Thursday in the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle I
Jos 3,7-10; Mt 18, 21-19,1
The question that Peter asks Jesus, "Lord, how often must I forgive my brother when he sins against me?" is one which is also found on our own lips. Behind these few words we hear other questions too: If I continue forgiving my brother each time he sins, wouldn't I be making forgiveness cheap? How else would he learn that he is not to behave in that way?
These are very important questions to which I do not have a simple answer, because the Gospel is not a manual, like a recipe book which tells you exact amounts or tells you exactly what and how to do. The Gospel is a story of a relationship with Christ and which therefore must be lived in order to be understood.
The central thing to take away with us from the Gospel today is that we are forgiven. This is a game changer because we suddenly become aware of how much we have been forgiven. And that is precisely the word: for-given. So much has been given for us, that is, Jesus Christ himself.
When we realise that we have been forgiven, we can be sure of two things: first that Jesus trusts us, that is, that it was worth giving up his life for us and forgiving us; second, that we have been recreated again, there is now a future before us that wasn't there before because of our sin. And therefore we are given another chance; not one chance, but a chance over and over again, actually seventy times seven times, that is, infinitely.
From our end however we need to be open to receive this forgiveness. Imagine you are sitting in a dark and stuffy room and the curtains are drawn and the windows are shut. There is a bright sun shining outside but you cannot feel the warm rays, you cannot see the bright light unless you decide to take the trouble of drawing the curtains apart and opening the windows. This is what happens when we realise where we have done wrong and accept God's forgiveness. Recall how the forgiven servant is relieved when all his debt is forgiven.
The way how this is done has changed over the ages. In face, confession as we know it started in a rather different form from how we know it today. But since the time of the early Christians, as we read already in the letters of James and others, the Christians were required to ask forgiveness from their own community.
One of the strongest experiences I have had since I have been here was meeting Marcel Uwenza sj a fellow student who experienced the atrocities of the Rwandan genocide, practically all the members of his family killed. Marcel then unexpectedly met his perpetrator, who admitted that he had killed them and fell to his knees asking for forgiveness. Marcel says that he froze for what felt like the longest five seconds of his life, and then embraced the perpetrator, telling him that he has forgiven him.
Similarly, we have also read of the father of Hether Heyer who was killed last Saturday, and who says that he forgives them too, just as Jesus forgave his enemies on the cross. When we realise how much we are we gain the strength to forgive in turn.
Desmond Tutu the South African Anglican Bishop who, together with his family and all his people suffered because of the apartheid once said, "Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what has happened seriously and not minimalising it...It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and to have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and to appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have brought them to do what they did."
How much more must we practice this in our daily lives, with our daily struggles of forgiving each other's faults and always being ready to give the other person an opportunity to start all over again, because we too, have been given that possibility by Christ himself.
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