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. (Matthew 6:14-15)
Christ actually taught us to pray that passage, and Catholics do so at every Mass.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Before I began to understand the beauty of Catholic doctrine on sin and forgiveness, I asked some friends if God's forgiveness was conditional. After all, do we not ask God to forgive us "As" we have forgiven others? Does not "as" mean "in like manner?" Don't we ask for God to forgive us in the same way that we forgive others? The question was immediately dismissed by my friends who insisted that God's forgiveness is unconditional.
How then do we reconcile God's unconditional forgiveness with the Lords Prayer and Matthew 6:15? Is God unwilling to forgive us? The answer came while I was reading Jesus' words about divorce, a subject which hits home for me.
He said to them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. (Matthew 19:8)
When we don't forgive, we harden our own hearts. Our hard hearts become impervious to God's forgiveness. God's forgiveness cannot enter a heart which has hardened itself against forgiveness. So when we forgive others, we soften our heart; we make it pliable, porous and permeable. Gradually, as we learn to not hold grudges, as we learn not to demand payment for the wrongs done against us, our hearts will softten and God's forgiveness can begin to enter ours. Only when we forgive others can God's forgiveness begin to have an effect on us. Otherwise, God's forgivenss just dries up on the outside of our hearts like water poured on a piece of hot granite.
And that understanding addressed the question of what forgiveness is. Put simply, it is not demanding repayment or restitution for the wrongs done against me. When I really began to think about it, I asked myself it I wasn't just as bad as those who have wronged me; I who am so ready to demand reparations for wrongs against me and yet so quick to deny those same reparations to those whom I have wronged.
Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." Nathan answered David: "The LORD on his part has forgiven your sin: you shall not die. (2 Samuel 12:13)
My sins are really against God anyway and for them I deserve nothing less than eternity in Hell. David understood this and his only response was to write Psalm 51.
So that's my take on forgiveness. God's is not unwilling to forgive me, but his ability to do so depends entirely upon my forgivenss of others, just as Jesus stated and just as my friends insisted was not so. And my forgivness of others is really nothing more than not demanding some form of material recompense to my wallet or emotional recompense to my pride for wrongs done against me. That's it in a nutshell. Forgivenss does not mean that I have to hang around bad people or that I have to let my kids play with their kids. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't get punished by God or arrested by the police or put in jail by the courts. It doesn't mean that I have to let someone who abuses me live in my house. It just means that I will not demand repayment.
When someone says something bad against me or wrongs me, I try to say, "OK God, I probably deserved that." On my own I'm really no better than they are and have probably done worse. And if I am better than they are, it is only because of God's presence in me, not because of anything I am. And that is humility. I hope to master it some day.
-Tim-
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