On given weekends during the present Jubilee Year of celebrating God’s Mercy, we are asked to focus our attention on the Spiritual Works of Mercy. On this weekend, we are directed to the one entitled “Forgive all injustices.”
There is not one of us who has not been hurt/wronged by others. We are hurt most deeply by persons to whom we are close. We can respond in a number of ways when we are treated unjustly. On an instinctual level, we are inclined to strike back at one who hurts us. We want to get even. The lack of a willingness to forgive others can come to expression in the tendency to keep track of the wrongdoings that others have done. This puts us in a position of one-upmanship in relation to those who have hurt us. It can be appealing to hold over the head of another who has hurt us the wrongdoings that he/she has done.
We act in an unforgiving manner if we give in to the inclination to drag up from the past an occasion on which someone has offended us. Perhaps shortly after the wrongdoing occurred, we expressed in words that we forgave the one who had hurt us. Have we really forgiven the one who has offended us when we bring up from the past an incident in which she/he has hurt us?
Because in many cases we still have to live with persons who have hurt us, it can be appealing to put up an emotional/spiritual wall between ourselves and the one who has wronged us. We thus live on a functional level with others. We do what we have to do to get by, but we keep an emotional distance between ourselves and the one who has wronged us. After all, we don’t want to get hurt again. Whenever we hang on to the wrongdoings that others have committed against us, this poisons all of our relationships with persons. We weaken and cripple our ability to receive and to extend our Lord’s love with one another.
By ourselves, we do not have what it takes to forgive others for the wrongs by which they have offended us. The Lord will give us the strength to forgive others if we ask for this. He does this by assuring us that He does not hold against us the wrongdoings that we have committed.
There are some wrongdoings or crimes that others have committed against us that we can never forget, for example, if someone injures us or one of our loved ones. With God’s Help, we can still forgive persons who have hurt us even though we can never forget the specific ways in which they have offended us. The Lord strengthens us to let go of the hard and negative feelings that we would otherwise harbor against the persons who have offended us. To forgive means that we let go of the inclination to play the ugly game of one-upmanship in regard to persons who have offended us.
We can speed up the matter of forgiving someone who has hurt us by continuing to pray for that person and by offering to extend kindness to that individual.
As foreign as it may seem to us at times to offer to forgive persons who have hurt us, I pray that we will continue to storm heaven for the power to extend the forgiveness that we receive daily for our wrongdoings to persons who have offended us. As we work with the Lord’s help each day to do this, we will be enabling ourselves and persons who have wronged us to get on with our lives in this world as the Lord wants us to do this.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Fr. Nelson Beaver – Pastor