Must you forgive them? (Marcy St. John)

    Jesus’ parable teaches us about mercy — about what mercy looks like and how we are to give it to others. Recall the time when you were a child and you acted badly — most likely toward a brother or sister or other relative. Recall that moment when you knew you “were in big trouble” and had to go to your parent for confession and mercy. Recall that feeling in your stomach, or your head, and your heart. Jesus tells Peter what mercy looks like: If your brother sins against you, forgive him not seven times but seventy-seven times. There is discussion in the Babylonian Talmud — one of the sources of Jewish law and teachings — that forgiveness must be unconditionally given three times — so we should understand seventy-seven as an indefinitely large number. In other words — forgive your brother again and again, always and forever. 

    We believe that God is merciful, and will show mercy to us. But this tells us that it isn’t for nothing that he grants mercy. We, too, must be merciful to receive mercy. Again, we must forgive those who trespass against us always, as many times as needed. This message so important that it is in the prayer we pray most often — at every Mass, at every service: when we gather together with other Catholics, when we gather together with other Christians, and even when we gather with those who are not Christian but who know this prayer — because it is The Lord’s Prayer. We ask God to “forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 

   Why must this be? There are those who have greatly wronged others — the coworker who lies and gets you fired; the banker who refuses to give you relief on your debts; the sister who keeps you from seeing your parent; the criminal who assaults your child or husband. Must you forgive them? This is America! I have rights — the right to sue, to accuse, to demand, to fight, to pursue Justice. 

    I won’t tell you that that is not so. There are times when you do need to defend yourself in the courts on earth against those who have harmed you. But even when you need to take those steps, you still need to forgive the person or persons who trespassed against you. 

   Why? 

    Because Jesus forgives. Because failing to do so injures your own heart and keeps you from your connection to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. It is a block, a stone, a pebble, a shard, a nugget of pain and resentment and anger. Or, as Pope Francis calls it, “a bothersome fly in the summer that keeps coming back” It keeps you from fully taking in the Word of God, the lessons of Christ, and the works of the Holy Spirit that are active, alive and giving us grace and mercy every day. 

--Marcy St. John,
OLMC Communion Service,
March 5, 2024

Image source: https://pastorduncansblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/forgiveness-reflections-on-parable-of.html

A welcoming and merciful attitude toward everyone (Pope Francis)

    This is the logic that guides Jesus’ mission and the mission of the Church: go in search, “fish” for men and women, not to proselytize, but to restore full dignity and freedom to all, through the forgiveness of sins. This is the essential point of Christianity: to spread the free and regenerative love of God, with a welcoming and merciful attitude toward everyone, so that each person can encounter God’s tenderness and have the fullness of life. 

--Pope Francis 

Image source 1: Br. Mickey McGrath, St. Frances Cabrini, available for purchase at: https://trinitystores.com/products/wall-frame-gold-st-frances-cabrini-by-m-mcgrath?srsltid=AfmBOoo6GEhZi16BOxZzbYNz6xjP9ye7xTX9eB9IDKM5REwvbTC5mWaC
Image source 2: https://www.catholiccompany.com/blogs/magazine/st-frances-xavier-cabrini-giving-without-reserve
Quotation source

Forgiven people must become forgiving people (Fr. Patrick van der Vorst)

    It is worth listening carefully to the questions that arise in the Gospels. They are rarely just trivial; they are our questions too. [In Sunday's Gospel,] it is Peter who speaks: “Lord, how often must I forgive?” He dares to suggest an answer, seven times, already generous in the language of Scripture, where the number seven points to fullness. But Jesus stretches the horizon even further: not seven, but seventy-seven times. In other words, forgiveness is not something to be counted, measured, or exhausted. And to make his point, Jesus tells a story of a servant whose debt is unimaginably large (far beyond anything he could ever repay) and yet, when he asks, it is simply cancelled. This is how God forgives: not cautiously, not reluctantly, but freely, abundantly, without calculation. Every time we enter the sacrament of Confession, we stand in that same place: bringing what we cannot repay, and receiving what we do not deserve: mercy. 

    But the parable does not end there. The one who has been forgiven so much refuses to forgive a small debt owed to him. And suddenly the light shifts. The story becomes sad... but it becomes a mirror. Because the mercy we receive is never meant to remain with us; it must flow through us. Confession does not only reconcile us with God... it calls us to become people of reconciliation. If we close our hearts to others, if we hold on to resentment or refuse forgiveness, we begin to block the very grace for others. Jesus is not being harsh; he is revealing a truth of the heart: that forgiven people must become forgiving people! 

    In The Confessional (1827) by Sir David Wilkie, we are drawn into a vivid moment of the sacramental life of the Church. A young woman kneels at the confessional, quietly speaking to the priest, while a small crowd gathers closely around, waiting their turn after what appears to have been a penitential procession. The scene is almost theatrical in its intimacy: faces lean in, bodies press forward, and , if you ask me, the figures seem remarkably close, almost a bit too close to the confessional box. This closeness is intentional however. Wilkie is less concerned with strict liturgical accuracy and more with conveying the human drama of repentance: the urgency, curiosity, even tension that surrounds the sacrament. The painting captures confession not as a distant, private ritual, but as something deeply embedded in communal life. The proximity of the onlookers heightens that sense of shared experience: sin and forgiveness are personal, yet never entirely hidden from the community. 

--Father Patrick van der Vorst 

Image & quotation source: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-18-21-35-2026/

Can we forgive? (Robert Schreiter CPPS)

    Where might we stand now, years after 9/11? When we think about perhaps forgiving something as terrible as this, we need to attend to the teaching of Jesus closely. 

    First of all, it is God who forgives sin and wrongdoing. Only God has sufficient perspective to grasp the extent of damage that sin and wrongdoing create in our lives and in the lives of those against whom we sin. 

    In the act of forgiving, we participate in God’s larger act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that comes from God it is a gift of God to us. If we listen closely to Jesus’s words, we will discover that. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’s first word on the cross is about forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do ” (Luke 23:34). We often read this as Jesus forgiving his executioners. But in actual fact, Jesus is calling on God, his Father, to forgive them. Jesus is still in the midst of his suffering. He cannot forgive his executioners for something they have not yet completed. But he can call on his Father to forgive. 

    This act of Jesus can be a great source of comfort to us when we struggle to forgive but cannot. We can call upon God, who sees all things, to forgive. And that is a prayer that we, too, someday may be able to forgive. 

--Robert Schreiter CPPS 

Image source: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/st-anthony-messenger/can-we-forgive-9-11/
Quotation source (and full article)

Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 13, 2026: Unless each of you forgives your brother from the heart...

Unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart…
If you can’t receive the mercy of God, how can you give it? 

    Our ability to be forgiving is based on our ability to accept mercy from God and to know that we need it. The author of Psalm 103 is very clear on God’s abundance of mercy for humankind: The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion. Indeed, God crowns us with kindness and compassion so that we might bring his mercy to bear on the world through our own forgiveness of others. For, as the Book of Sirach points out, mercy restores connection: Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? Rather, forgive your neighbor’s injustice, Sirach suggests, and set enmity aside, so that you might participate in the healing justice that mercy and forgiveness create in our world. 

    How often must I forgive my brother? Peter asks Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. In response, Jesus offers the parable of the unforgiving servant, in which the king understands the power of mercy and forgives the servant’s loan, but the servant himself does not understand forgiveness even after he himself is forgiven: he has his fellow servant put in prison until he pays back his debt. Jesus wants Peter to understand that God’s mercy is tremendous and there is no keeping score; if you have to keep score – as many as seven times? – it is not forgiveness you are contemplating. 

    God constantly forgave the people of Israel as a sign of the depth of his love for them. They didn’t get it, nor do we. God’s mercy is not conditional – God gave his Son for our salvation! -- nor can our forgiveness be conditional. For, as Paul tells the Romans, none of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord. All we do should thus be for the sake of his love for us, including opening ourselves to his divine mercy and wielding that same loving mercy in our world as we forgive our neighbor’s injustice and bring the Lord’s healing kindness to bear upon our world.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Created to experience union (Dr. Wendy Wright)

    God’s heart ‘breathes’ in and out, and our hearts are created to breathe in concert, in inspiration and aspiration, with the heartbeat of God. Our heartbeats are aligned with the divine rhythm by ‘living Jesus,’ by letting His divine-human Heart become our own. 

    Human hearts, too, breathe and beat in concert. 

    Human hearts are created to experience union with each other in the process of coming into union with God. In fact, we are most fully who [we] are created to be when we exercise love relationally. That is, when we love one another as we have been loved: concretely, uniquely, particularly. 

--Dr. Wendy Wright,
Seeking God’s Will Together

Image source: https://cbcmb.com/gods-heart/
Quotation source

It's a give-and-take (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

    In order to create Christian community, it is necessary to help all the members find balance with each other. Nothing will ever be the way we want it to be, but it will be the way we need it to be in order for us to be in community. Concessions will have to be made. We will have to make some changes in ourselves in order to be members of a community, as the community will have to make some changes in themselves to receive us as members of the community. 

    It’s a give-and-take that is the very center of what Jesus means by “love one another.” Love one another in order to adapt. Love one another in order to be transformed by one another. Love one another so that the Lord can work among us. That is change in us. 

   We stay the same and we no more belong than we did before. To belong to any relationship requires change, and that is what love makes possible. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, May 23, 2025

Image source 1: OLMC Advent Fair 2025, Activity Tables, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1306595431505868&set=a.1306604761504935
Image source 2: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/discover-power-community-being-part-something-bigger-than-johnson/