FORGIVING IN JUSTICE AND LOVE
How often should we let someone do us wrong or cause us suffering and we still choose to forgive them? It is a question asked in a variety of ways, ever in the firm conviction that the sufferer has done enough, and that at last he or she can be released from the tiresome obligation of further compassion. Knowing that we can expect to be forgiven a wrong we have done or suffering we have caused very often arouses a feeling of arrogance in us humans.
Consider the parable narrated in the Scriptures of the unforgiving servant: A servant is ordered by his master to pay back an amount akin to ten thousand bags of gold. The servant could not pay the money and asked his master for mercy and patience until he could repay. The master, moved with compassion, forgave him the debt and told him he did not have to pay it. The same servant went out and he found his fellow-servant who owed him a sum akin to a hundred silver coins, so that one debt is 600,000 times as large as the other. He grabbed the fellow-servant by the throat, demanding he should pay back what he owed. The fellow-servant begged the spared servant for mercy, but was refused and thrown
