Today’s readings: Ecc. 27, 30 – 28, 7; Rom. 14, 7-9; Matt. 18, 21-35.

Forgiveness has never been easy. When Peter asks Jesus the number of times one should forgive, his answer is 70 times seven, an infinity. There is no curb on the capacity to forgive, no limit on the ability to break the vicious cycle of violence.

We can never project a Christian discourse on forgiveness as seemingly condoning or legitimising injustice. Can we preach forgiveness to the oppressed when they are becoming aware of their rights? Can we in some way reconcile talk about forgiveness with a context of domestic violence or other sorts of abuse?

We have to be cautious.

In My First White Friend Confessions on Race, Love and Forgiveness, Patricia Raybon writes about how the oppression she felt in the US had taught her to hate white people. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice, writes Jonathan Sacks, once the UK’s Chief Rabbi.

Saying sorry doesn’t right a wrong, though it means drawing a line over the past, on lingering resentments. Today we have deeper knowledge and grasp of ourselves and of the mechanisms inside that determine our behaviour and choices.

Forgiveness may at times sound like a defeat. You do not forgive when or because you are weak. Forgiveness is never the last resort, because nothing else can be done.

You can only forgive if you are strong. Today’s first reading speaks of the dynamics within, which can be both liberating and enslaving. It speaks of anger management, which at some time or other we all may have experienced as painful.

Life is too short for us to wait and keep alive in our hearts the fires of bitterness instead of the fires of love. That is why Ecclesiasticus itself, a text which stands on purely natural wisdom without any specific reference to revelation, says: “Remember the last things, and stop hating”. It is never worthwhile to live imprisoned in resentment and anger.

But besides the purely psychological and ethical reasons to forgive, there are the reasons of faith. Forgiveness, according to the Bible, must come from the heart, and that is what makes it so hard. When we do something from our heart, writes Eugene Kennedy in The Pain of Being Human, we do it with our whole person; if it comes, it is the moment when we make ourselves fully present to others.

St John Chrysostom, a most important early Church Father, writes: “He that is angry without cause shall be in danger. But he who is not angry when he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices.”

Anger is not by itself sinful. The Bible speaks of God’s wrath, and Jesus was angry on several occasions. There are obvious reasons even for us to be angry.

Forgiveness and meekness never mean sitting on the sidelines when action is needed. They are submissiveness not to circumstances or to whoever is being unjust or abusive. They are submissiveness to God to whom ultimately the judgment seat belongs. Christ’s resurrection means God never abandons those who leave judgment only in His hands.

God has his own gentle power and way to lead us out to liberation even when things around us remain unchanged. In this sense, forgiveness is always a point of arrival. It is always the end of a long and winding road where painstakingly we can let go and let God be our guide. It is when the prison door is opened and the prisoner can go free.

Our generation, in very similar ways like previous ones, has witnessed and still witnesses terrible crimes of oppression, abuse and injustice that create victims, generate hatred and leave deep wounds in the broken body of humanity. Hurts received and not dealt with become barriers to growth and to inner peace. By contrast, forgiveness is the remedy that removes those barriers and brings healing.

That is why forgiveness is the hardest thing of all, yet its slow pursuit day after day brings us closer to achieving it.