Well then, tonight might just turn out to be one of the most
important nights of my life. That feels a little bit silly to type, but I
honestly think it might be true because tonight I found a church. I went to a
bar, and I found a church. I went to a bar called Revolution which is not a
particularly great bar but it is a great name, and some people called Kingsgate
Community Church meet there on Sunday nights and eat together and love Jesus
together with their whole hearts.
I could write a whole blog trying to tell you all about it,
but in a way I think you had to be there. Jesus certainly was, in a way that
was very difficult to ignore. I’m not sure if you can sense through these words
the ridiculous level of enthusiasm that is pouring out of me right now, but
honestly me and my mate Jo walked down two flights of stairs and out onto the
street laughing every step of the way. With sheer joy. Because God is epic.
Anyway, I’d love to just enthuse so much that you get it,
but I think instead I’ll share some of it with you. The leader of this merry
bunch was speaking, and he was speaking about God and how perfectly, how
permanently, he has forgiven us and has made us his children – children that he
is proud of whatever and forever. And he told this story, from South Africa a
few years ago, from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
A frail black woman
rises slowly to her feet. She is something over 70 years of age. Facing across
the room are several white security police officers, one of whom, Mr van der Broek,
has just been tried and found implicated in the murders of both the woman’s son
and her husband some years before. He had come to the woman’s home, taken her
son, shot him at point blank range and then set the young man’s body on fire
while he and his officers partied nearby.
Several years later,
van der Broek and his cohorts had returned to take away her husband as well.
For many months she heard nothing of his whereabouts. Then almost two years
after her husband’s disappearance, van der Broek came back to fetch the woman
herself. How vividly she remembers that evening, going to a places beside a
river where she was shown her husband, bound and beaten, but still strong in
spirit, lying on a pile of wood. The last words she heard from his lips as the officers
poured gasoline over his body and set him aflame were, “Father forgive them…”
Now the woman stands
in the courtroom and listens to the confessions offered by Mr van der Broek. A
member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission turns to her and asks, “So
what do you want? How should justice be done to this man who has so brutally
destroyed your family?”
“I want three things,”
begins the old woman calmly, but confidently. “I want first to be taken to the
place where my husband’s body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and
give his remains a decent burial.”
She pauses, then
continues. “My husband and son were my only family, I want secondly, therefore,
for Mr van der Broek to become my son. I would like him to come twice a month
to the ghetto and spend a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever
love I still have remaining in me.
“And finally,” she
says, “I want a third thing. This is also the wish of my husband. And so, I
would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so
that I can take Mr van der Broek in my arms and embrace him and let him know
that he is truly forgiven.” As the court assistants come to lead the elderly
woman across the room, Mr van der Broek, overwhelmed by what he has just heard,
faints. As he does, those in the courtroom, family, friends, neighbours – all
victims of decades of oppression and injustice – begin to sing softly, but
assuredly. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”
In that incredible old woman, I see Jesus. He is that good.
And tonight, I am very happy indeed.
