Who Is Your Ali Ağca?

Love crosses boundaries.

It jumps over barricades.

Love redraws the line of our circle to add and include.

Sometimes, enlarging our circle of love actually means breaking out of our circle of comfort and familiarity to step into another person’s world.

Remember when Jesus invited himself over to Zacchaeus’ house?

This did not please the  religious crowd…

They complained, “He has gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner.”

B. Zahnd’s book, Unconditional? The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness, tells the story of Pope John Paul II and Ali Ağca…

On May 13, 1981, Ali Ağca, a Turkish Muslim, approached Pope John Paul II as he traveled in an open motorcade through St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Standing only a few feet away, Ali Ağca fired a gun several times, critically wounding the pope as four bullets struck his torso, right arm, and left hand.

Ali Agca was immediately apprehended, and the gravely injured pope was rushed to the hospital. John Paul II would spend twenty-two days in the hospital recovering from Ali Ağca’s attack.

In his first statement following the attempted assassination, John Paul requested that people “pray for my brother [Ali Ağca], whom I have sincerely forgiven.”

If you are inclined to casually dismiss this as just “what popes are supposed to do,” may I suggest that until quite recently this is not how a pope would be expected to respond to an attempted murder (in another time, a pope who was attacked by a Muslim fanatic would have responded with his own form of violence, which in all likelihood would have escalated into a Christian holy war and Islamic jihad).

Two years later, John Paul II visited Ali Ağca in prison. In a private room the two men sat knee-to-knee, face-to-face, the pope holding the hand of his would-be-assassin… and forgiving him.

There are two iconic photographic images that emerged from these two dramatic encounters of Pope John Paul II and Ali Ağca. The first is  a photograph of the shocked face of Pope John Paul II, his papal robe splattered with blood, just after being shot. The second is a photograph of the shocked face of Ali Ağca as the pope met with him in prison and forgave him. In both pictures a shocked face seems to be asking the same question—”Why?”

In his hatred, Ali Ağca fired bullets of hate into the body of John Paul II, and though the bullets almost took the pope’s life, the hate never touched his soul.

John Paul II responded with whispered words of love and forgiveness—words that lodged in the soul of Ali Ağca.

Love walked through the doors of a prison cell to offer forgiveness and friendship.

Love crossed boundaries and jumped over barricades.

Love redrew the lines to add and include.

So here is my question for you:

Who is your Ali Ağca?