Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 195 · July 14
The Hand Put Out
“And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
In 1947, in a church in Munich, people are leaving after a talk about God's forgiveness. A balding man in a grey overcoat is making his way forward against the crowd, toward the woman who gave the talk.
She is Corrie ten Boom, and she had been a prisoner at Ravensbruck, the camp where her sister Betsie died. By her own account, she knew him before he reached her. He had been one of the guards there, standing at the door of the shower room. He told her that he had since become a Christian and that God had forgiven him. Then he held out his hand and asked whether she would forgive him too. She wrote afterwards that at first she could not do it. She stood there and prayed for help to do what she had spent years telling other people to do. And then her hand went out to take his.
The distance between his hand and hers is what Paul's last words in this verse measure: "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 a matter of personality until the measure comes, and the measure is the cross: we forgive as God has forgiven us. Colossians says it in nearly the same words, "Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another," and gives the same measure: "even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye."
There are two warnings here, and the first is the one people walk past. The verse just before names what must go: "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice." That list is as common in church as the pews are. A person can be kind to a whole congregation and still keep up a private quarrel with one name, and Paul counts that as the sin itself. The second warning runs the other way. Nothing in this verse puts the guard back at the door of your life. Forgiving someone and trusting them are two different things, and this verse asks for forgiveness. Whatever forgiving costs you, it is measured by what God has already given you in Christ, and the One who forgave you will give you the strength to do it, as He did for Corrie.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 195 is Pour Out Your Heart (Psalm 62:8).