Ravensbrück and the forgiven guard
Corrie's most famous post-war moment
Corrie ten Boom is speaking at a church in Munich in 1947 — one of her first speaking engagements after the war — about forgiveness, about the love of God, about what she and Betsie learned at Ravensbrück.
After the service a man approaches her with his hand extended. She recognizes him.
He is one of the guards from Ravensbrück. He was one of the cruelest. She remembers him at the processing station where the women were stripped and forced to walk naked past the guards.
He does not recognize her. He tells her he has become a Christian since the war. He tells her he knows God has forgiven him for the things he did at Ravensbrück. He asks her to forgive him.
Corrie describes what happens in her body: cold, unable to move her hand, nothing in her that wants to forgive this man. She stands there frozen.
And she prays: Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.
She takes his hand. The warmth that moves through her arm and into her is something she does not produce. It is something she receives and passes on.
She writes that she had never known God's love so intensely as in that moment of forgiving an enemy she could not forgive on her own.
The forgiveness was real. It did not come from her. She was simply the conduit.
“Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.”
— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place, c. 1947 AD
“For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don't forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Corrie could not forgive the guard. She was honest about it. And she prayed not Lord help me forgive him but Lord I cannot — give me yours.
This is the most important distinction in the theology of forgiveness: the difference between trying to manufacture forgiveness from your own reserves, which is impossible in the hardest cases, and asking to be the conduit for a forgiveness that comes from somewhere else.
Corrie did not have what the moment required. She knew it. She asked for what she lacked.
The forgiveness she passed to the guard came through her but did not originate in her. That is why it was possible.
Is there someone you cannot forgive from your own reserves? Have you stopped at the impossibility — or have you asked to be the conduit for what you cannot produce yourself?