DAILY HOMILIES #mercy

Unforgiveness is like holding hot coals in your bare hands hoping to throw them at your offenders. Once a snake brushed a saw in the farmer’s tool shed and in anger the snake rolled itself around the saw hoping to crush it but the snake ended up committing suicide. Unforgiveness is suicidal. On the other hand, forgiveness is self-healing. It is releasing a prisoner only to discover you are the prisoner.

God keeps us alive despite our sinfulness not because He condones sin but just so that we may have the opportunity to repent. We serve a merciful God – let us extend this mercy to our brothers and sisters; especially those who offend us or are still living in the darkness of sin.

Our failure to forgive people puts a big question mark on our baptismal certificate. Our failure to be merciful to people as God was merciful to Ahab makes us no better than Jezebel. It is horrible for someone to kill another person (because of land or anything whatsoever) but it is even more horrible for a Christian to partake in jungle justice which has now become the order of the day today.

When we go for confession, God so forgives our sins and washes us that we can confidently say we become new creatures. God does not remember our sins because the moment we offload them at the confessional, our old self dies and we leave as newborn babies. Just as you cannot accuse a newborn baby of sin, God no longer accuses us of the sins that we have dropped at the confessional. Never be too shy to go to confession; it is not the priest who forgives us but Jesus Christ himself who gave the priest the power to retain or absolve sins in His name.

Each of us has a past. You may see yourself as a desert, God is saying, I will make rivers flow from you. You may have gone deep in sin, yet God is saying: “my child, you can still be a Saint.” The God who called a murderer and changed his name from Saul to Paul is the same God we serve.

God believes that people can change so He keeps giving second chances again and again. God knows that in punishing the sinner, the saint suffers alongside. God allows the sinner to be but the day of harvest must surely come.

There is an extent to which our worship of God becomes reduced to the mere observation of rules. This was the problem of the Pharisees.

Jesus had the chance to totally squash to pieces all those who treated him badly yet, He did not even wait to rise from the dead before He began his campaign of forgiveness. Right on the cross, Jesus said: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34). As if this was not enough, eight days after Easter Sunday, Jesus appeared to his disciples saying: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

It doesn’t matter what your past has been, Jesus wants to work through you and in you. Jesus wants you to be His apostle, to spread the news of His Resurrection to the ends of the earth. Come of the darkness, embrace the light, save yourself from this wicked generation.

Knowing the weaknesses of others should not make us puffed with pride, it should make us think of ways to help them up. This requires humility; humility to know that your level in life came not by your power but by the grace of God and others who helped you in the past.

It surely makes a lot of sense to revenge on the wrongs done to us by others, to teach them a lesson or to show them that we are not to be toiled with. This is often the message in all our action movies – it is the wisdom of the world. However, as Christians, Jesus expects us to operate with a higher level of wisdom; one that sounds foolish to the world, a wisdom that forgives, that turns the other cheek after receiving a slap, a wisdom that says: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”