Mt 18:21-35 (Law of Love )
A missionary was surprised one day to see a woman enter his hut carrying a handful of sand which was still dripping water. “Do you know what this is?” she asked. The missionary answered: “It looks like sand.” “Well, these are my sins,” the woman explained, “my sins which are as countless as the sands of the sea. How can I ever obtain forgiveness for all of them?” “You got that sand by the shore, did you not?” said the missionary. “Well, take it back there and pile up a heaping mound of sand. Then sit back and watch the waves come in and wash the pile slowly but surely and completely away. That is how God’s forgiveness works. His mercy is as big as the ocean.”
The custom of the world is to return good for good, but the custom of the child of God is to return good for evil”. Sadly, one could add that it is all too common to return even evil for good. The debtor in our parable received goodness and mercy beyond measure but he still went out and inflicted evil on his fellow servant. As a result, the mercy shown to him lost all its effect and he had to pay the price.
Forgiveness means to give up any right of retaliation. The difficulty of forgiveness is our inheritance as human beings. The difficulty in forgiving involves not merely the moral question but the physiological aspect as well. Forgiveness is actually a decision of the will, of the mind. It is an act of the intellect to decide, “I will forgive.” Unfortunately, emotions cannot catch up with the intellect. Therein lies the difficulty – we have forgiven with our heads, but our hearts act up and say, “Not yet.” Faced with the fact that it is difficult to forgive because our emotions cannot catch up with our decisions, the only thing we have to keep in mind is this: when we refuse to forgive, the first victim of unforgiveness is not the one seeking forgiveness, but we who deny forgiveness.
In one way or the other, we are “debtors” before God. We fall down, we stumble, we sin against Him and our brothers and sisters. But God in His abounding love and mercy has forgiven us through Jesus Christ His Son. If God was able to forgive us “while we were still sinners,” how much more we are to one another? If we do not feel that we owe a lot to God then we can never learn how to forgive others. It is far better to forgive and forget than to resent and remember.
