What Does Forgiveness Look Like?
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009Imagine this scene from a recent courtroom trial in South Africa:
A frail black woman stands slowly to her feet. She is something over 70
years of age. Facing her from across the room are several white
security police officers, one of whom, Mr. van der Broek, has just been
tried and found implicated in the murders of both the woman’s son and
her husband some years before.
It was indeed Mr. van der Broek, it has now been established, who
had come to the woman’s home a number of years back, taken her son, shot
him at point-blank range and then burned the young man’s body on a fire
while he and his officers partied nearby.
Several years later, van der Broek and his cohorts had returned
to take away her husband as well. For many months she heard nothing of
his whereabouts. Then, almost two years after her husband’s
disappearance, van der Broek came back to fetch the woman herself. How
vividly she remembers that evening, going to a place beside a river
where she was shown her husband, bound and beaten, but still strong in
spirit, lying on a pile of wood. The last words she heard from his lips
as the officers poured gasoline over his body and set him aflame were,
“Father, forgive them.”
And now the woman stands in the courtroom and listens to the
confessions offered by Mr. van der Broek. A member of South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission turns to her and asks, “So what do
you want? How should justice be done to this man who has so brutally
destroyed your family?”
“I want three things,” begins the old woman, calmly, but
confidently. ”I want first to be taken to the place where my husband’s
body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a
decent burial.”
She pauses, then continues. ”My husband and son were my only
family. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. van der Broek to become my
son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend
a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have
remaining within me.”
“And finally,” she says, “I want a third thing. I would like Mr.
van der Broek to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus
Christ died to forgive. This was also the wish of my husband. And so,
I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the
courtroom so that I can take Mr. van der Broek in my arms, embrace him
and let him know that he is truly forgiven.”
As the court assistants come to lead the elderly woman across the
room, Mr. van der Broek, overwhelmed by what he has just heard, faints.
And as he does, those in the courtroom, friends, family, neighbors-all
victims of decades of oppression and injustice-begin to sing, softly,
but assuredly, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch
like me.”
God is good!
