The Hand Corrie ten Boom Could Not Shake

In 1947, Corrie ten Boom stood in a church basement in Munich, face to face with a man she recognized immediately. He had been a guard at Ravensbruck, the concentration camp where her sister Betsie had died. He did not recognize Corrie. He had just listened to her speak about God's forgiveness, and now he extended his hand. "Will you forgive me?" he asked.

Corrie froze. She had just preached about forgiveness, yet her arm would not move. She knew the theology. She had spoken the words. But standing before a man whose cruelty she had witnessed firsthand, she discovered the vast distance between saying "I forgive" and meaning it from the marrow of her bones.

She prayed silently, desperately. "Jesus, I cannot forgive this man. Give me Your forgiveness." As she reached out mechanically to take his hand, she felt something she described as a warm current passing from her shoulder through her arm into their clasped hands.

This is precisely what Jesus addresses in Matthew 5. He is not interested in people who merely refrain from murder while nursing hatred, or who avoid adultery while harboring lust, or who keep oaths while their hearts are tangled in deception. The Almighty looks past our careful exteriors to the raw terrain of the heart. Jesus calls us not to better behavior but to transformed desire — the kind of change that only comes when we stop performing righteousness and start begging for it.