Is there someone in your life you need to forgive?
If we look deep enough, most of us will admit that there is someone we still haven’t forgiven for something that was done to us; perhaps something that happened years ago. One of the great spiritual truths is that forgiveness is as much for ourselves as it is for the other person. If we do not forgive, we hold that person in bondage to their sin. And we hold ourselves in bondage both to the sin and the sinner as well.

It isn’t always easy to forgive. Sometimes we don’t even want to forgive. We begin the process, and it is a process, by asking for the desire to desire to forgive. Eventually, as that desire takes root, we learn to let go of our mistaken notions about forgiveness and come to understand what forgiveness really consists of.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that the sin doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean that we forget something bad happened to us. It doesn’t mean everything is “all better,” and it certainly doesn’t mean that restitution and justice aren’t needed. True forgiveness is a free will action, prompted by God, that frees us from bondage. It’s not an emotion; it’s an act of the will. It’s making a decision to let go of the chains that bind us, and then moving forward.

Remember that the Lord tells us that everything can be worked to the good for those who believe, including the greatest of sins committed against us. One of the keys to having that happen is our cooperation with God’s requirement to forgive. But first, we have to be willing to take that first step of the will.

First Reading

Warn the wicked, trying to turn them from their ways (Ezekiel 33:7-9).

There is a particular responsibility that goes with the prophetic office. Ezekiel, whose name means “God strengthens,” was given a very important mission as regards the people: to warn them of Jerusalem’s impending destruction, and then to bolster their hopes in the Babylonian exile. This chapter (33) begins as we see here with God telling Ezekiel that  he must be the watchman on the wall who warns the city with a trumpet blast about the coming of the enemy. Midway through this same chapter,  Ezekiel receives word in Babylon, where he is living with the first of the Jewish exiles, that the city of Jerusalem has fallen.

His task now is to explain the reasons that God has allowed this to happen to his chosen people in the hope that this will finally turn their hearts back to the God who first gave them the land they have now lost. Because remembrance of God’s past actions on behalf of his people is so important to maintenance of the covenant with God, when they forget him and his works, God repeats himself, so to speak. By sending them back to  the area where Abraham had first come from when God called him out of Babylon and into the promised land, he is reminding them that what he has given he can take away. But God is also true to his promise, and that is the message of Ezekiel: that God will lead his people back again, in the way he led their father Abraham, out of Babylon and back into the land of promise.

Second Reading

Owe nothing to anyone, except mutual love (Romans 13:8-10).

In this portion of Romans, St. Paul is concerned with explaining to this community of Christians how they should conduct themselves in the world. And here, as a kind of summation of the whole, he gives the central moral teaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: love. He lists four of the last seven of the Ten Commandments, those having to do with how we are to treat our neighbor; note that he doesn’t even bother to list the rest, finishing his list with a rather surprising, “whatever…” We shouldn’t take from this that St. Paul doesn’t know or care about the Ten Commandments!

The critical part of this teaching is that love accomplishes all of the commandments, whatever they may be. We must be clear that he is not saying that love substitutes for the law or erases the law, but that love accomplishes what the law commands. He means that the love that has come to dwell in our hearts by the grace of Jesus Christ and his Spirit moves us to live in a way that is not simply expressed by a moral code. Supernatural charity or love is a new power that enables us not only to obey the “shalt nots” of the old law, but to live in a positive disposition which is ordered to more than simply observing justice toward our neighbor. Jesus commands us not only to be just to our neighbor, which is what the law required, but to love our enemies!

Gospel Reading

If two agree about anything for which they pray, it shall be granted to them (Matthew 18:15-20).

After having given the “keys of the kingdom” to Peter in Matthew 16 (the Gospel reading two Sundays ago), we now see an aspect of the power to bind and loose that Peter receives being extended to the disciples. The Church itself is given a certain authority in the world. Reminiscent of the prophetic commission that we see in the first reading, Christians are to be “watchmen” over others who may stray from the truth. We have a prophetic responsibility, which we have received by Baptism, to speak honestly and directly to those in the Church (a “brother”) who may begin to stray from the path of love that Paul describes in Romans.

Jesus tells us that to guard against this simply being taken as a personal grudge by the one receiving the correction, we should go with others who can thereby make clear that this is not personal, but rather an objective matter of proper Christian conduct. You might be tempted to think that when Jesus says, “If he refuses to listen…treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector,” that he means reject him all together. But we need to recall that the person who recorded this Gospel for us was a tax collector named Matthew. And Luke tells us about how Jesus  treated the tax collector named Zacchaeus (Luke 19). Likewise, St. Paul is sent to preach the good news to the Gentiles by Jesus (Acts 9:15). Sometimes Christian love will have to be tough love, giving clear signs of God’s disfavor at sin, but love and mercy are to have no limits for those in Christ.

MEDITATION:
Listen now as Jesus comes before you and says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.” As you hear those words, is there someone you believe has “sinned against you”? Have you done as Jesus commands by telling this person how you feel, or are you harboring secret ill will? How do you respond to Jesus?

RESOLUTION:
Consider the people in your life whom you may need to forgive. Make a plan to talk with them in order to resolve your differences.

Reprinted from  Opening the Word at Formed.org .
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