Who do I need to forgive?

Homily

7th Sunday in Ordinary Time C

20 February 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Who do I need to forgive?

Note that there is no option in this week's pivotal question, nor in the Gospel.  There is only am imperative.  Forgive, baby, forgive! The question is not should I?  It's who.  Jesus always speaks with great clarity, cutting me to the heart.  Today's revelation is this.  Mercy is at the heart of God.  It alone is the ground of reality.  If you want to live, you have to forgive.

This week's question is the easiest to answer, and the hardest to do.  Who do I need to forgive?  That's easy!  It's me.  I need to forgive myself.  To a person here today, we are all too hard on ourselves. Does that sound like weak sauce to you?  I promise you it's not.  It's as hard as anything you'll ever attempt to do - to forgive yourself.

I am my own worst enemy.  I always have been, and probably always will be.  I'm a fool to ignore this.  What do I know first and best about myself?  That I'm not good enough.  When Jesus says love your enemies, it starts and ends with me. Forgiving any other enemy is easy in comparison.

At the present moment, I have lost touch with how much God wants to forgive me.  Yet it's Jesus' favorite thing to do - by far!  He is desperately thirsting to forgive right now those who will never pay him back. That's me, and that's you.

St. John Vianney put it even better than Jesus.  Can I get away with saying that?  SJV says it better than the psalmist, who sings God's desire to forgive me spans as far as the east is from the west.  SJV puts it this way.  God forgets how I will hurt him tomorrow so he can forgive me today.  Woof.

I try to get this across in the confessional.  You are God's favorite person right now, for you give Him a chance to reveal how He really feels about you.  You give Him the chance to reveal all His love, by forgiving you at the place where you will not pay him back.  

Yet I never trust this for myself.  It might be true for others, but not me.  That's God's truth, not mine.  I know God instead by how much I deserve His mercy.  I have calculated it with the greatest precision.  Yet the measurement is the thing I'm most wrong about.

His truth is how He feels about me.  Mine is that I am not worth it.  Which makes me the enemy of God, and just as bad, the enemy of myself.

It's the scariest thing not to be able to control how someone feels about you.  Sin is trying to control in response to a fear rooted in hurt.  Jesus sees this in me, and says Father forgive them, they know not what they do.  Sin is about control, but did you notice in today's Gospel there is zero control?  Today's Gospel is again completely off the rails, defying all calculations.  Which is precisely the point.  If I ever stopped calculating what I'm worth, stopped trying to control how God feels about me, I wouldn't give a flip every again about measuring anyone else.

The key is me.  Who do I need to forgive.  I need to forgive myself.