There’s the good side of God forgetting our iniquities with total forgetfulness. And, there’s the bad side of God remembering our sins in detail, as today’s first reading from Sirach notes. It’s a fearful thought that God would remember in detail every sin committed against his majesty. Every blow that strikes another; every looting that destroys; every angry word yelled at another in vengeance. Every detail – minute detail – of every action and move, every facial quiver, how much saliva flew out of the mouth when screaming, all measured by God. To think that God would not forget such details we wouldn’t even consider is a fearful thought. Here we are again back to the virtue of forgiveness. It seems to come up at those necessary times throughout the Church year. At times, I get the sense we may treat forgiveness like Superman treats kryptonite; avoid it at all cost because if I draw near to it, it will kill me. When in truth, it does the opposite. It will save us. Just like it saved all those horrible, horrible men standing near the bottom of Jesus’ Cross, asking his Father in heaven to forgive these violent actors because they don’t know what they do. Some of the last words Christ would speak in his brief life. A life, by the way, not taken from him, but given over freely. The power of his life and death belonged to him alone, and not those horrible people standing down below him on that first Good Friday. Here we are, with readings that center on the most difficult virtue to put into practice from that long list of Christian virtues. So the king had first forgiven the large debt of a lowly servant after the servant begged for mercy. In fact, the king went further than the beggar’s request. The servant only wanted more time to repay. “Give me a couple more months and I’ll give you back all I owe.” But the compassionate king, acting like the God we love, forgave everything. “Don’t worry about it, Judas,” the king said, “you’re all set. You’re free of all you owe me. Keep what you make, and your wife and kids I was going to sell, buy them something nice instead.” Don’t you think the wider world, and our personal world, would be a better place if we could forgive as easily as that? Where God would have no need of remembering all our sins in great detail? Where forgiveness was not on the top of the list of difficulty, but somewhere down in the middle of the long list of virtues? Instead, Judas walks off, encounters someone just like himself in social standing, doesn’t keep his social distance because he starts to choke the guy – for it’s hard to choke someone from 6 feet away – probably spit in the guy’s face too like the Sanhedrin did to Jesus. He does his best impression of Robert DeNiro in a drunken rage. How can anyone be so quickly forgetful and so short-sighted about the mercy they were just shown by someone else who had the power to crush out their life? How can we lose sight of the mercy freely given to any of us so quickly? That amazes me more than any other detail in this lengthy parable. That the mercy shown to the first servant, the forgiveness that was just won through begging, could not be carried forth to the next human encounter. That’s what the Lord wants us to do with it. He doesn’t want us to lose the mercy we receive from him. But to forward it to our next encounter. Where we become God in the best sense. Where the Divine within us is spread like a heavenly virus. We understand why forgiveness is on the top of the difficult list. While many offenses against our person are actually tiny in nature, where we make them out to be large, once in a while there’s a large offense that makes forgiveness, mercy, and compassion genuinely hard to practice. But, the model here is the Cross, the largest offense in all human history, with Christ hanging on it, as we hang onto his words. When the Lord spoke those words of forgiveness from the Cross on that darkest of afternoons, it was in that moment that his humanity knew full and everlasting peace. He did it for them, those horrible people who wanted him up there, like the king in the parable forgiving the servant. But he also forgave for himself. Christ filled his human nature with goodness in that moment. And that’s what the virtue that is most difficult to practice does for us. It fills us with God’s peace. A very good reason to practice forgiveness, at least from our hearts.