Lord, how often shall my brother or sister sin against me, and I forgive them? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him , “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.”
Mathew 18:21– 22
David Niyonzima was teaching at a Friends school in Burundi in 1993 when the genocidal clashes between Hutu and Tutsi occurred. During this time of wanton killing, soldiers and their collaborators suddenly appeared at the Friends school, and without warning, opened fire on him and his students, killing several and forcing everyone to flee for their lives. David, a Hutu, escaped and hid in an abandoned building for twenty-four hours before he was able to reach his parents’ home, where he was reunited with his wife Felicity, a Tutsi.
After hiding for a week, David and a friend tentatively returned to the disturbingly quiet school compound, where they were confronted with thousands of flies and the smell of decomposing bodies. He remembers that he simply “sat down and cried.” After burying his students, he sank into a deep depression over the enormity of this brutal crime.
Despairing, David was almost ready to ask God to take his life when he suddenly received an “outrageous” spiritual message that he was “to come to terms with what had happened” and offer forgiveness to the men who had perpetrated the massacre. Stunned by this message, he struggled with whether Jesus really intended for him to take his message of forgoing vengeance literally. If so, did “these teachings really apply to such blatant evil as this?”
A short time later David encountered a man on the street who had collaborated with the soldiers and been present at the massacre at the Friends school. Much to David’s surprise, he found himself taking the man’s hand and saying, “By God’s power, I forgive you for your part in bringing the soldiers to kill our students”. In that moment David experienced a sense of deep peace radiating throughout his body, and he realized that by choosing forgiveness over vengeance, he had mediated God’s love into the world, and that Love had begun to set him free. He describes this encounter as a “turning point in my life, pulling me away from the spirit of revenge which has overwhelmed the people of Burundi, and turning me toward the spirit of forgiveness.”
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or condoning what was done; it does mean seeking to release ourselves and others from the painful grip of the past. Fortunately, our release from the limiting clutch of history does not hinge on the offender’s remorse or apology. Desmond Tutu, Chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said “ If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit’s whim, locked into victimhood…”
David Niyonzima’s life was transformed by forgiveness. He says, “My complete healing has taken longer, and in some ways continues today, but that day [when I forgave] put me on the right path.”