Main news for 6 March 2024

"Forgive, and you will be forgiven" is a principle known long before Christ came. But in our fallen world it is usually taken to mean mutual indulgence: close your eyes to my sins, and I will close mine to yours, and we will not spoil each other's mood with mutual reproaches and claims. Of course, such an arrangement usually works only as long as the interests of one of the parties are not seriously affected, but quite often it still helps preserve decency and the appearance of normal relations. In everyday life, this is often what is called "forgiving your neighbor his sins."

But Jesus undoubtedly means something else: for He was never tolerant of any sin, although He always forgave the repentant sinner. He plainly proceeds from the fact that we are all sinners, and each of us needs, on the threshold of the Kingdom, to be forgiven those sins of which we repent and for which we grieve. But then we have no moral right to demand an accounting from others: either we begin to reckon up sins, and then there can be no question of the Kingdom, or we allow ourselves to be judged and cleansed from sin by the One who alone can do this; then the road into the Kingdom is open to us. The choice is ours.

Those who came to trade in the temple had no intention of defiling it. They were quite devout people who had put up for sale what pilgrims needed for the rites. The transformation of God's house into a den of robbers happened unnoticed, contrary to the conscious will of those gathered there, as everyday practical concerns accumulated like dust and covered over the very thing for which the temple exists.

When we come to God with our everyday needs, we are not committing a sin, for He Himself invited us to ask for them. But when we come to the temple only with practical needs, forgetting the selflessness of our relationship with God, we risk becoming those same "practical people" who made the temple a place of commercial deals.

What, after all, is the connection between faith and forgiveness? And do unbelievers really have no ability to forgive at all? Of course, if by faith we mean what is most often meant by it, namely religiosity and everything connected with it, the questions asked may appear, at the very least, strange. But if we see in it what most authors of the biblical books saw, namely faithfulness, much immediately becomes clearer. At the same time it is important to keep in mind that faithfulness in this case, judging by the context, applies not only to relationship with God, but also to relationship with one's neighbor; in any case, Jesus never says that He means only faithfulness to God or to Himself, as Messiah or as Teacher. And that is no surprise, because faithfulness is indivisible. Either it exists, and then it permeates every relationship, whether with God, with Christ, or with one's neighbor, or it does not exist, and then it is nowhere and in nothing. Moreover, faithfulness is unconditional, because at its foundation lies that spiritual wholeness which, for life in the Kingdom, to which Jesus calls the faithful, must be absolute.

Only this makes forgiveness possible: forgiveness is not indulgence toward the sin of one's neighbor, which often makes one close one's eyes to the obvious (unless, of course, it concerns the one closing his eyes directly), but the ability to see in one's neighbor that image of God which gives even the greatest sinner hope for salvation, a hope that remains until the day of Judgment. This is what the Savior calls us to: to live the life of the Kingdom and to look at our neighbor with the eyes of a citizen of the Kingdom. And to forgive the neighbor's sins until God carries out His judgment.