“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower door in the processing center at Ravensbrück. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.”
Corrie Ten Boom in her memoir, The Hiding Place
Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian during the Second World War. Motivated by their deep Christian conviction, she and her family joined the resistance and built a secret hiding place in their home to save the Jews from the Nazis. However, they were betrayed by a Dutch informant and arrested by the Gestapo. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp where Betsie eventually died.
After the war, Corrie came face-to-face with her ex-jailer who had stepped forward after one Sunday service to shake her hand—she had often preached Christ’s forgiveness—and she found herself unable to forgive him. She wrote, “His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.”
While this man had become a Christian and was joyously grateful for Corrie’s message of Christ’s forgiveness and cleansing of his sins, he did not explicitly ask for her forgiveness for the unspeakable things he did to her and Betsie, together with countless others.
Offering forgiveness to those who have hurt us deeply is one of the most difficult things a Christian will face. Just like Corrie who knew that Jesus Christ had died even for her ex-jailer, that God’s forgiveness is for all who repent and believe in the Son, we may know our need to forgive others, we may even want to forgive, but we tried and tried and found ourselves unable to do so.
We simply could not will away the hurt we still feel. I am sure many among us have faced or are struggling with this, me included. What are we to do?
We yearn justice for the harm done to us—and that impulse is good and right in itself. God’s people is recorded throughout the Bible to cry out for justice (Exo 3:7-9; Ps 28:1-2; Hab 1:2; Rev 6:10). We long also for some sense of closure or be assured that there is some greater meaning in our life story because of the wrong we suffered—and again, those are not wrong in and of themselves. We hope to see ourselves standing tall with Joseph in saying, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen 50:20).
While Joseph rightfully called out the evil and injustice he suffered at the hands of his brothers for what it was, he was not justifying the ends by their means. Rather, he was simply acknowledging and trusting the sovereignty of God in the entire tapestry of things and choosing not to take vengeance into his own hands (Rom 12:19).
Let us trust that God will bring it about in his own time. There is a possibility that we may not experience that justice in the span of our earthly lives. Sometimes, we get to hear the apology we are holding out for, but oftentimes we don’t. People move on with their lives as though they have forgotten what they did to us. Or they may even pass away without ever acknowledging it. Realistically speaking, it is also rare to find any kind of retrospective meaning for the hurts we experienced. To forgive, we must trust that God, who is good, is at work for our good, even if it is and remains incomprehensible to us till the very end. This does not mean that the matter is ultimately unresolved but that we cannot see it to the end in this lifetime.
It may be helpful to differentiate forgiveness from a feeling we associate with forgiveness. Forgiving is not forgetting; forgiving someone does not mean that we will feel as if the hurt had never happened. It may sometimes be the case but more often than not, forgiveness is a difficult choice we repeat over and over. At those times, we can pray, “Lord, I am again remembering all the hurts he did to me. I am again feeling angry and indignant. Help me forgive.”
Even as we cannot undo what we have suffered, we can prevent those same things from happening to others; even as we carry our hurts, we can be the consoling presence for those who suffered the same. In this way, we can be sanctified by our suffering and steward our pain and not be consumed or wholly defeated by it.
May we again and again pray and experience the forgiveness of Christ through us as Corrie did:
“I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
