Straight from the heart...

"...from your heart."
Mt 18:35

Reading
Mt 18:21-35

Jesus Christ demands that we forgive our brothers and sisters from the heart. From the heart!! Act of forgiving is something close to performing a miracle or more than performing a miracle. Forgiveness is a God-act, in this act of forgiving we become a child of God.

For Peter Damian, God forgives our sins which is a miracle in the moral order. Demons cannot forgive sins because it is difficult for them. He states that it is difficult to forgive than to perform any miracle1. William Placher beautifully states that when we forgive, we take humanity of the person seriously2. Another person writes that forgiveness "deconstructs the absolute categorization of the other as sinner and constructs new perspectives"3 for the other. John Caputo in The Poetics of Impossible writes that God's power to forgive is to make sinner as if he did not sin, that is God alters the past and makes it as if the past did not happen.4

That is precisely why Christ demands that we forgive others, because God forgives us endlessly and eternally. When we forgive from the heart we perform a miracle which is of the highest moral order. When we forgive we take a person seriously and when we forgive we construct new perspectives for the other. We have the power to perform this miracle. Lets do it straight from our hearts.

____________________________________________________
1 Irven Michael Resnick, Divine Power and Possibility in St. Peter Damian's de Divina Omnipotentia (Leiden: Brill Academic Pub, 1992), 62.
2 William C. Placher, "Visiting Prisoners" in Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 188.
3 Joseph S. O'Leary, "Religions as Conventions" in Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 419.
4 John D. Caputo, "The Poetics of the Impossible and the Kingdom of God" in Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 474.