The Peace of the Lord 

Among sinful human beings (the only kind there are!), peace is a non-thought without forgiveness. Mutual forgiveness. A forgiveness the Responsorial (Psalm 103) directs us to base on the very being of God: “The Lord is kind and merciful; slow to anger and rich in compassion.” 

Sirach 27:30 to 28:7 asks us how we can expect God to act like God to us if we won’t act like God to one another. This isn’t as crazy as it might sound. If we ask God for forgiveness, because “the Lord is kind and merciful; slow to anger and rich in compassion,” we are saying it is good for God to be this way. We are glad he is this way. But can we say that honestly if we don’t agree that it is good for us to be this way too? 

Should a person nourish anger against fellow human beings and expect healing from the Lord? Refuse mercy, yet seek pardon for oneself?  

We need to examine our hearts and ask whether, down deep, in the core of our being, we believe forgiving is good or not. If we do not believe it is good, then we do not believe in the God who is “kind and merciful; slow to anger and rich in compassion,” the God of “steadfast love.” That is serious! 

In Matthew 18:21-35, Jesus makes it graphic. When a forgiven debtor will not forgive his debtor, the master “handed him over to the torturers until he paid back all he owed.” 

Jesus is not saying here that his Father (and ours) is a torturer! He is telling a story to make a point. The point is not to describe the character of the Father. He did that in the story of the “prodigal son,” where he is describing the “joy in heaven over one sinner who repents.” Jesus tells this story to answer Peter’s question: “How often should I forgive?” Don’t make it say what it doesn’t. 

What Jesus says is, “My heavenly Father will treat you in exactly the same way unless each of you forgives your brother or sister from your heart.” We actually prayed for this in the Our Father at the beginning of the Rite of Communion: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” 

Matthew and Luke have different versions of this prayer, which shows it was not meant as a formula to be memorized and recited (although Christians find value in that and do it), but as a set of priorities to guide our hearts in prayer. Translations vary. The one the liturgy uses, because we are used to it, is not found in any modern ones: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Ray Brown renders Luke’s version as “Forgive us our sins, for, indeed, we ourselves (now) forgive our every debtor.” He points out, in response to the difficulty caused by “Forgive us… as we forgive,” that here “there is no quid pro quo, nor is there a question of the priority of human forgiveness.” We never measure God’s actions by ours. “The Matthean ‘as’ simply means that the human forgiveness is the counterpart of the divine.” 

Romans 14:7-9 makes forgiveness a matter of stewardship: “None of us lives as our own master… we are responsible to the Lord.” Since God “has given us the ministry of reconciliation,” we are accountable for all divisions. (2Corinthians5:18.) 

Prayer Prompt: “Peace” is the most frequently used word (7 times) in the Rite of Communion at Mass. In the Rite of Communion, three things are presented as inseparable: peace, forgiveness, and the “wedding banquet of the Lamb.” The inclusion of “Lamb” tells us that the wedding banquet celebrates, depends on, and is incomprehensible without the sacrificial death of the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” All forgiveness, all peace, is rooted in that. So, without forgiveness, no peace. Without peace, no wedding banquet of the Lamb. Should I forgive everyone now and start the wedding banquet early? 

— Fr. David M. Knight

View today’s Mass readings, Lectionary #130, on the USCCB website here

Fr. David M. Knight (1931-2021) was a priest of the Diocese of Memphis in Tennessee, a prolific writer, and a highly sought after confessor, spiritual director, and retreat master. He authored more than 40 books and hundreds of articles that focus primarily on lay spirituality and life-long spiritual growth.