June 2

REMEMBER ME WHEN YOU COME INTO YOUR KINGDOM

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!”

But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Luke 23:39-43

The prisoners in the Montinlupa Prison who gathered for a large assembly were astonished to see a woman in her seventies make her way up the steps of the platform to address them. What would an old woman have to say to them, and how did she even obtain permission to get in? Mass assemblies were rare, and usually only armed men were brave enough to enter this maximum security prison that housed only the most hardened criminals.

As she began to speak, these defiant men—most of them in chains—had difficulty understanding her words through her thick Dutch accent, but slowly she captured their attention. She told how she and her family had hidden Jews from the Nazis during World War II and how German police, because of a tip from two of her fellow citizens, had pounded on their door one frigid February day in 1944 with warrants for their arrest. The speaker was Corrie ten Boom. She knew what life was like in a death-camp prison, and she could identify with these men in their misery. But there was more to her story than her own suffering.

After the war was over, the two Dutchmen who had betrayed her family were taken into custody and put on trial. That they were getting what they deserved would have been the natural response, but not so. "My sister Nollie,” Corrie told her audience, “heard of the trial of these two men who told the Gestapo about us, and she wrote a letter to both of them.

“She told them that through their betrayal they had caused the death of our father, our brother and his son, and our sister. She said we had suffered much, although both of us had come out of prison alive. She told them that we had forgiven them and that we could do this because of Jesus, who is in our hearts.”

Both men responded. One wrote: “I have received Jesus as my Savior. When you can give such ability to forgive, to people like Corrie ten Boom and her sister, then there is hope for me. I brought my sins to Him.”

The other letter gave an opposite viewpoint: “I know what I have done to your family, that I have caused the death of several of you who have saved Jews, and above that I have helped to kill many hundreds of Jewish people. The only thing I regret is that I have not been able to kill more of your kind.” Corrie went on to challenge the prisoners that every one of them—even as those criminals who had been on the cross—could accept or reject Christ and his forgiveness. ²