The Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Who can forgive sins? Now the trouble starts. The Scribes who were always making troubles to Jesus had their major involvement in today’s gospel too. “How can this man talk like that? He is blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They are the spoke men for the traditional Jewish belief that only God is capable of forgiving sins. Jesus moves in to question this attitude because scribes are wrong both about God and about the nature of forgiveness.

Many people agree with the scribes in limiting the forgiveness of sins to God. God does forgive sins, but is he the only one to do that? If we believe that the forgiveness of sins is God’s exclusive right, it lets us off the hook about bothering to forgive those who have sinned against us. For Jesus, forgiveness is not the exclusive right of God; it is the shared duty of all who follow him. Jesus wants everyone to imitate God’s practice of forgiving sins.

When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray to the Father, he makes an essential part of the prayer the commitment to forgive, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In Luke’s gospel Jesus says, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day and turns to you seven times, and says “I repent” you must forgive him (Lk 17: 3-4). When Peter asked Jesus how many times I have to forgive my brother, seven times. Jesus replied “I say seven, seventy times”. St. Paul sums up the whole mission of Christ under the heading of reconciliation. Through Christ he says, God “reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18). Christ died, he says, in order to reconcile the world to God “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20).

For Jesus, forgiveness is the most profound healing. God is ready to forgive as we heard from the first reading

“No need to recall the past

no need to think about what has been done before

see I am doing a new deed

even now it comes to light, can you not see it”?

There is little point in questioning God’s generosity in the matter of forgiving. The problem is not with God’s forgiveness but with our own; whether we can forgive. Jesus’ concern is to involve us in the same work, in the same commitment to forgive those who sin against us. This is one of the new deeds that God is doing in the person and ministry of Jesus.