In my experience, any time I receive people for confession, whatever penance I ask them to do, they accept without any reaction or comment. Nevertheless, I noticed that if I ask to forgive someone who made a mistake or hurt his or her heart, the reaction is normally surprisingly strong: “No! It is impossible! I cannot make it! He did such a bad thing to me, I cannot forgive!” Indeed, it seems that forgiveness is far beyond our possibilities and strength.

In the Bible, the idea of forgiveness undergoes an evolution. In the beginning, the response to wrongdoing is just revenge. In the book of Genesis God himself says: “Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” (Gen. 4:15) And after a while, Lamech says to his wives: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold" (Gen. 4:23-24). In the book of Exodus, there are regulations meant to stop the escalation of violence consequent to revenge: the punishment must be proportional to the damage suffered: “eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe”(Exod. 21:24-25). At the time of Jesus, the rabbis were teaching that forgiveness can be granted at most three times. It is no surprise, therefore, that Jesus’s call to forgive "Not seven times, but, […] seventy-seven times” leaves everybody astonished and probably worried.

Jesus makes use of a parable for explaining why we need to forgive. He talks about two servants. One was left off of his incredibly huge debt: one silver talent was 36kg of precious metal (or the salary of 6,000 working days). So, his debt of 10.000 talents was such a huge amount of money that nobody could ever think to pay it back. But, despite the infinite mercy of his king, this slave is not moved to compassion to forgive another slave who owed him only a hundred denarii, which is the wage of a hundred working days, that is a considerable amount of money, but nothing if compared with the debt previously forgiven to his creditor.

This parable depicts our lives. Forgiving is very difficult. It has nothing to do with weakness since in fact forgiving is a strong act of will able to overcome the emotional refusal of those who hurt us. It is a resolution that forces ourselves to go against our feelings. Indeed, forgiving takes a lot of spiritual energies and it becomes almost impossible if we rely on our strength. Nevertheless, everything changes if we realize that before forgiving others, we are the object of the infinite mercy of God: before forgiving others, we are forgiven by our Heavenly Father. And, as it is said in the parable, our debt is much bigger than the offense we have suffered because of the misconduct of our neighbor. The awareness of the immense love and mercy of God, therefore, enables us to overcome our feelings to start loving the person who, humanly speaking, is unlovable, the person who has become our enemy.

Finally, we cannot foresee whether the person who made it wrong to us will convert or not because of our forgiveness. But what we surely know is the fact that if we do not forgive, the hatred in our hearts will never disappear and even will grow stronger, up to the point of affecting our spiritual, psychological, and even physical life. If we resolve to not forgive, we will pay miserable consequences: we will become slaves of our own heavy feelings. It is for this reason that Jesus invites us to forgive. Forgiveness is mainly a grace for the one who forgives because it makes us freer and happier. And since the desire to take revenge from time to time will come back, we need to renew our resolution every day in a gradual and on-going process of healing, a choice to be remade seventy-seven times. It will be a path of liberation, a path that will lead us to the surprising discovery that our Father in heaven had beforehand taken up from our shoulders a burden as heavy as 10.000x36Kg,… for free!