Overview:

Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

“But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.” (Mt 6:15)

Find today’s readings here. 

God’s love is freely given and it is everlasting (Isaiah 54:10). There is nothing I can do to make God stop loving me. But when it comes to forgiveness, it’s a little more complicated. 

In today’s Gospel, after Jesus teaches his followers the Our Father, he stresses the line about forgiveness: “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions” (Matt 6: 14-15). St. Augustine, in his writing On the Sermon on the Mount, describes this passage as forming a “compact” with God. “And if we lie in that compact, the whole prayer is fruitless,” he writes. 

God’s mercy abounds, but there’s a catch. For starters, while there are no sins that cannot be forgiven, we need to be sorry about what we’ve done if we are to receive that forgiveness. This seems straightforward. If I offend a family member, for example, I will not receive forgiveness if I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong and, consequently, have not apologized. I can say the same of my relationship with God. 

And yet Jesus raises the stakes. Forgiveness is not simply something that’s between us and God, but also between my neighbor and me. God will not forgive me if I do not forgive my neighbor who has offended me. 

But why should God wait on my stubborn heart? This, I think, is also about my ability to receive God’s forgiveness. If I hang on to resentments, I cannot receive God’s mercy. It’s a key theme in the fifth chapter of The Big Book, a foundational text in the spiritual tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous: “For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.”

To walk with Christ means leaving all behind, including bitterness toward others. It means recognizing both that I need to forgive others and that I need God to forgive me. If I want to maintain my compact with God, I must forgive those who have hurt me.

J.D. Long García is a senior editor at America and co-author of Clericalism: The Institutional Dimension of the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis.