St Benedict Parish recently issued the following announcement.

After having meditated on fraternal correction last Sunday, today’s Liturgy highlights another aspect of Christian charity: forgiveness. Jesus, knowing how difficult this is for human nature, proposes, as a measure of our forgiveness, the very example of God: he always forgives and generously the sinner who repents. The Christian is called to imitate divine conduct, to be like God in what constitutes the true greatness of love. In the first reading of today Sirach talks of us harboring anger…this is the anger that is nourished, treasured, and cultivated. It drives out all peace in our lives and ends up poisoning our life. It can quite often be for the most stupid reason – but over the time the anger and resentment can build and slowly choke our life. 

The only antidote to anger is forgiveness. In the second reading of today St. Paul tells us that we are meant to live not for ourselves but for the Lord. If the Lord is the Lord of love and mercy, the way, and the truth to the life we owe it to ourselves to love. Love is the greatest of all the virtues. I would like to just leave you with a brief image of forgiveness that I heard from NT Wright. As Christians we must see forgiveness like the air we breathe and store in our lungs. There is only room for us to inhale the next lungful when we have just breathed out the previous one. 

If we insist on withholding it, refusing to give someone else the kiss of life they may desperately need,we will not be able to take any more in our self, and we will suffocate very quickly. Whatever the spiritual, moral, and emotional equivalent of lungs may be, they are either open or closed, living, or dying – the Old Testament often uses the metaphor of a hardened heart. If it is open, able to forgive others, it will also be open to receive God’s love and forgiveness. But if it is locked up to the one, it will be locked up to the other. Peter’s question and Jesus’ answer in today’s Gospel say it all. If we are still counting how many times, we have forgiven someone, we are not forgiving them at all, but simply postponing revenge. 

Seventy times seven is a typical bit of Jesus’ teaching. What he means, of course, do not even think about counting; just do it. We must forgive like we breathe, because if we don’t, we suffocate ourselves. The fundamental lesson of the parable is found in the words spoken by the master to the wicked servant: “Weren't you also supposed to have pity on your companion, just as I had pity on you?”. The profound reason, therefore, for which we must forgive our neighbor is that God has forgiven us; and we must do it in the same way and to the same extent as God.

Original source can be found here.