On Forgiveness

IN ABOUT AN HOUR of watching television today, I witnessed such tragedy that I actually wept for someone I don’t even know.  During a televised trial, a fifteen-year-old boy was sentenced to 50 years in prison because a year and a half ago he shot two fellow students to death and wounded 13 others at his school.  I didn’t cry because he was sentenced to an entire lifetime behind bar (although that’s reason for tears) but because just before the sentencing, the judge allowed anyone who had suffered damages stemming from this tragic incident to speak before the court.  I heard the testimony of students and parents who had been affected by this senseless act of violence.

A father enumerated a litany of injustices that had occurred within his own family of five children when the oldest son had been wounded—the nightmares of the smaller children, the trauma-counseling costs, the medical bills, the failing mortgage, the fear.

A young woman who had been wounded read a short story she had written, describing the continual fear and violation of privacy that had taken place in her life—the continual haunting replay of that day’s horrors, the living always with the reality that anywhere, by anyone, you could be killed.

The TV cameras panned the courtroom to the defendant, head bowed, unable to look up.  His appearance was that of someone carrying a burden impossible to bear.  Because he was. 

I tried to get into his mind during those moments in the courtroom, hearing detail by detail the trauma—still ongoing—that he had placed on so many individual young lives and on so many families.  How could he bear it?  How could anyone bear it?

And then a final victim took the stand, a burly high school student who explained that three bullets had entered his body.  Two had been removed, but one was still there, lodged in his spine because the doctors feared that to remove it might paralyze him from the waist down.  This young man described his trauma graphically.  He also noted that he had had to change the career dreams of his life as a result. He ended his testimony by saying:  “But I forgive him.”

And that’s when I cried—because I’m sure that those are the only words that could make a difference in the perpetrator’s life at this time.  And yet how could he bear to hear them?  He doesn’t deserve forgiveness—he intended, on that day, to kill, in cold blood, whoever came within range.

But aren’t we all in his situation?  Which of us has not hurt—in either small or egregious ways—another human being?  And we have carried the memory of that burden in our own consciences.  Oftentimes, we would have wanted forgiveness from the one we offended, yet we would find it painful to hear those words of forgiveness. 

And yet, we have heard those words—from the Cross—when we least expected it:  “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”  When we come right down to it, for each one of us, they are the only words that really matter for us.  These are the words that determined our ultimate destiny.  Whether we reflect on it—ever, occasionally, every day, or with every sin—we need those words from Jesus.  Without them, like the fifteen-year-old defendant, we face—not a lifetime—but an eternity in prison.

--Contributed by AJS