Pope Francis: Divine mercy forgives and forgets
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis
celebrated Mass in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta in the Vatican on Tuesday
morning. In remarks to the faithful following the readings of the day, the Holy
Father spoke on the season of Lent as a privileged time in which to prepare our
hearts to receive God’s forgiveness and to forgive our neighbors in turn,
forgetting the faults of others.
The Holy Father’s address
focused on God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness as a perfection of his
nature, which contrasts sharply with the inability of fallen human nature to
make even the slightest concession to its own frailty.
Without memory
Taking as his starting point
the Gospel account of Peter’s well-known question to Jesus regarding how many
times we are to forgive a brother who has sinned against us – seventy times
seven times (cf. Mt. 18:22) – and the account from the 1st reading
of the young Azaria, sentenced to death in a furnace for refusing to worship a
golden idol, who, from the flames of the fiery furnace invokes God's mercy for
the people at the same time as he implores forgiveness for himself (cf. Dn.
3:25,33-43), the Holy Father offered the young Azaria’s prayer as an especially
apt illustration of the way we ought to trust in the goodness and mercy of the
Lord:
“When God forgives, his
forgiveness is so great that it is as though God forgets. Quite the opposite of
what we do, as we chatter: ‘But so-and-so did such-and-such,’ and we have the
complete histories of many people, don’t we? From antiquity through their
Middles Ages, their modernity, and even down to their present – and we do not
forget. Why? Because we do not have a merciful heart. ‘Do with us with us
according to your clemency,’ says this young Azaria ‘according to Thy great
mercy Save us.’ It is an appeal to the mercy of God, that He might give us
forgiveness and salvation and forget our sins.”
The equation of forgiveness
In the Gospel passage,
explaining to Peter that we must always forgive, Jesus tells the parable of the
two debtors, the first who gets a pardon from his master, while owing him a
huge fortune, and who even shortly afterward was himself unable to be as
merciful with another, who owed him only a small sum:
“In the Our Father we pray:
‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’ It is an equation: the two
sides go together. If you are not able to forgive, how will God forgive you? He
wants to forgive you, but He will not if you have closed hearts, where mercy
cannot enter. ‘But, Father, I forgive, but I cannot forget the bad turn that
so-and-so did me ...’. Well, ask the Lord to help you to forget. That, however,
is another matter. We can forgive, but we cannot always forget. Sometimes we
say, ‘I forgive you,’ when we mean, ‘you’ll pay me later’. This, never: forgive
as God forgives – to the utmost.”
Mercy which “forgets”
Pope Francis went on to
stress that mercy, compassion, forgiveness, repeated the Pope, are most Godly,
and recalled that heartfelt pardon given and received is always an act of
Divine mercy:
“May Lent prepare our hearts
to receive God’s forgiveness – but let us receive it and then do the same with
others: forgive heartily. Perhaps you never even greet me in the street, but in
my heart I have forgiven you. In this way, we get closer to this thing so
great, so Godly, which is mercy. Forgiving, we open our hearts so that God’s
mercy might come and forgive us, for, we all have need of pardon, need to ask
forgiveness. Let us forgive, and we shall be forgiven. Let us have mercy on
others, and we shall feel that mercy of God, who, when He forgives, [also]
‘forgets.’”
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