Are We Asking Too Much?

Some say we do not have the right to offer forgiveness on another’s behalf.

Simon Wiesenthal, premier Nazi-hunter, has been much in the news lately. First he showed up on TV networks to protest President Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery, and then to comment on reports of the death of Josef Mengele. Wiesenthal had a lot at stake in the Mengele question; he has committed much of his life to tracking “the butcher of Auschwitz.” Although Wiesenthal himself survived the German concentration camps, he lost 89 family members to the Nazis.

Wiesenthal is often asked about his obsession: Why hunt down men in their seventies and eighties for crimes committed half a century ago? Is there no forgiveness? No reconciliation with such people? Wiesenthal set down his personal answers to such questions in a slim, powerful book called The Sunflower. It begins with a haunting story, a remembrance of a true event that occurred during his imprisonment.

By chance, Wiesenthal was yanked out of a work detail and taken up a back stairway to a darkened hospital room. A nurse led him into the room, then left him alone with a figure wrapped in white, lying on a bed. The figure was a German soldier, badly wounded, swathed in yellow-stained bandages. Gauze covered his entire face.

In a weakened, trembling voice, the German made a kind of sacramental confession to Wiesenthal. He recounted his boyhood and early days in the Hitler Youth Movement. He told of action along the Russian front, and the increasingly harsh measures his SS unit had taken against the Jewish populace.

And then he told of a terrible atrocity, when all the Jews in one town were herded into a wooden frame building that was then set on fire. Burning bodies fell from the second floor, and the SS soldiers—he among them—shot them as they fell. He started to tell of one child in particular, a young boy with black hair and dark eyes, but his voice gave way.

Several times Wiesenthal tried to leave the room, but each time the ghostlike figure would reach out with a cold, bloodless hand and beg him to stay. Finally, after maybe two hours, the soldier explained why Wiesenthal had been summoned. He had asked a nurse if any Jews still existed; if so, he wanted one brought to his room for a last rite before death.

“I know that what I am asking is almost too much for you,” he said to Wiesenthal. “But without your answer I cannot die in peace.” And then he asked for forgiveness for all his crimes against the Jews—from a man who perhaps the next day might die at the hands of the soldier’s SS comrades. Wiesenthal stood in silence for some time, staring at the man’s bandaged face. At last he made up his mind and left the room, without saying a word. He left the soldier in torment, unforgiven.

Wiesenthal’s book devotes 90 pages to that story. For the next 105 pages, it lets others speak. He sent the story to 32 thinkers—Jewish rabbis, Christian theologians, secular philosophers and ethicists—and asked for their responses. Had he done right? Should he have forgiven the dying SS criminal?

The respondents gave a clear consensus, with the vast majority concluding that Wiesenthal was right in leaving the soldier unforgiven. Only six thought Wiesenthal had done wrong. Some of the non-Christians questioned the whole idea of forgiveness; they deemed it an irrational concept that merely lets criminals off the hook and perpetuates injustice. Others allowed a place for grace and forgiveness but considered the heinous crimes of the Nazis as beyond forgiveness.

The most persuasive arguments came from those who insisted that forgiveness can only be granted by the very people who have been wronged. What moral right, they asked, had Wiesenthal to grant forgiveness on behalf of the Jews who had died at this man’s hand?

The question Wiesenthal posed in The Sunflower resurfaced with a vengeance when President Reagan decided to visit a Nazi cemetery last spring. Many questioned whether even the President of the United States had the right to express forgiveness for crimes that were committed against someone else.

I am not prepared to pass judgment on the almost unbearable dilemma that confronted Simon Wiesenthal in the hospital room. At the least, the 32 responses show his question has no easy resolution. But the Bible does add an interesting twist to one aspect of the dilemma he faced in 1944 and President Reagan faced in 1985. It relates to an old-fashioned theological word that kept cropping up in Wiesenthal’s book and in newspaper accounts of the Bitburg fiasco. The word is “reconciliation.”

A profound phrase from the book of 2 Corinthians convinces me that we do have the right to offer forgiveness on behalf of another. In that passage, Paul announces that we have been granted “the ministry of reconciliation.” “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors,” he continues, “as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (5:20, NIV).

The ethicists in Wiesenthal’s book correctly note that forgiveness, grace, and reconciliation defy human reason. What logical right have I to offer forgiveness and reconciliation on someone else’s behalf? Paul answers that question with this concluding statement, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). The righteousness of God is an undeserved, “un-reasonable” gift as well, a gift made possible only through Christ’s own “ministry of reconciliation.”

What does it mean to be a minister of reconciliation, an ambassador of Christ proclaiming forgiveness to those who did not sin against you personally? Some Christians are trying to put reconciliation into practice by settling in the line of gunfire along the Nicaraguan border. Some mothers in Northern Ireland are hoping to bring peace to their cities simply by walking through the streets and pleading for reconciliation. In this country, Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship volunteers enter crowded, fear-filled cell blocks to proclaim forgiveness and love to those society has set aside as guilty and unworthy.

Churches have organized various ways of expressing the Christian faith: the ministry of evangelism, the ministry of social concerns. Should we consider a ministry of reconciliation? The needs are not only in Central America and Ireland. Wherever a marriage is breaking up, wherever a child has become estranged, wherever social distance separates races or social groups there exists a need for reconciliation: a need for someone to take on voluntarily the burdens of others and to offer forgiveness even before it is sought.

One man, Will Campbell, has taken that phrase, “Be ye reconciled,” as his life motto. In the autobiography Brother to a Dragonfly, he explains that his Christian love and compassion once extended to blacks and the oppressed in the South, but not to rednecks and members of the Ku Klux Klan. But after three close friends were murdered by the KKK, he heard a message from God that defied every human instinct. He was to go, as a minister of reconciliation, to the very group who had killed his friends. He was to become, and in fact did become, an “apostle to the rednecks.”

I think the title “minister of reconciliation” was one Paul eagerly claimed for himself. He had reason. He, too, had a record of “war crimes,” committed, in his case, against Christians. God forgave him for those crimes, and the apostle to the Gentiles never seemed to get over that startling feeling of being reconciled.

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