The Unmerciful Servant

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“Then Peter went up to him and said, ‘Lord, how often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘Not seven, I tell you, but seventy-seven times’” (Matt. 18:21-22).

Peter was obviously othered by this business of forgiveness. He obviously had a lot of things that he felt he either needed to forgive, or he needed to work on in that direction.

But in the question that he asked Our Lord he faces a limit on his forgiveness. As often as seven times? He is willing to negotiate a little bit, but there is a final point there.

Our Lord tells him, “Not seven, but seventy-seven.” In other words, always. Our Lord invites us to have a forgiving heart.

“If you forgive others their failings,” we’re told in St. Matthew, “your heavenly Father will forgive you yours. But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive your failings either” (Matt. 6:14-15).

“As God's chosen ones,” says St. Paul, “holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other.

“Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which is the bond that makes us perfect” (Col. 3:12-14).

One of the final words that Our Lord speaks from the Cross: “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Our Lord invites us to have those words frequently on our lips and that sentiment in our hearts.

One of the most poignant photos of John Paul II is when he goes to the prison cell to visit his would-be assassin and to forgive him.

He walks the talk, going out of his way. He left the world with this great example of forgiveness.

He said to Ali Ağca, ‘My brother, how can we appear before the Lord if we do not forgive our faults reciprocally?’ The papal spokesman clarified later that his would-be assassin did not ask for forgiveness, but the Pope forgave him anyway.

Forgiveness is the loving refusal to demand compensation for past injuries or hurts. The logical human reaction is that ‘I want my pound of flesh.’

‘I want to get even, I want to get my revenge, I want to have vengeance. I want to have that feel good when it comes to scoring points.’

Our Lord invites us to wash away all those things, to wipe the slate clean.

Sometimes it's in the little things of each day, and sometimes there might be big things in the course of our life that Our Lord places upon us. He wants us to truly learn this virtue.

There was a couple in Texas who had an only child, a daughter, and she was brutally murdered. Then the fellow who did it was caught.

The couple who had lost their only child wanted justice, and they wanted the death penalty. They campaigned for the death penalty and it was handed down.

A week or two before it was due to be carried out, they decided to go and visit this prisoner. He was a young fellow.

They wanted to look into his eyes and let him see and experience what their daughter must have experienced before she left this world. They wanted their pound of flesh, they wanted vengeance, they wanted to get even, and they wanted some satisfaction for the hurt that they had been caused.

They expected to find some monster, but in fact, they just found some young kid who made a big mistake in his life. He was brought up in a difficult area, deprived of many things, and he was very remorseful; asked for their pardon.

When they came away, they were a bit confused. They didn't expect to find such a simple fellow. But they decided to go back and visit him again, just to get a second look and a second impression.

The second time they came away they had been more chastened, in a sense. They sort of saw that, ‘Maybe this guy didn't deserve to die, he's not such a bad guy after all, he's very sorry for what he did, and maybe he deserves a second chance.’

They decided to campaign against the death sentence; that the guy would get a reprieve. They kept visiting him over time and helped him a little bit.

He lived out his sentence, and eventually, he was released. They were there at the gate of the prison to welcome him back into the world. They helped him to get started again.

But they narrated how as soon as they started to understand where this fellow was coming from, they began to sleep better at night. ‘A new peace came into our lives. Little by little we were able to forgive and move on.’

So, the loving refusal to demand compensation…the devil moves us to demand compensation.

‘I want to heal this hurt; I want to feel better by inflicting some hurt on other people.’ Hurts or abuses or injustices can burrow actively into our memory.

Our Lord invites us to have unlimited forgiveness, to forgive always promptly and wholeheartedly. It's not just a superficial forgiveness, but a profound, deep thing that comes from our heart.

God pardons those who pardon others. We are all the time in need of the pardon of God. We come looking for that pardon frequently.

We are invited by Him to show that same pardon to others. The mercy that we show to others is the same mercy that will be shown to us.

Ecclesiasticus says, “He who exacts vengeance will experience the vengeance of the Lord, who keeps strict account of sin. Forgive your neighbor for the hurt he does you, and when you pray your sins will be forgiven. If a man nurses anger against another, can he then demand compassion from the Lord?” (Ecclus. 28:1-3).

Our Lord has perfected this command by extending it to every person and every offense. There is no offense that is unforgivable.

Through His death on the Cross, Christ has made all men brothers in a new creation. Everybody is part of that.

But good old St. Peter wondered if this teaching was going a bit too far. His is a rather calculating mentality. Surely there should be some limit to our forgiveness.

If this person hurts me, if they have done some injustice, if they really deserve something or other for what they have done, shouldn't we deliver that something or other?

Our Lord bids him to hold his tongue, change his heart, change his mind, his orientation, his attitude.

It's not a question of mathematical calculation, when we keep a scorecard of past wrongs, up to here and no further. ‘I take this amount, but I won't take any more than that.’

Christ wants us to learn how to overcome evil through the power of His infinite love.

He wants us to put that into practice in the ordinary things of every day. He tells us this is the only way that we will attract the infinite mercy of God.

To forgive from our heart requires true faith, deep faith. Due to the intensity of their faith, holy souls and saints who have lived their lives in imitation of Christ often did not see the need to forgive.

St. Josemaría used to say, “I did not need to learn the lesson of forgiveness, because God has taught me how to love” (Pilar Urbano, The Man of Villa Tevere).

We can look at our life and our heart, our conscience, to see if we are holding any little resentment there inside, either real or imaginary; if there is something that we need to come and lay at the feet of Our Lord on the Cross.

Has my pardon been speedy, sincere, wholehearted, and unreserved?

“If somebody annoys us fifty thousand times, that's how often we have to forgive them. Our patience has to get ahead of our bad feelings. We have to wear out our feelings before they provoke more harm” (St. John of Ávila, Sermon 25).

Lent is a very good time for us to look and see: How am I forgiving others? Lord, help me to imitate your paternal mercy.

Our Lord doesn't tire of repeating that advice. Every time we go to Confession, we have a reminder that God has forgiven us many offenses, so we have no right to harbor resentment against anyone.

Our pardon has to be sincere, profound, and prompt. Sometimes we might feel some hurt for no objective reason, only because our self-love has been bruised. Our self-love can be very sensitive.

If on some occasion we have been seriously offended, we could call to mind all the times we have made some serious transgression against Our Lord.

Our Lord “does not accept the offering of someone who fosters division or has a stain on their heart. He sends them away. ‘Go first and make peace with your brother, and then come and be forgiven’ (cf. Matt. 5:24). His greatest objective is peace, social harmony” (St. Cyprian, Treatise on the Our Father).

Lord, help me to examine how I react when people rub me the wrong way. I see that I receive fewer blows than I deserve.

My reaction is one of understanding: ‘This person does not mean to hurt me’ or, ‘They have some other little cross that they’re carrying’ or, ‘I have taken this up in the wrong way.’

Lord, help me to avoid even the most minute fault against charity so that the small contradictions of daily life and social life don't detract from my happiness.

If on some occasion we have to summon up a lot of strength to forgive some greater thing, we can think of Our Lord on the Cross.

There was a lady president of Ireland one time who went on a state visit to Belgium, and she told a story from her youth which eventually got taken down by some journalist and put in a magazine.

She lived in Belfast during the troubled times, and one day her younger brother came home who was deaf, and he'd been very badly beaten up, almost left half-dead. And she was furious. She wanted to go out and kill somebody.

Her father who was there stopped her in her tracks and said, “Don't you go out and do anything, because if you go and do something, there will be another family in this town who is in the same situation as we are in now.”

The words from the merciful heart of a normal father of a family stopped her in her tracks. In that crucial moment in their family life, that father had known how to summon up words of forgiveness, mercy, patience, of kindness, and those words got engraved in her heart.

That father didn't know that his daughter was going to grow up and become a professor of law, and then become the president of the country and go on state tours of other countries; that she would bring out this anecdote in one of her speeches.

That story in Flemish got sent to the other side of the world to a Belgian priest in Singapore. He translated it back into English. He sent it to me.

The best friend of a nephew of mine got kicked to death outside a disco in Dublin. I sent it back to them and they said that the words helped. So words of love and forgiveness go around the world.

That father of a family was able to come out with those words because he had been formed in that virtue somewhere along the line. He picked it up from somebody else.

Powerful words, an attitude of forgiveness in the domestic Church that forms the souls of others.

We have to have a forgiving heart and realize that people can change. We have to avoid making definitive judgments based on people's external actions.

Every so often people around us change. We grow. We develop new virtues. The grace of God works in us.

We’re told in the Furrow, “True charity neither keeps account of the necessary services it renders all the time, nor takes note of the effronteries it has to put up with. Omnia suffert—it endures all things” (Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 738).

Our Lord wants us to endure all those insults to our self-love, to see it as an opportunity to grow, to stand on my pride, my sensitivity, to laugh at ourselves; and even to thank Our Lord because, with this little pain or hurt or pinprick, maybe I get my just deserves.

Possibly, through those things, Our Lord is helping us to be better instruments—more humble; using our ups and downs, our shortcomings, to use us better in the long term.

Lord, help me to forgive the tiny offenses of every day. It's inevitable in our daily dealings with others—at work, at home, in social relationships—that there would be small little frictions. The world is made up of all sorts of little frictions.

It's possible that somebody may treat us unfairly or hurt us a little bit. And it's possible that it doesn't happen infrequently—people we live with, people we work with, people we deal with regularly.

Somebody in Asia once told me that wherever two people are together, there is politics. That can be a useful little phrase. All it takes is two people for politics to happen.

Our Lord invites us to understand those questions. To know how to forgive on all occasions, and to do so promptly. Not seven, but seventy times seven.

Our Lord asks this of all those who follow Him—“Take up your cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24)—having a forgiving approach and an attitude of unlimited pardon. He wants us to have this generous largeness of heart, to imitate Him.

“Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Look at all the things that they did to Our Lord: every scourge, every thorn, every insult, every humiliation. Our Lord was not spared anything.

At the Tenth Station of the Cross, Our Lord is stripped of His garments. He stands exposed to the vulgar gaze of the crowd. Of all the things that Our Lord had to suffer, He might have been spared that. But He wasn't spared anything.

“Far be it from us,” we are told in Friends of God, “therefore, to remember who has offended us or the humiliations we have endured—no matter how unjust, uncivil, or unmannered they may have been—because it would not be right for a son of God to be preparing and keeping some kind of dossier from which to read off a list of grievances” (J. Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 309).

We don't keep a list of grievances. Although my neighbor may not improve, although repeatedly they might commit the same offense or do something that offends me, Our Lord wants us to avoid all bitterness.

Keep love in our hearts, because the only thing that has any value in the eyes of God is love. He teaches us to love with all our hearts. Lord, keep my heart pure and clean from all enmity.

The pardon that we grant has to be sincere, from the heart, just as God has pardoned us.

It has to be immediate, without allowing any bitterness or a spirit of divisiveness to eat away at our hearts, which is perhaps what the devil wants—and all of this, without being humiliating to the other person or being melodramatic but using those little things of daily life.

We don't even have to say, ‘You are forgiven.’ ‘Behold, I grant you my forgiveness!’

It’s just enough to smile, to change the direction of the conversation, to make an affectionate gesture as if the offense had never taken place at all.

We don’t need to suffer some great injustice before we show such charity. The little things that happen each day are opportunity enough.

Often, we have disagreements over trifling matters. There may be sharp replies or disconcerting gestures—often caused no more than just by tiredness—at work, in traffic jams, in the rush of public transport.

Lord, help us to be prepared for those little moments of friction. Don't let our charity grow cold.

Don't let us distance ourselves from others. Don't let us turn glum, with a look on our faces that everybody knows there is something wrong.

Help us to let those things pass onto the bridge, to keep our presence of God. Don't let our soul lose its peace and joy. Don't let me become touchy, oversensitive. Help me to see this is my pride at work.

Lord, are there any reactions that I have to the little irritations of each day? I have to find a way to holiness there.

“If your neighbor does wrong to you, you have to forgive him”, says Our Lord (cf. Mark 11:25). “Charity is patient. Charity is kind” (1 Cor. 13:4).

In forgiving and forgetting, it is we who have the most to gain. Our life becomes more joyful and more serene, and trifles don't upset us.

We’re told in the Furrow, “It is true that life, which by its nature is already rather narrow and uncertain, sometimes becomes difficult. —But that will help you to become more supernatural and to see the hand of God [in everything]. Then you will be more human and understanding with those around you” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 762).

There is probably nothing that attracts people more to the apostolate than that they see that loving heart that is there inside us: our words, our gestures, the atmosphere we carry with us.

We have to try and see the good in other people. It is a very healthy thing. Whenever we get that temptation to criticize or to judge, or the devil stirs up some negative feeling inside us, to immediately think of all the good that person has done in their life, how they are struggling for holiness, with their talents, their abilities, their fidelity.

“We have to understand everyone,” says St. Josemaría. “We must live peaceably with everyone; we must forgive everyone. We shall not call injustice, justice; we shall not say that an offense against God is not an offense against God, or that evil is good.

“When confronted by evil, we shall not reply with another evil, but rather with sound doctrine and good actions: drowning evil in an abundance of good (Rom. 12:21; J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 182).

Great phrase: “drowning evil.” How can I drown evil?

Lord, help me to summon up that abundance of good with which you want me to flood this world, flood my environment, my workplace, my family life, my dealings with others.

We will not commit the error of that mean servant, who himself having been forgiven so much, was not capable of pardoning even a little. Forgiven so much by his master, and then he went out and throttled the person who owed him something (Matt. 18:23-30).

How many family arguments would resolve themselves in the recognition of responsibilities and duties if we were to concede that this ugly detail, that untimely event, has been due to the tiredness of the person concerned after a long and difficult day?

We’re told in the Furrow, “While you continue to interpret in bad faith the intentions of your neighbor, you have no right to demand that people should be understanding with you” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 635).

We can ask Our Lord to purify our memory; help us to wipe the slate clean.

In Cana of Galilee (John 2:1-12), Our Lady doesn't deplore or criticize the lack of wine. ‘How can they have organized this thing so badly? How can they not be foreseen?’

She doesn't let loose with a whole series of criticisms of her friends. She helps to find a solution to the need.

We ask Our Lady how to forgive, and she'll teach us.

She'll teach us how to struggle to cultivate in our own lives those very virtues that sometimes might seem to be lacking in others. And then we'll be in a position to help them a little more.

Understanding and forgiving are the most radical manifestations of love. We find on the Cross Our Lord's final words among those radical manifestations: words of love, understanding, and forgiving.

In spite of the incredible tortures and insults that He was given, He's our example of patience. He carried the Cross, a symbol of injustice and death.

He invites us to carry our cross patiently, in a world that's often unfair, indifferent, violent, and rude. With our formation, possibly we might be all the more sensitive to all of those things.

But Our Lord invites us to pray for those who put us down, so that we would be called children of God.

Our Lady is “the Mother of Mercy because her Son, Jesus Christ, was…the revelation of God's mercy” (John Paul II, Encyclical,Veritatis splendor, August 6, 1993).

Mary magnifies God's mercy. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46).

She is “the one who has the deepest knowledge of…God's mercy. She knows its price, she knows how great it is” (John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, November 30, 1980).

Mary, may you help me to magnify also that spirit of forgiving in my soul.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

KI