A LESSON ON FORGIVENESS
Today’s
Lenten lesson from our Mass readings is clear and direct to the point:
forgiveness. There are two interrelated sides to it: God will forgive
us, insofar as we forgive others.
Day in and day out, we are reminded of this crucial lesson when we pray
daily the “Our Father.” And yet, we are hardly aware of what we utter. No wonder we are inconsistent.
Perhaps our daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer has already become
trite and commonplace for us. It fails to touch us any more. Will the
First Reading work for us? After all, it is one of the most beautiful
and sincerest prayers which we find in Sacred Scriptures. Azariah gives
voice to this supplication, pleading that the contrite heart and humble
spirit of the Israelites be mercifully accepted by God.
From the Gospel, on the other hand, we have an honest, albeit indirect,
admission by Simon Peter regarding his struggle to forgive. He poses a
question to Jesus: “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I
forgive him? As many as seven times?” By responding to him in a
seemingly absurd way, Jesus wants to bring home the message that
forgiveness isn’t a question of numbers or of frequency. Using the more
effective approach of a parable, Jesus gets the message across in a
better way. In the end, He makes His point more sharply: “So will my
heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your
brother from your heart.”
There you are — lesson learned hopefully, through whatever way, method or approach. And lesson lived, of course. Fr. Martin Macasaet, SDB
REFLECTION QUESTION: Do you count the number of times you forgive the person who has offended you?
Father God, thank You for being always ready to forgive me. Grant me a heart that never bears grudges against another.
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