Forgiveness must be generous

A Reflection for Thursday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

All four evangelists insist that forgiveness is fundamental to the Kingdom of God. Human beings forgiving each other is the most important sign that God has forgiven and reconciled with humanity. This all-pervading mercy is evidence that something new has broken into human history, bearing with it new ways of thinking and acting.

Essential to this new mercy is the commandment that Christians must forgive others as much as they have been forgiven. Human forgiveness must be as generous as God’s. It is the divine quality that God most hopes to see reflected in every human being. It is the human action that unites us most closely with God’s way of understanding and interacting with the world.

It is a remarkable claim. In the other religions of Jesus’ day, the divine qualities shared by deities usually conferred supernatural or magical powers. In Jesus’ mind, these wonders were inconsequential in comparison to the divine quality of mercy. When Jesus repeatedly stressed the importance of forgiveness, he was doing more than just offering a useful way to build a human community or develop a well-integrated interior life. He was offering a way of being like God, who “makes the sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Mt 5:45). Anyone who wants to have a mystical experience merely has to forgive another person and suddenly their mind will encounter divine wisdom.

The unforgiving servant in today’s Gospel reading did not allow his master’s mercy to transform him. He remained stingy with his kindness and in doing so alienated himself from his master and brought the most severe justice down upon himself. Jesus’ warning is that we will cause the same alienation and bring the same justice down upon ourselves if we do not forgive as we ourselves have been forgiven. 

Mercy is not just a beautiful ideal; forgiveness is not just a helpful practice. These things are the fundamental tools with which God is acting to restore creation to its initial wholeness.