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Good morning. It’s a sad truth but it is sometimes only after a person’s death that you realise quite how extraordinary their life has been. I wonder how many people had heard the name ‘Eva Kor’ before her death last week, and yet she was surely one of the most remarkable people of modern times. As a Jewish child, Eva Kor was taken to Auschwitz where, as a twin, she came to the attention of the notorious Dr Mengele who carried out experiments on her and her sister, Miriam. They were both incredibly fortunate to survive. Yet rather than carrying bitterness to the grave, Kor very publicly forgave not just the Nazi regime but even Dr Mengele. Eva Kor dedicated the rest of her life to forgiveness, teaching about it in a down to earth, practical way. She stripped away the guilt that many feel when they cannot forgive. Forgiveness is personal, she taught. No one can direct someone else to forgive. And indeed for a person who has been badly wronged, for the victim of abuse or serious crime, it is an affront for another to suggest that forgiveness should be a duty. Rather Kor focussed on the positive, liberating power of forgiveness. “The moment I forgave the Nazis, I felt free from Auschwitz and from all the tragedy that had occurred to me,” she wrote. Forgiveness for Kor was not about forgetting wrongdoing or condoning perpetrators. Rather it was about freeing the victim from the pain that had been imposed upon them. Eva Kor was Jewish. But a great deal of her radical approach to forgiveness is echoed in the Christian Gospel. Jesus starts off a parable by asking, ‘‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” It’s a crazy question because none of them would. What sort of shepherd would risk losing ninety-nine sheep for the sake of one? But that shepherd does seek out the lost sheep and in so doing finds joy. In the same way, what kind of God would give his life on a cross to forgive a bunch of sinners? But that’s what Jesus does. Forgiveness makes no logical sense. Revenge is the human instinct. And perhaps it is precisely because it is so counter-intuitive that forgiveness has such power to transform situations and bring joy to damaged lives. Forgiveness should never be imposed upon a person. It is personal. But at the same time it would be a mistake to forget the transformation it can bring. As Eva Kor wrote, “Anger is a seed for war. Forgiveness is a seed for peace.”