Kirsten Powers: Christians forgive the unspeakable
Forgiveness shown by the Charleston victims' families staggers the world.
When Christians are in the news, it's usually because they have done something wrong — they've gotten on the wrong side of a culture war or cheated on their wife, or worse. What the world rarely gets to see is the powerful grace that flows from a deep faith predicated on the belief that we are all sinners in need of forgiveness.
The family members of those slain at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church bore witness to this central tenet of Christianity last week as the nation gasped in awe. "I forgive you," one after another told the stone-faced and unrepentant alleged killer, Dylann Roof, at his bond hearing.
Tweeting about the incredible scene, National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke noted, "I am a non-Christian, and I must say: This is a remarkable advertisement for Christianity." Thankfully, the circumstances requiring forgiveness don't always involve the murder of a loved one. But sometimes they do.
This month, USA TODAY reported an unlikely friendship between Pastor Phillip Robinson and the man who murdered his father. After forgiving the killer — who had repented for the crime — Robinson testified on his behalf to win his release from prison and later visited him at his home, where they hugged and prayed together.
Bishop Angaelos, who heads the the United Kingdom's Coptic Orthodox Church, responded to the beheadings of Coptic Christians in Libya with a call for the Islamic State terrorists to be "prayed for and forgiven." This echoed the comments of an Iraqi Christian refugee who was asked by an interviewer how she would retaliate against the ISIL militants who drove her from her village. The young girl said simply that she wanted God to forgive them.
Laura Waters Hinson, the director of "As We Forgive" — an award-winning documentary about forgiveness and reconciliation after the Rwandan genocide — was witness to the role Christianity can play when radical forgiveness is required. Hinson chronicled the astonishing relationships borne of forgiveness after Rwandans began confessing to genocide crimes and were released into society. A woman who had lost her sister and niece forgave the man who had viciously clubbed them to death. He ended up building a house for her, and became her neighbor and friend. An Anglican bishop forgave the people who had skinned his niece alive, and became a leader in the reconciliation process.
"The only way they could forgive is to say 'this person who killed is also God's child, and I am not the one to judge them," Hinson told me. "They could give up their anger because they felt it was God's to handle. They felt they had been forgiven by God, so they were called to forgive this person. They all talked about the incredible release that comes from forgiveness."
When Gary Ridgway, known as "the Green River killer" (he was convicted of 48 murders) faced the father of a 16-year-old victim he heard the unthinkable: "I forgive you for what you have done," the grief-stricken father told him. "You've made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and what God says to do, and that is to forgive. And he doesn't say to forgive certain people; he says to forgive all. So you are forgiven, sir." Ridgway broke down crying.
It's the barbarism of these murders that place these acts of forgiveness — particularly when repentance is absent — in such stark relief. A Las Vegas man, Arturo Martinez-Sanchez, cited his Christian faith in 2012 when he forgave the man who had raped and murdered his wife and 10-year-old daughter and beat Sanchez within an inch of his life with a hammer as his two young sons looked on. When a reporter asked what he would say to the murderer if he could, Martinez-Sanchez replied, "I would say, 'I forgive you.' If he kissed me on the cheek, I would kiss him back."
Just like Jesus.
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