Someone has observed that as Christians, we should all be grateful to St. Peter because he opened his big mouth and put the question to Jesus directly: “How many times ought we be wiling to forgive someone

            Peter was speaking for all of us . . . all of us have learned that forgiving is never easy! It is for that reason we sometimes become convinced that we are well within our rights to set some definite limits on forgiveness. Enough is enough! We say that and we mean it! Enough is enough!

            When we would drive over to Lexington when I was a child, we'd always pass a rather creepy looking old house along the way. Even though it had all been said before on other trips, someone in the car would tell about how that old house had a partition right down the middle effectively sealing one side off from the other.  Two sisters lived there, but they were never ever able to forgive one another and, thus, the partition. They lived in the same house and died in that old house having never forgiven one another.

            We'd always register the same reaction . . . "How dumb was that? They should have ‘made up'." How dumb was that?

            I do believe that we all knew that it was more than just "being dumb" . . . forgiving isn't easy. Those two eccentric old sisters may have been the poster girls for not forgiving and forgetting, but we all knew that forgiving and forgetting isn't easy for anybody.

            Think for a moment about what forgiveness is actually all about. The Greek word for "forgive' means to "release from one's grasp," to "set free."

            A graduate student in social work once did a study on the dynamics of forgiveness as a social process. What she said she learned was that among all the people she interviewed, there was unanimous agreement about one thing: when they forgave someone there was, for everyone of them, a physical sense of relief, a feeling of letting go of a heavy and restrictive weight. Like the old spiritual says, "they laid their burden down."

            Most reported that they had not realized that they were carrying such a heavy weight of bitterness until they "released the other from their grasp." Suddenly, the people said, they felt much freer and much lighter and much more themselves.

            They went on to bravely admit that they had somehow enjoyed the feeling of being the victim and, for that reason, they had hung on to the anger and the resentment refusing to forgive.

            When the forgiveness finally happened, though, it was wonderful! All the people interviewed talked about how good it felt!

            Forgiveness feels so good because it is so good. It is, for us, a return to the experience of harmony and acceptance that the Garden of Eden represents. This is the way we were created to live by a loving Father God.

            So, why do we set limits on our forgiving? Peter thought he was being downright righteous to suggest forgiving someone as many as seven times! Jesus counters with "seventy times seven," which really amounts to unlimited forgiveness!

            Unlimited, unreasonable, illogical, seemingly wasteful forgiveness . . . this is the very essence of what life in Jesus Christ is all about.

            Christianity is a way of living. It is about relationships above everything else, our relationship with God and our relationships with one another . . . Christian living is not about a set of rules on a table of pre-set limits on anything . . . not on loving, not on forgiving, not on understanding, not on accepting, not on giving in, not on moving on.

            Christianity is grounded in real living in a real flesh and blood world. Jesus was one of us and He knew that forgiveness is never, ever easy.

            The prayer Jesus taught us to pray makes it clear that forgiving will be a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day struggle for us, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." We pray that prayer so often because we need to do so. Jesus teaches us that we can't do it alone.

            Until about four years ago, I could not think of my father without a flash of deep-rooted anger. I had accepted the part about alcoholism being a disease on one level. All I knew was that this "sick" man never wanted to get better and, because of that, life for me and for my mother had been punctuated by all of the ugliness that alcoholism brings with it. We never knew what to expect, who to expect once the alcohol triggered the personality changes. That was just too much to forgive - I wasn't about to forgive any of that, never!

            One day about four years ago, I was walking in a lovely park near us. The trail around the lake takes me about fifty minutes. I began my walk not thinking about anything or anybody, just enjoying the beauty around me.

            As I walked along, I began to replay some of the worst of the worst memories, the ones that had been seared into my consciousness all those year, the ones that fueled my resentment, all the ones that I could not forgive or forget.

            All I know is that during those last few minutes of my walk, I realized that it was alcohol that had claimed and dominated my father's life from the time he was a wild teenager until the day he died from liver and kidney failure, consequences of all those years of uninterrupted drinking.

            I realized that for all my life it had been easier to be angry and resentful that my dad was not like some of my friends dads, that my dad's life centered on his need for the next drink and the escape it promised. He was who he was. He didn't ask to be that way.

            At the end of that walk, everything had changed. God had taken my burden of no forgiving away! It remains blessedly so today! I can think of him without anger. I can honor him as my father, flawed and captive though he always was to another "master."

            "Love" would be a stretch . . . maybe that will come. I am just grateful for the forgiveness that occurred that day in the park. God brought that about. I barely even wanted it. My limits on forgiveness had been established and those limits I had set in place were destroying me slowly but surely. Not forgiving was destroying me.

            We can't really know for sure what was going on with Peter when he tried to bait Jesus into setting some limits on forgiving. All we do know is that Jesus wouldn't buy it.

            Unlimited forgiveness was, for Jesus, a way of living and a way of dying.

            God wants that for all of us, and God can make it happen . . .

            This, I know.