Forgiveness

This past weekend I watched the movie In My Country (also known as The Country of My Skull) starring Samuel L. Jackson (A Time to Kill as well as many other movies) and Juliette Binoche (The English Patient and Chocolat). In this movie, she plays an Afrikaner writer, and he, a writer for the Washington Post. Both have been asked to cover the Reconciliation talks after the collapse of Apartheid. Obviously, they go into it with very different attitudes. She feels that it is important to find out exactly what abuses occurred under Apartheid, but he feels that it is important to bring the Afrikaners to justice, and feels that every Afrikaner has a share of the blame for what happened. She, and some other locals, try to explain to him the concept of Ubuntu. I thought Ubuntu was a Linux operating system, but I digress (okay, I knew the word Ubuntu meant something before anybody ever named an OS after it, but I wasn’t clear on the meaning). Eventually he came to understand that we are all connected, and, if you do something that hurts me, it also hurts those around me, and, eventually will hurt you, too, even if you do what you do because of something I did to you. That, in a nutshell, is Ubuntu.

It occurred to me that the people who practiced Ubuntu are better at forgiveness than I am. By the way, I could be mistaken, but I got the feeling that the two main characters in the movie were either fictional or composite characters; at the beginning of the movie, though, they showed a disclaimer that basically said that the Reconciliation talks were faithfully recreated, that the script-writers did not write any of that dialog. In many cases, those who testified wanted only to have the bodies (or body parts) of loved ones returned to them for proper burial. It’s hard for me to imagine what those people must have been feeling, but clearly they had accepted the fact that killing or imprisoning those who had abused their power would not bring back their loved ones; it would only make the healing of their country more difficult.

We are, of course, commanded to forgive. In fact, we have been told to pray for those that despitefully use us. I have to admit, I haven’t had to deal with too much “despiteful use” myself. Perhaps if I lived in another part of the world I would get a chance to really test my faith (not planning on doing that any time soon, though). I have certainly been lied about, but then, I guess all of us have had to deal with that at one time or another.

I just got an E-mail from a good friend who just found out that her family has been embezzled from. They don’t know how much was taken, but it could be a considerable amount. The embezzler is someone who has been very close to the family for quite some time, and was never even suspected. She understands that she has to forgive this person; she wants to feel love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance, but right now, it’s hard. She is in prayer, and she has asked me for prayer, and I am asking for prayer on her behalf, as well.

Perhaps the best known Scriptural reference is the Lord’s Prayer, in Matthew 6:9-15. You notice that, in the prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray for forgiveness, but also for God to help us to forgive others. At the end of the prayer, He points out that our forgiveness from God is dependent upon our ability to forgive others. Has anyone ever wronged us as much as we have wronged Him? Remember also that Peter once asked Christ how many times was he required to forgive, and Jesus surprised him with how much forgiveness Peter was responsible for. That applies to us, too.