This Sunday is about forgiveness, and most of us have something to learn about this important act.

Our First Reading tells how awful wrath and anger are, and how the sinner “hugs them tight,” a wonderful image. Release them and let them go, it says.

The Psalm speaks beautifully about God’s absolving love: God is kind and merciful, slow to anger, rich in compassion. The Second Reading says we ought to live not for ourselves but for others. We should imitate God. When we live for the Lord, it says, we will also be graced to die for the Lord.

Forgiveness is a major ingredient of living for God and for others. People do not always do right, and we need to forgive them as God does. Forgiveness is the gift and the goal.

But what does it consist of?

Our culture has some pretty diverse ideas about this. For some it is a condescending act performed only by a person who is higher than another—a King or Queen or a judge or a boss or a media star—someone who leans down to grant pardon. For others it means “I can forgive but I can never forget.” Perhaps this means, I will remain angry forever but I will never act upon it. Such a stance can include an uncomfortable attitude: “I will choke back my hurt and anger by a sheer act of the will. I may have been savaged by someone, but I will not display it in my reaction.”

On Easter Sunday of 1960, that seer of truth and lover of God, Dag Hammarskjold, wrote an interpretation that moved me:

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who “forgives” you—out of love—takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

There is a price you must pay for your own liberation. Since it has come through another’s sacrifice, you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, in spite of the consequences to yourself. You absorb them, if doing so truly flows out of love. (from Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 197)

There, Jesus tells a long and involved parable about a servant who is pardoned by the master but then goes out and refuses, viciously, to forgive his own fellow servants.

At about six lines from the end the owner of the vineyard calls him a “wicked servant” and says, “should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?”

What is the lesson? That the deepest motivation for forgiveness is loving gratitude.

If someone has forgiven me out of love, then my authentic reaction will be deep appreciation. I will want spontaneously to pass the gift on. It follows that if God has forgiven me, I will want to give to anyone else the same liberation I have received.

By doing so you or I halt the chain of causality and pass along love instead of hate.

As we dwell in Christ’s presence this Sunday, especially if we are able to receive communion, let us sense his forgiving love, signified so deeply in the sacrament. Let us allow our gratitude to flow to others.