“Forgiveness” by Brian Flanagan, Fiat Ventures
This week’s First Reading starts off with quite the quote: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” My son is just about a year old, and he has certain stuffed animals that he hugs tightly…or puts right into his mouth…depends on the day.
We can agree that we’re all sinners, but I’d bet that most of us would prefer not to think of ourselves in that image, hugging tightly to anger, almost as though we love it and have affection for it. But as we think about it more, we can see how true that is. Picture a small child holding tightly onto a toy or stuffed animal. What happens when you take it away? They cry. They might even throw a tantrum. They hold on even more tightly and try not to let go. Sometimes when we’re angry at someone, and a friend tells us we need to just “let it go”, we can have that same reaction. “Don’t take away my anger toward this person! I have every right to feel this way so don’t tell me any different!”
Not that being angry itself is childish, but what we do with that anger can sometimes be. We all know the “Christian thing to do” is to forgive someone when we’re angry with them. But it would be overly simplistic to say that forgiving someone is just “letting it go.”
So what does it mean to forgive? Well for starters, it doesn’t always mean that you’re saying “Hey no big deal, it’s okay, let’s go right back to the way things were.” It could mean that, if say you’re forgiving a friend for getting distracted and forgetting to text you back. But sometimes when we are deeply hurt in one way or another, it might even be the case that the relationship can never go back to the way things were. Sometimes we might even have to cut ties with that person. But even if we never see them again for good reason, we’re still called to forgive them. Not to say that what they did was okay, or that there’s no harm done when there is. Jesus calls us to “love our enemies”, and loving someone means, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, to “will the good of the other.” Obviously in some cases this can take a long, long time, and we might even have to start with the prayer, “Lord, I really don’t want to forgive this person and I still have all this anger in my heart toward them, so help me to see them as you see them and not be clouded by anger and resentment.”
Peter then asks a great follow-up question in the Gospel; he asks how many times we have to forgive someone. As many as 7 times? Jesus answers, “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Sometimes we interpret that line as Peter asking “Lord, if my brother sins against me seven times, do I still need to forgive him even after the 7th time?” Jesus’ words still apply to that scenario, but another way to look at it is Peter asking, “Lord, if my brother sins against me in a big way that’s hard to get past, is forgiving him just a one-time thing, or do I need to keep forgiving him over and over for the same sin?” And Jesus answers, “Yes, sometimes when people sin against us it’s really hard to get past, we have to keep praying for them and praying for the grace to get to a place where we can forgive.”
So this week, think of one person in your life right now that you need to forgive (or work toward forgiving). Then think of another person that you’ve hurt in some way, and ask for their forgiveness. If we start there, we won’t be like the sinners hugging wrath and anger tight, and we may not quite be like Elsa from Frozen and just “Let it go” either, but we’ll soon be like the Saints worked to forgive, and so received God’s mercy for themselves.