.
But our call isn’t just for obedience to a holy exemplar. We’re called to compassion by one who endured victimhood for our sake. It’s from this ground of Christ’s suffering that the Church must call victims, through compassion, to healing.
Perhaps the most clear and direct answer is the pursuit of justice. And certainly justice– which brings acknowledgement of wrong done and harm suffered– should help to bring about healing. But not all justice can or will be meted out in this life, and it can’t– in this life– always satisfy. Consider the mother whose son is murdered. Even a life-sentence won’t necessarily relieve the trauma of her loss– or her sense of victimhood. Is it possible that, absent immediate justice, we can be more than conquerors?
Christ’s passion offers precisely what we need. For here Christ is a victim, suffering cruelly at the hands of others. In this way, he shares our experience of victimhood in the first sense; indeed, he more than shares it, because he takes on himself every sin ever committed. But in the second sense– that of taking on a victimhood identity– Christ refuses to participate. Isaiah’s Suffering Servant proclaims that Christ “at one and the same time … bears the truth of Israel’s sin and is himself the divine instrument of its overcoming.” John Webster distinguishes this as “the particular form of his majesty: that he should give himself into the hands of the wicked, that he should become of no account, that he should be counted worthless.” But “he does not give himself up, and he does not give himself away.” In overcoming the lasting harm of victimhood, it’s the latter example of Christ that we must follow.
The gospels relate and Webster identifies manifold forms of victimhood in the passion, each of which is a debasement: contempt, betrayal, oppression in silence, and physical abuse that ultimately ends in murder. Betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, and abandoned by the disciples, Jesus endures his trial alone. Mark’s gospel highlights the absurd injustice of this scene: the chief priests and council try in vain to find adequate testimony against him. Even the false testimonies they convene ultimately contradict each other (Mark 14:56). Luke emphasizes the injustice, too. On his account, Pilate finds no reason to punish Jesus (Luke 23:4), and one of the crucified thieves also declares Christ's innocence (Luke 23:42).
Luke goes on to illustrate the contempt in Herod’s court, where the king and his soldiers dress Jesus in a robe and a crown and proceed to mock him (Luke 23:11). Yet in the derision and questioning– here and amidst the chief priests, scribes and those crucified with him, Christ is silent. In this, Webster points out, Jesus accepts his victimhood: “his silence is his holding back, the willed restraint in which voluntarily he takes on the office of sufferer, freely giving himself into the hands of his oppressors, literally letting them have their say.”
His victimhood reaches its apex at the cross, a death penalty whose collateral purpose was the victim’s abject humiliation. Fleming Rutledge writes that “crucifixion was specifically designed to be the ultimate insult to personal dignity, the last work in humiliating and dehumanizing treatment. Degradation was the whole point.”
It’s to all of this, says Webster, that Christ “gives himself.” And therefore in Christ, victims have the comfort we need– not merely by acknowledging our suffering, but by suffering himself and doing so to the utmost.
Yet while he gives himself to every aspect of victimhood, “he does not give himself away.” He clings to his identity as Son of the Father, an identity characterized by obedience: “The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him” (John 8:29). It’s this task of pleasing the Father that enables his suffering. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ first mention of his passion binds his identity to this obedience: “The reason the Father loves me is that I lay down my life– only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:17-18). He asserts that same authority on trial before Pilate, informing the prefect that his kingdom is greater than Rome. Jesus’ servants show restraint not because of Pilate’s power, but because Christ’s kingdom is of another place. And at the moment of his death, he continues to claim his Sonship and express his utter dependence on God: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
It’s impossible to extricate Christ’s identity as the Son from his obedience to the Father. He’s sent from the Father for the express purpose of his redemptive work. From his reliance on the Father throughout his ministry to his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus rests in the Father’s love. Peter underscores it this way: “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly”(1 Peter 2:23). It’s in his obedience unto death that he is triumphant, says Paul, “even death on a cross.”(Phil. 2:8). Through the wretchedness of “giving himself” in obedience to his victimhood, he becomes the victor, “high and lifted up, and … exalted”(Isaiah 52:13), “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11).
Rescue from the victim identity likewise rests in our identity as children of God. Where victimization wants to name us abused and humiliated, Christ offers us abundant life in which we’re conformed to his image with ever increasing glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). And just as Christ’s identity as Son is bound up in obedience to the Father, our identity is marked by our obedience to the Son. Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commands”(John 14:15). This simply means that we must “live as Jesus did” (1 John 2:6).
In terms of victimhood, the crux of this obedience comes at the moment of his crucifixion, when Jesus forgave his abusers (Luke 23:34). In this moment, Jesus didn't ask for justice or wait for repentance. Rather, he “entrusted himself to him who judges justly,” and showed mercy.
We’re called to follow him in this. Jesus commands that we forgive. The prayer he taught his disciples assumes it (Matthew 6:12), and at Peter’s question, he said we must forgive repeatedly (Matthew 18:21-22). It seems that, rather than hurting our offender, failure to forgive hurts us, causing division between God and the one who refuses to be merciful (Matthew 6:14-15).
To follow our Lord in this is no light thing. As Rutledge writes, “forgiveness is by no means as simple or expeditious as is often suggested; it is a complex and demanding matter,” one that shouldn’t “be discussed apart from the question of justice.” Perhaps it’s for this very reason that, when Christ commands our obedience in John 14, he follows it with the promise of help: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever– the Spirit of truth” (John 14:17). We cannot possibly forgive without confidently entrusting ourselves, as Jesus did, “to the one who judges justly.”
To forgive our victimizer is to participate in God’s redemptive work. Webster writes that Jesus suffered “others to do (evil against him) not out of weakness but because he bends even our wickedness to serve his purpose of reconciling us to himself.” The crucifixion was the attempt to annihilate Christ, but in that humiliation, God lifted him up and offers us reconciliation.
When we’re victimized, we’re humiliated. When we don’t forgive, we’re unwittingly complicit in our own degradation, extending the power of victimization and permitting it to do its deeper, lasting work. When instead, empowered by the Spirit, we extend forgiveness in the face of evil, we live as Jesus did: offering grace and mercy where they aren’t deserved. We’re released from the corrosive power of the harm done to us, and we thrive as children of God.