Forgiveness

This weekend we have Peter coming up and asking Jesus, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’ Jesus is asking Peter, and thus commanding us, always to forgive others. There should be no time and no situation when we do not forgive.

But in reality we so often hear people saying, ‘I can’t forgive him for what he did to me.’ ‘What she did was unforgivable.’ A woman told me that she couldn’t say the Our Father because of the sentence Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. This was because she could not forgive her husband who had hurt her so deeply.

In the parable, Jesus gives us that the servant’s greatest sin wasn’t just cruelty — it was spiritual amnesia. Moments after having a debt effectively worth millions of pounds erased (a talent was a monetary unit worth about twenty years’ wages for a labourer), he violently attacked a fellow servant over the equivalent of a few months’ wages. Let us reflect and ponder how much we have been forgiven by our loving and merciful Father. Forgiveness is one of the clearest signs of whether we truly understand the Gospel. In refusing to forgive our brothers and sisters, our hearts are closed and their hardness makes them impervious to the Father’s merciful love. But in confessing our sins our hearts are opened to His grace.

When we realise how much we have been forgiven, forgiving others stops feeling like a loss, and starts feeling like an act of gratitude. It is the proof that we have received mercy — because those who have truly been forgiven cannot help but forgive. If you have found it impossible to forgive a particular person in your life, what does that reveal about how deeply you believe God has truly forgiven you?

Here is a prayer that might help when we struggle to forgive.

Heavenly Father, You are the source of all mercy, and it is from Your mercy alone that forgiveness flows.

Lord, You know the wound I carry. You know the hurt that lives in me, and You know that on my own, I cannot release it.

So I come to You not from strength, but from weakness. Not with forgiveness already in my hands, but asking You to place it there. Give me the grace to will what I cannot yet feel. Soften what is hard in my heart. Open what pride or pain has closed. Turn my injury into compassion and my memory into intercession.

Lord, You stretched out Your arms on the Cross and forgave even those who drove the nails. Let that same love — which is stronger than any wound — move through me now. I choose to forgive. Help me mean it. And when I cannot mean it yet, give me the grace to be willing. Through Christ, who is my peace andmy reconciliation, Amen.