The advice columnist Ann Landers once famously wrote that “hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.” Anyone who has struggled to forgive a serious wrong knows there is certainly wisdom here. At the same time, it risks reducing forgiveness to something we do primarily for ourselves and our own spiritual or emotional growth.  

Jesus’ conception of forgiveness in today’s Gospel is more relational. He is counseling his disciples, those who are following him together in community. In any stable community, the ongoing practice of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation is necessary to keep it from falling apart. “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur,” says Jesus, and “woe to the one through whom they occur.” Sin is serious. Sin is damaging. But we who are bound together in Christ know that sin does not have the last word: “If your brother sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him.”  

But even for those committed to the path of Christian discipleship, the call to forgive endlessly can sometimes seem a bridge too far. It may help to remind ourselves that forgiveness does not mean denying that wrong was done. Indeed, forgiveness would be pointless if there was no wrong to forgive. In the end, though, we cannot reject the possibility of forgiveness for others without rejecting it for ourselves. For all of us, without exception, bear the weight of that millstone and all of us pray that we might be saved from the sea.