The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

In today’s gospel reading Peter’s question “Lord how many times must I forgive the offences of my brother? Seven times? seems to be a practical one in light of the nuisances we face in forgiving others.

For the faithful, we know the Bible will never cease to enlighten us no matter how often we read it. So the enlightening sentence for me was “The king took pity on him and not only set him FREE but even CANCELLED his debt”.

How often in the process of forgiving those who have injured us, we are ready to cancel his/her debt, that is the injury inflicted, but are we ready to set him/her or for that matter set ourselves free from the bitterness of the evil which has been done on us. And the best way to examine this is to check out how we think, speak or react when the person who injured us is right before us or is spoken about by others.

The root cause of the difficulty we have in forgiving others and setting free is our failure to appreciate how completely God has forgiven us. An overwhelming experience of this forgiving love should impel us to forgive those who have injured us. If we do not do this it means that we heave fully realised and therefore not really experienced God’s forgiveness.

So we pray that we experience God’s seventy-times seven forgiveness, no limit, endless and on-going in light of our own sinfulness and be ever ready to forgive and set free those who have injured us, which is the primary demand proposed by Jesus for our daily living.