The Hand Put Out

A church in Munich in 1947, emptying after a talk. A man in a grey overcoat comes up the aisle against the flow of people leaving, his hand already out.

The woman he is walking toward is Corrie ten Boom, who had been in Ravensbruck, where her sister Betsie died. By her own account she recognised him before he reached her; he had been a guard at the shower room door. He told her he had become a Christian and that God had forgiven him, and asked whether she would forgive him. She wrote afterwards that her arm would not move. She stood with his hand out in front of her and prayed for the ability to do what she had spent years telling other people to do, and then her hand went out.

That distance is what Paul's last clause measures. Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Kind and tenderhearted sound like temperament right up until the measure arrives and turns out to be the cross. Colossians says it in nearly the same breath, forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, and hands over the same measure: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.

Two warnings, and the first is the one people walk past. The verse just above names what is being displaced: let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice. That list is ordinary church furniture. A person can be kind across a whole congregation and keep a private clamour running about one name, and Ephesians counts that as the sin rather than the exception. The second warning runs the other way. Nothing here puts the guard back on the door. Forgiving a man and trusting him are different acts, and anyone telling you this verse requires both has quoted you something it does not say.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 195 is Pour Out Your Heart (Psalm 62:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two