My dear Parishioners,
Peace! There are nineteen (19) In Brief articles in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which treat the Lord’s Prayer or “Our Father.” The following reflection considers CCC, 2862.
The fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer has two parts, one which implores God’s mercy for our offenses and the other which is the condition for our reception of forgiveness, namely the forgiveness of those who have offended us. Here we consider both aspects.
For those who believe Sacred Scripture our need for God’s mercy should be evident: “If we say we have no sin the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8); the just man sins seven times a day (cf. Proverbs 24:16); and of course, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Pride is a sin, and like all unrepented mortal or deadly or grave sins leads to damnation. The Good News of the Gospel, in part, is that God does not will the death of us sinners but that we be converted and live (cf. Ezekiel 18:23; 33:11). The bad news is that, seemingly, not everyone accepts God’s grace and call to holiness. It seems that not everyone rejects sin, Satan and the glamor of evil. While Heaven is a longed for destination, even if by way of Purgatory, there is another destination which is Hell or Gehenna (cf. Mark 16:16; John 3:18; 2 Peter 2:6; Titus 3:11).
Our reception of forgiveness is contingent on the extent we forgive. This makes the Lord’s Prayer both powerful and dangerous. Our need to be forgiving is not only found in the Lord’s Prayer. When teaching about the “unforgiving servant” (Matthew 18:21-35) we see how severe the Lord’s judgment is on the wicked who fail to forgive others. The difference, of course, is that the torture and confinement of Hell are worse than anything we can imagine here on Earth, and we have no way to repay all that we owe God. While some discount the reality of Hell, the repeated imagery of “place of torments” (Luke 16:28), “pool of fire” (Revelation 19:20), “furnace of fire” (Matthew 13:42, 50), “unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12), and “everlasting fire” (Matthew 18:8, 25, 41; Jude 7), where “the worm dies not, and the fire is not extinguished” ought to make a clear impression that there is a very real and radical possibility for the life to come which is not very pleasant. It seems to me that the logic of the Lord’s Prayer and of the Gospel calls us not only to be faithful to prayer, but to mercy and repentance no less, encouraging one another similarly.
In the Lord’s Prayer we pray for God’s mercy upon us and we promise to show mercy to our neighbors. The phrase attributed to Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) errare humanum est was picked up by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism (1711): … “to err is human, to forgive divine.”
God bless you!
Father John Arthur Orr