So, the other day I was watching a documentary created by some American college students filmed several years ago. It took place in Arusha, Tanzania, 50 miles or so from the snows of Kilimanjaro. Arusha is a bustling city, and is amazingly international.
Turns out, there was a significant United Nations presence in Arusha, and had been for some time. I’d seen UN forces in tv and movies, and Brooks and I saw some in Israel, and their robin’s egg blue helmets in-person seemed to light up with the dubious familiarity of murky geopolitics. I suppose when you see UN troops, you know something heavy’s going on.
The International Community had been gathering in Arusha since 1995. The blue helmets and global diplomats gathered for the somber work of the International Criminal Tribunal for next-door Rwanda.
For those of you who don’t know or who may have forgotten, for a hundred days in the Spring and Summer of 1994, some 800,000 Tutsi people were killed by their fellow Rwandans, and many more were left maimed, scarred, and haunted by the atrocious things they’d seen. People the world over were horrified by the stories, the images, the totality of destruction.
This Tribunal in Arusha was established in the aftermath to hold those responsible at the highest levels accountable. And for a short time on one sun-scorched afternoon, a few American sat behind bullet-proof glass with translators repeating gruesome details into those students' headphones. We learned later on that the story we heard that day was mild, a little more mundane than what often came to light in that sterile space. Thank God.
While there, the students heard a story of a woman whose sons had been killed by two Hutu men in the same gruesome fashion so many others met their end: the men wielded machetes, as the victims’ horrified mother watched from a shed just yards away. But the story doesn’t end there.
In a frankly shocking turn, years later, the mother began the work of piecing her community back together the only way she could figure. Leaning on her Christian faith, she started teaching people in her community about reconciliation, about forgiveness, and about moving forward together.
Already, this is incredible. She was forgiving the Hutu and inviting them back. Her work was extraordinarily successful and soon grew to be a full-blown NGO. So, one day, she was in her office when two men came in. They told her who they were, the same men who had so brutally killed her sons, their prison sentences now ended. She screamed. And she wept. And she threw them out.
Who could blame her? After a time, though, she searched them out and invited them back to her office. When they arrived, she apologized for her outburst and offered them both jobs working with her to continue the work of reconciliation.
Y’all, I was floored. I mean, I think of myself as a Christian, but that’s a different level of faith and forgiveness.
If you Google stories on forgiveness and the Rwandan genocide, you’ll get over a quarter of a million hits from the New York Times to Al Jazeera to some podunk newspaper out of rural Oklahoma. There are thousands of stories like this woman's. Jesus’ words to love your enemies, to do good to those who hate you, to forgive as you would hope to be forgiven, they are alive and well in Rwanda.
But I want to raise a bit of caution here. These stories are deeply stirring. I hope they compel us more comfortable Christians to live somehow differently. Pray we never face the days Rwandans did, but pray, too, that if we did, we may be so grace-filled. But at the same time, I worry. I worry that, as a part of an institution that has, over the century, been so connected to wars, to abuse, and to countless harms, standing up here preaching forgiveness is a little like saying, “Turn the other cheek, so we can hit you again.”
See, when Jesus spoke his words, he was speaking from a very different place compared with modern Christians. In Jesus’ day, he was speaking from his place in the social structure -- darn near the bottom. “Turn the other cheek,” and all the other bits that go with it, would’ve sounded considerably different coming out of, say, Pilate’s mouth.
The very same words mean something different when spoken by the oppressor. And the problem is, that through the growth of the church across time, we Christians have shifted away from being an oppressed minority early on to being in a position of great power today. There was a time when we could say, “Turn the other cheek” as a rallying cry of defiance.
But things have changed, and we must be careful how we deploy such language. To put it bluntly, that mother forgiving her sons’ killers, it’s inspiring when she, a woman who endured all this, tells the world her story of forgiveness. But t would be cruelty for us to tell her that she MUST forgive them. And that’s the fine line we walk. Forgiveness is not for the oppressor to dole out. Forgiveness is given by the ones who are harmed.
These days, Rwandans are still trying to figure out how to live with each other. After the Genocide, 1-2 million Hutus fled the country and are trickling back in. Many of those who killed were jailed for a time, but they’re sentences are coming to an end, and they, too, are returning to their homes.
All that means that the one-time oppressors are reentering communities they once helped destroy. Peace Clubs have sprung up around the country where survivors share their grief and perpetrators listen to the hurt their crimes caused. And forgiveness comes often, in varying degrees.
A photographer has begun a series of portraits -- a killer paired with a survivor -- and the results are sobering, real, and pain sits in everyone’s eyes. The caption of one such portrait tells two stories. First, his: “I burned her house. I attacked her in order to kill her and her children, but … they escaped. When I was released from jail, if I saw her, I would run and hide.”
And then hers, “I used to hate him. When he came to my house and knelt down before me and asked for forgiveness, I was moved by his sincerity. Now, if I cry for help, he comes to rescue me. When I face any issue, I call him.”
The photographer drew out a scale of 1 to 10 on a nearby stick and asked others just how much they actually forgave. There’s a lot of grace here. One points to a perfect 10, unquestioning forgiveness. Another, a 7, good, but there’s still work to be done. And yet another defiantly jabs at the number 2. There’s forgiveness, but there’s still so much pain.
But still, there’s forgiveness. I don’t know about y’all, but for me, that’s the real witness. Maybe I’m a little too cynical, but those 10s just seem so far out of reach. I find the most reality in that last person, the one that jabbed the number 2. See, that mother that brought in the killers, these folks that say they’ve forgiven all the way to 10, those feel like saints among us, exemplary models of forgiveness. And that’s great, we need those.
But if I’m going to learn anything about true forgiveness, I need those 2s, the folks that are in the work while still furious, afraid, or just stubbornly trying to live into their faith while staring down the world’s evil. I need those 2s.
Just like how the words of Jesus sound different coming from folks in power, with all their privilege , they sound different coming from those 2s. And we need to hear that witness, need to understand how different it is when the call for forgiveness comes not from the perpetrators, but from the still wounded.
That’s a portrait of forgiveness not without consequence, but with Christ at its center pointing just slightly above where we are now. Those 10s may come, but if we’re honest, we start by getting to 2.