On Forgiveness

16 October 1988

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Today's Gospel tell us how vain it is to imagine that we love people – our nearest, or what we call ‘our neighbour’, those who are farther from us, if we love only those who love us in return, if we love only those from whom we expect the same.

Love begins at (a, the) moment when we conquer our natural feeling, when we conquer the enmity (?) and hatred of others within ourselves without waiting for the moment when they will change, but receiving them in the way in which God in Christ received us: received us with an open heart, received us at the cost of all His life.

And we may well ask ourselves, what it means to forgive those whom we naturally cannot forgive; and we should ask ourselves this question every day of our life, because there is not one day when a Christian does not say in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive as I forgive’. Conversely it means, ‘To the extent to which I refuse to forgive, to the extent to which I reject my neighbour I cannot hope for forgiveness’.

What is than this forgiveness for which we ask? Forgiveness does not begin at the moment when we feel that everything is all right between us and (my) offender, or indeed, between an offended person and us; because forgiving does not mean forgetting; forgiving means remaining acutely aware – and yet, accepting another person. Forgiving begins at the moment when I say, ‘I see all the evil there is in him, in her, in them; I see it with increasing horror, with an increasing sense of pain; and yet, I d o u n d e r s t a n d – not only believe vaguely, but understand earnestly, seriously that no one wishes to be evil, no one wishes to be below his own mark, unworthy of his own self; no one wishes to be an object of rejection, of horror to others; and that everything which is evil in a person, or simply, not to use words that at times are too strong, (everything which is) ugly in a person, a distortion of the beauty which this person could be – that all this is an illness, and that this person is a victim of evil, in the same way in which a person (is) ill, whether it is an infectious disease that can contaminate us, or a disease that will only (how terrifying it is to say 'only'!) kill another person... but it is a d i s e a s e.

And so, according to the writers of old and of our days, to forgive means to recognise the person who offends us by being what he or she is or by doing what he or she does, – to recognise this person as a victim, and be prepared to carry the consequences of this spiritual disease, carry it – or rather, carry the person; because the evil, the sin, the degradation can be carried only by the Lord Jesus Christ; but the consequences of evil, those things which hurt us, reach painfully can be carried by us.

And so, every person around us who to us is an offence, every person around us who is a temptation is a presence of evil, however evil this evil may be we must be prepared to endure either to carry to the e n d this person as the lost sheep on our shoulders, or carry this person on our shoulders as Christ carried His cross. And be ready to carry this person to Calvary, to the place where w e shall be crucified on this cross of a person's hatred, a person's evil, be prepared to be crucified because it is the moment when we will be able to say in the words of Christ, ‘Father, forgive! He, she does not know what they are doing’.

Let us reflect on the responsibility which we take upon us when day after day we say, ‘Lord, forgive as I forgive’. Amen!