Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord!

In the fifth penultimate petition of the Lord’s Prayer we pray that our Heavenly Father, the Lord God, forgive us our debts, in a similar way to how we forgive our own debtors. When we pray in such a manner, we of course mean not a monetary debt, but are talking about our sins, mistakes, hurt feelings, all of the failures in our spiritual life, and so on. We ask that the Lord forgive our sins, like we forgive the sins and insults of our neighbours.

These words are frightening if we consider that we are asking the Lord to deal with us as we do with other people. It seems to me that there are few people in the world that do not remember this or that wrong which was done to them at one time or another. Although more often than not we would like to forgive that person who sins against us, in reality it is hard to forget and act graciously towards such a person, as if nothing had transpired.

To convince ourselves to forgive our debtor, or at least to act towards him or her in a kindly and good-natured manner, we can always remember those great blessings that the Lord repeatedly grants us. One can remember that He created us, gave us free will to decide how to live, sent His Only-Begotten Son to live amongst us so as to show us the way to salvation, suffer, and give up His life for the sake of our eternal blessedness. It’s sad to think that despite everything that the Lord has done for us, we continue to sin against Him daily. If we compare our debt before our Creator and Saviour and that sin of our neighbour that is so difficult for us to forgive, it become clear that our sin and the debt of our debtor are in completely different and disparate categories. Therefore, let’s compel ourselves to forgive those who wrong us and treat everyone with love.

As is the case with the former petition, in the context of the Divine Liturgy these words have a particular meaning. When we approach the chalice, each of us wishes to obtain a closer relationship with Christ. We hope to join ourselves to Him and to be sanctified, that is, we await that through Communion, we will become in some way more God-like. This does not mean that we are not obliged to take steps to bring ourselves closer to God. Rather, it means that we firstly use all methods at our disposal to reach this goal and then approach the Chalice with the hope that the Lord will arrange everything that we were not able to correct.

One of the Lord’s characteristics, as we heard in today’s Gospel parable, is mercy and love towards mankind. He forgives all our sins if only we ask of this from Him; therefore, let’s strive to join ourselves to Him and become like Him, through the Communion of the Holy Mysteries of Christ. It behooves us to firstly make an effort to become, as much as possible, merciful and forgiving towards our debtors. In such a way, God will forgive us our sins and we will be worthy of Communion and sanctification.

priest Alexis