Fr William Fennelly OSB
The gospel we’ve just heard urges us to cultivate a readiness to forgive. It’s among the most the difficult goals we could aspire to. We all struggle with the idea of forgiving people who have done us serious harm. Popular culture endorses the idea that some offences are ‘beyond forgiveness’, media controversies in recent months give many examples of this. The Christian story, however, encourages us to realise that this is just not true. Our faith teaches us about an all-merciful Father. In the list of moral priorities there is probably nothing higher for a Christian, than the duty to be merciful as Our heavenly Father is merciful. Our ultimate fate depends on this.
Hannah Arendt a jewish woman, who is recognised as one of great 20th century German philosophers, wrote that, “Forgiving is certainly one of the greatest human capacities and perhaps the boldest of human actions insofar as it tries the seemingly impossible, to undo what has been done, and it succeeds in making a new beginning where everything seemed to have come to an end”. Surely such forgiveness is excessive and yet for us this is precisely what is at the heart of the Christian call. When the woman with a bad reputation fell on her knees before Jesus in the house of Simon the Leper, bathing Jesus’s feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair, Simon was disgusted by her. Jesus rebuked him, reminding him that ‘her sins, her many sins must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love. It’s the person who is forgiven little, who shows little love’.
What it comes down to, in the end, then is love. Jesus himself makes a direct correlation between being forgiven and developing the capacity to love and to be loving. If we can be harsh with others, we can be harsher still with ourselves, acting as judge, jury and executioner at our own trial. It’s only by praying daily for God’s forgiveness as we forgive others, that we can hope to receive the grace to forgive ourselves. That capacity depends on our willingness to encounter not only one another but to also forgive ourselves. The challenge Jesus places before us is to recognise our need for a depth of forgiveness. This could be the beginning of a great revolution of tenderness that puts the human heart at the very centre of how we live in the world.