The plea that we make of the Lord is a serious one, because we must then forgive the one who has hurt us and that calls for a heroic act of faith. It also calls for great humility and immense love.

Yet the statement in the Our Father is extremely clear: “forgive us our trespasses,” or rather, “you Lord, forgive us,” “as

we forgive those who are in debt to us,” or “and we are committed to forgive those who have treated us badly.”

How often in life, we see difficult situations: a friend betrays us, we are unexpectedly blamed, calumny hurts us, malicious

gossip causes us much suffering. Everyone of us has his/her own experience at sometime or other when we’ve had to

forgive someone.

To forgive is not easy because human pride is very strong. It prevents us from “bowing our heads” and pushing out of our

minds the sufferings others have inflicted on us.

Only Jesus truly knew how to forgive. As he was nailed to the cross he turned to God and said: “Father, forgive them,

they know not what they do” (Lk 23, 34).

Before this sublime example we can only feel very ‘small.’ Christian life is certainly not easy. To live intensely the Lord’s

message in the Gospel means to daily reflect on what we have to do. Only a love that is true and totally free from any

constraint is the right key that opens our hearts to God, and subsequently to our brothers. Forgiveness will then be a natural consequence of our love. The more sincere and deeply rooted is our love, the better will be our ability to promptly forgive the evil we have experienced.

Daily life with its real problems in the family, at school or at our places of work allows us gradually to get accustomed to be internally willing to forgive.

Day after day, difficulty after difficulty, we can improve our relationships with those around us leaving our hearts open gradually to others, trying to forget all that has inevitably caused us suffering.

Help us, Lord, so that, tasting the fullness of endless joy of your pardon and rejoicing in the grace that you give us, may we be examples to our brothers and sisters, loving those who cause us harm and pardoning them from the depths of our hearts. Holy Spirit be always our tireless strength.

 

POPE BENEDICT ON THE OUR FATHER (From Jesus of Nazareth p. 159 - 160)

The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has

come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord “has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,” that “he

was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities,” and that “with his wounds we are healed” (Is 53:

4-6) no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we

take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most

recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution

because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven

and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable

of seeing when we speak of Christ’s Crucifixion, we will have to take up these issues again.