Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
June 20, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062024.cfm

---

Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.’

“If you forgive others their transgressions,
your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others,
neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.

---

In these verses, Jesus utters another dangerous prayer: forgive us, God, as we forgive others.

Uh oh! I don’t know about you, but I think we can be pretty bad at forgiveness. It’s so much easier to remember a wrong done to us, to excuse ourselves of any responsibility for it, to fester in its hurt, to calculate a concomitant revenge, to demonize and ostracize the offender.

Jesus says, “Hey, is that the way you want God to forgive you?”

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We examine Jesus’s words in the Our Father to find the secret to forgiveness.

• We are all the children of One God, equally and completely loved.
• God wills holiness and joy for every one of us.
• God will always grant forgiveness to the ready heart.
• We live for the hope of heaven, and the circumstances of this world pale in its Light.
• Still, in our daily circumstances, we need to be fed by the Spirit in order to find the courage and desire to forgive as God does.

---

Poetry: Enemies – Wendell Berry

If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,

how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then

is love to come—love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go

free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not

think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.

---

Music: Forgiveness – Matthew West