The Scandal of Grace

Over the last few weeks we’ve been exploring the big story of God, the story that we find ourselves in. We began with God’s amazing act of creation, when he made the universe we live in, a world of astonishing complexity and beauty and order. Yet, that world is changed and marred by human rebellion against God, where we choose, over and over again, to go against God and to walk our own way. Then finally we looked at God’s plan of rescue, which Jesus put into action by taking upon himself the pain and guilt of our wrong-doing, and so set us free from it.

Today, I will attempt to tell of a very concrete moment where the drama of guilt, repentance and forgiveness was played out in one country’s history. The talk has been hard for me to prepare. The reason will, I think, become apparent. It is a very personal story I will tell, and involves some deep emotion for me.

As many of you know, I was born in South Africa in 1975. Some of you may know that at the time, Apartheid laws were in force in South Africa. Apartheid is the name that was given to the attempt to separate the people of South Africa along racial lines. People of different races were prohibited from working together, living together, marrying each other, using the same buses or trains or toilets or even park benches, and so on. Cities were divided into areas reserved for whites and blacks, (there is a picture of a the black-only area of Soweto behind me) and black people in rural areas were confined to reservations called homelands. The government of the day spent 90% of its budget on, and allocated 80% of the land and other resources to, the 5% of the population that was white. The vast majority of the population of South Africa therefore lived in poverty and squalor, deprived of political influence, robbed of any chance of bettering their circumstances for themselves or for their children, condemned to a life of servitude and exploitation that resembled nothing so much as slavery.

1975 was also the year before the outbreak of the Soweto riots. Soweto lies 40kms south-west of the city of Johannesburg, and in 1976 was what is known as a township, an area reserved for black people.

On the 16th of June 1976, thousands of teenage school children marched through Soweto in protest against an educational policy that was about to be introduced, to teach all black children in Afrikaans as well as English. In part, the children objected because they saw Afrikaans as the language of the white oppressor. At the same time, this policy was really only the next step in an ongoing drive by the Apartheid government to deprive black children of a decent education in order to turn them into a more compliant labour force.

The protest march was confronted by several hundred heavily armed police officers, who proceeded to open fire on children as young as 11. At least 23 children were shot and killed. The picture behind me, recording the death of a boy called Hector Pietersen, became one of the most iconic images of the terror and pain of Apartheid, and the violence of the regime that imposed it. The riots continued for another few days, claiming the lives of several hundred more people. No official records were kept of the dead.

The Soweto Riots unleashed a period of unrest and often violent resistance by black people against the Apartheid state, culminating in the mid-1980s in a concerted bombing campaign against white civilian targets, waged by the largest resistance movement, the African National Congress, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. In 1987, or so, a bank building a little over a mile away from my parents’ home was bombed. I remember hearing the blast. As far as I remember, no-one was killed, though several people were injured.

In an attempt to contain this resistance, the Apartheid government supported another black political movement, the Inkhatha Freedom Party led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, which was vehemently opposed to the ANC on ethnic grounds. This enmity soon spilled over into riots and political murders of increasing brutality, killing upwards of 1200 people a year at its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For a very long time, South Africa teetered on the brink of inter-ethnic as well as interracial civil war.

Then, on the 11th of February 1990, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC, was released from prison after 27 years of imprisonment, and led the African National Congress in negotiations with the Apartheid government. Derailed three times by the intractability of the various factions and parties involved, these negotiations finally ended with an agreement between the ANC and the ruling National Party under FW de Klerk to hold fully democratic elections, and to change the South African constitution. The picture behind me shows de Klerk with Mandela on the day that the outcome of the negotiations was announced.

The elections were held on the 25th of April, 1994, amid scenes of unprecedented joy and enthusiasm. That day I will remember for the rest of my life, partly because it was one of only two occasions in my entire life where I was able to cast my vote. Many people across the world thought of these elections as miraculous, since they marked the first time in the history of the 20th century that a violently oppressive regime voluntarily and peacefully handed over power to a democratically elected government.

I think it is fair to say that that wasn’t really the main reason I and many other white South Africans like me considered the elections miraculous. The miracle for us was that inter-ethnic civil war was averted. The Inkhatha Freedom Party had threatened to boycott the elections, a boycott that would have led inevitably to war, but changed its mind two days before the elections. It emerged later that that change of heart was due in large part to Nelson Mandela’s intervention, and his offer to the leader of Inkhatha, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to appoint him Minister of Home Affairs in the new government. It was an unbelievably big-hearted and risky gamble to take by the ANC and Mandela, but it paid off.

After the elections, the question arose how South Africa was to deal with its past. I know that many white South Africans feared what the ANC might do to them now they were in power. The way the white minority was won over by Nelson Mandela is really the second South African miracle, and was achieved with what seems now almost effortless elegance, summed up in one iconic moment. When South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup, Mandela walked onto the pitch at Ellis Park Stadium, wearing a Springbok rugby jersey, with the number of South Africa’s captain, Francois Pienaar, stitched on the back, to hand over the trophy. It is fair to say that in that one moment, Mandela made almost the entire white population fall in love with him. The moment gave rise to one of the most famous images of the 20th century, Mandela shaking the rugby captain’s hand and laying his hand on his arm. It was an astonishing, impossible moment.

I missed that final, by the way. I was in Germany at the time, and found out we had won only a day later, in a train full of German football supporters who had never even heard the word rugby. It was a moment of elation and depression at the same time.

Once the dust had settled after the elections, the question could no longer be avoided how the Apartheid past was to be dealt with. In a move that is breathtaking in its magnanimity, the ANC refused to arrest and punish perpetrators of crimes against humanity, but instead set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to investigate the past and to provide the guilty parties the opportunity of full and frank confession in exchange for amnesty.

However, it is fair to say that in the beginning, the majority of white South Africans, myself included, did not think there was anything much to apologise for. Apartheid didn’t seem to us to have been all that bad.

On the one hand, the division between the races had been so effective that most white people had no idea whatsoever of what life was like for black people during Apartheid. We never saw the arbitrary state-sponsored violence, the forcible evictions and displacements, the complete inadequacy of public health care and education and infrastructure, or even basic sanitation in black townships and homelands. On the other, many white people argued that they weren’t responsible for the abuses that the commission brought to light, because they hadn’t directly abused anyone, or even known that it went on, or there had been good reasons for the police to do what they did.

I must admit that I was firmly in that camp myself, at first. I grew up in a very liberal household. My parents certainly weren’t racist, and never actively supported the Apartheid government, even if they never actively resisted it either.
It wasn’t until I began to encounter more black people my own age at university and while volunteering with a charity called Moral Re-Armament that I became aware of the extent to which I had been invaded by the prevalent racist attitudes that surrounded me. Racism is much like a corrosive acid, which eats into your soul without you realising it.

Now, I wasn’t overtly racist, in the way Afrikaner nationalists were, who thought that black people were closer to animals than humans, dangerous, devious and stupid all at the same time. But I did think of people as black first, and as people second. In my head, white people were people, black people were black. I kind of caught myself out thinking of black people as grown children, not morally evil or stupid but just a little irresponsible, not entirely capable of thinking through the consequences of their choices for themselves, who therefore needed my guidance. That paternalistic attitude, I think, was and still is very prevalent amongst white people across the world, even here in the UK.

In addition, I came to realise that to this day, a black man my age in South Africa is disproportionately less likely to have anything like my level of education or wealth. I benefitted hugely from growing up as a white boy in Apartheid South Africa, a benefit I did not deserve, and that I received directly through the suffering of others just like me, except in skin colour. In spite of myself, I had become complicit in the oppression and exploitation of other people, and I profited from it.
The realisation didn’t come over me all of a sudden. I had decided to follow Jesus, again, at the beginning of 1994, and slowly, over the course of the next year or so, it dawned on me that the way I had thought about people, and the way I had acted towards them, was wrong. More than that, I realised that there was really no excuse for my attitude. For the first time in my life, I became aware that I was guilty, that in fact, I needed to be forgiven.

Have you ever had that experience, whether it came as a slow dawning or as a sudden insight, that something you said or did was simply wrong, and there was no way to excuse it? To admit that we are wrong is something we do very seldom, I think. We are misunderstood, mostly, or we didn’t intend that our actions would have the outcome they did. We may even admit that we have not acted as well as we could have done. But to admit that we were wrong, that is hard.
The only thing more difficult to do than to realise that I need to be forgiven, is to accept forgiveness when it is offered. It was only a year or so ago that I realised that I refused to be forgiven for the attitude I used to have. I admitted my guilt quite readily, yes, but I carried it with me almost as a perverse badge of honour. My feelings of guilt were my proof that I wasn’t like other white people who denied their guilt. But I wasn’t going to let it go either. I wasn’t about to let myself be forgiven.

Because, you see, if we are honest about it, then we must admit that forgiveness is an outrage. Redemption is a scandal. How does it make sense that someone who is guilty, beyond a shadow of a doubt or beyond any excuse whatsoever, how can someone like that be forgiven, let off, allowed to continue his or her life as if nothing had ever been done? Worse, how can it be right that the one person most entitled to judge, and Nelson Mandela surely had the right to exact justice for what had been done to black people in their own land, how can that person choose to let the guilty go free? Surely, that can not be just.

That dawned on me a few years ago when I met an academic from Holland, who was utterly outraged by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She could not believe how Nelson Mandela could have agreed to what she considered a complete farce. The guilty should have been punished. South Africa should have held its own Nuremberg trials and locked up the evil-doers for life. To let them go was an abject moral failure at best, if not craven political gamesmanship and horse-trading for power or profit and influence.

Yet, that was what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was about. It was an attempt to substitute punishment for mercy on a national scale. For that moment, an offer was made to all white people, myself included, to admit our failures and wrong-doing, and to have the slate wiped clean.

Much the same scandal lies at the heart of our Christian faith, our relationship to God. The apostle Paul, one of the most influential men in the early church, wrote in his first letter to the church he had begun in Corinth, in 1 Corinthians 1:18:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

What is the message of the cross? It is quite simply this – there is one who has the right to judge, to exact justice for all human wrong doing. He is God, the creator of us and of everything we see around us. If anyone has the right to say that something isn’t working right, it is the one who made it, and designed it to work in a particular way. Yet, this judge, the only authoritative judge, before whom every one of us is guilty, not only chose not to punish the guilty, but became human in order to suffer our punishment in our place. If you think about it, logically, that just doesn’t make any sense at all.

As Quinton Howitt, in his commentary on Corinthians, puts it, “To put this in perspective, who would follow through with a plan in which Gordon Brown and/or George Bush are crucified in order to protect and save Al Qaeda from their sin?”
What could possibly be the benefit of this forgiveness? What could possibly be gained by letting the guilty go free? The benefit is quite as irrational as the forgiveness itself. Out of the refusal to punish comes not anarchy, a wilful rejection of all moral authority. Out of forgiveness comes life, and a deep transformation of the forgiven.

I had my own Truth and Reconciliation moment at conference that the charity Moral Re-Armament organised. I stood up in front of an auditorium full of about 300 or so people and apologised for what had been done in my name and my own attitude. It was one of the scariest things I have ever done. Afterwards, as I sat in a minibus with a group of other black young people on the way from the conference venue to our dormitory, I was trying to learn the name of the girl sitting next to me, as proud a Zulu woman as I have ever met. When I struggled to say her name right, I said, “Your name is too difficult for my European tongue to pronounce.” She snorted dismissively and said, “You are no longer European. You are African now.” In that moment, she offered me forgiveness, and acknowledged a change in my heart that I had not yet seen.

That offer of transformation and freedom is open to every one of us today, right now. Let me underline that here, and if you take nothing else from today, then take this: you too have the offer placed before you to have your guilt washed away. You, too, can be free of everything you ever did. What is required is your frank confession: “Yes, Lord, I did wrong. Please forgive me.”

As the apostle John puts it in his letter,
If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1: 9

We confess our guilt, not so we can feel worse after than we did before, but so that we can be forgiven, and be set free. That is the most amazing miracle of all.

The sad fact is that because forgiveness makes no rational sense, we live our lives quite often as if forgiveness was never offered, or was never necessary to be offered in the first place. We may consent to forgive others for what they did to us. We hardly ever consent to be forgiven, or to forgive ourselves, for what we did. Or else, we deny that guilt and forgiveness was ever at issue at all.

That is also the sadness hidden within our South African miracle. Far too many white South Africans refused at the moment when the opportunity to come clean and be set free of the past was offered to us. They did not refuse to accept that they were being forgiven. They refused to accept responsibility for what was done, which is a necessary pre-condition for receiving forgiveness. You can’t be forgiven for something you didn’t do. You can also not be forgiven for something that you deny to have done. For as long as you justify yourself, you can not be justified by Jesus’ sacrifice.
That is why we live in South Africa with a partial miracle, in a fading and increasingly tattered looking rainbow nation. The forgiveness that was offered through the TRC was rejected by too many, and the voices are getting louder that declare that forgiveness should now be withdrawn, and the guilty be delivered over to their fate.

That is also the reason why I fear my family and I will never be able to go home again. Because, you see, whenever I go back to South Africa, I know that I become a white man again, tainted, no matter what I do, with the arrogance and denial of my fellow white men. Every time I meet a black person, I will have to prove again that I am not like those others who do not see how they mistreat people, how much their view of their fellow human is still prejudiced by race.
Yet, that is not quite the end of it. Hope still burns in my heart. I too have a dream, much like Martin Luther King Jnr did all those many years ago, though, through necessity, my dream must be more ambitious. Martin Luther King Jnr once declared famously that he had a dream of an America where white kids and black kids played together in peace. I dream of something more. I dream of the time when my children won’t know what “race” means anymore, because we have finally stopped to judge each other according to arbitrary categories, and instead see in each other only another beloved child of God. It would take a miracle, that is true. But then, I serve a Lord whose business it is to perform miracles. Perhaps, some day, He will grant me the grace of performing this one.

And so, may you be blessed with the courage to take responsibility for the wrong you did, or do. May you be filled with the courage to admit it freely to the Lord our God. And when you do confess, may you be open to receive the grace of His forgiveness, that washes away your guilt, and sets you free from all condemnation.

Erik Peeters, 02/06/2010

The Scandal of Grace

Erik Peeters

Erik explores forgiveness on a personal and a national scale by looking back at his journey through the dramatic transition of South Africa from a violent and oppressive Apartheid regime to a democratic multi-racial society. Along the way, he discovers how much forgiveness runs counter to conventional wisdom on justice.

Downloads:	2270
Recorded:	16/05/2010
Length:	35 minutes

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