Befitting this holy season, our Liturgy of the Word today looks something like a penitential rite. It begins with an acknowledgment of sin:
We have sinned, been wicked and done evil; we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws. We have not obeyed your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name…1Then, in our Responsorial, we move to something akin to a Kyrie, a plea for God’s mercy: “Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins.”2
Jesus, in our Gospel reading, gives us the conditions for receiving God’s forgiveness, which is a gift, a grace.
In our contemporary idiom, karma, a Buddhist term, refers to getting what you deserve. If you spend any time on social media, you read quite a few invocations of karma. As Christians, we are people of grace. I don’t know about you, but I will take grace over karma any day.
Theologically, grace usually refers to unmerited favor given us by God. In other words, God doesn’t grace us because we deserve it. He graces us because God is God and self-giving constitutes divine nature at its deepest level.3
If I want to receive God’s grace given in Christ through the Spirit’s power, I must be willing to extend that same grace to others. Among these “others” to whom I must extend grace are not only but especially my enemies.
In a few moments, gathered around the Lord’s Table, we will pray “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”4 If you’re praying this prayer intentionally, you are accepting God’s condition for forgiving you. What you’re praying is something like “God forgive me both on the condition that I forgive others and to the extent that I forgive others.”
In our Gospel today, Jesus says, “Forgive and you will be forgiven.”5 You know from experience that it is often easier to invoke karma over someone who has wronged you than it is to extend the grace of forgiveness, let alone do what the Lord enjoins in the verse immediately preceding the first verse of our Gospel for today- to love that and do good to that person.6
1 Daniel:5-6.↩
2 Psalm 79:9; Lectionary 230.↩
3 See Philippians 2:5-11. ↩
4 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass, The Communion Rite, sec. 124.↩
5 Luke 6:37. ↩
5 Luke 6:35.↩
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