God Forgives EVERYTHING

I will never forget a story I read from the Spanish Civil War, in which a Republican was dying and called out to two Nationalist soldiers who were passing by: “A priest, please! A priest!” One of the soldiers shouted at him: “Rot in hell, you son of a…!” But the other soldier, moved with pity, went to find a priest and brought him. When the dying man saw the priest, he asked anxiously: “Are you the parish priest of this town?” The priest said he was. So the man made his confession and received the Anointing of the Sick, and the priest asked the soldiers to carry him somewhere under a roof so he wouldn’t die in the street. On the way the man kept saying: “He forgave me, he forgave me!” And one of the soldiers said to him: “Of course he forgave you, that’s his job!” But the man explained: “It’s that I didn’t just kill sixteen priests. When I came to this town to kill the priest, I found his father and his brother, and since they wouldn’t tell me where he was, I killed them. And this man, whose father and brother I killed, has given me absolution. He has forgiven me!”

Well, that is how God is. God forgives EVERYTHING. Absolutely EVERYTHING. And that is something people who hold a grudge over some serious harm done to them or their families sometimes find hard to understand. But the things of God are definitely not easy to understand. How can we explain, for example, that God became flesh in a Virgin and came to this earth as a poor, helpless baby to save us from our sins? How can we understand that God sent His own Son to die on a cross, abused, insulted and despised by many? Wouldn’t it have been easier for Him to come Almighty, with thunder and lightning from on High, to shout at us to repent and behave ourselves?

Well, it wasn’t like that, because God made us free. Free to follow Him and love Him only if we want to. He left us the Way to follow Him, and He reminded us of it many times through His Son in many parables, so that we would learn what Evil is and what Good is. Jesus Christ, who is infinitely merciful, came to this earth to reform the “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” of the Old Testament, but He also came to tell us that the commandments for all people are the same ten His Father gave to Moses.

And as if that were not enough, He left the sacrament of confession in His Church when He said to the apostles: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you retain them, they are retained” (Jn 20:22–23). That sacrament shows us the infinite mercy of God, who forgives anything to anyone who is truly repentant and resolved not to sin again. How many times have we read that wonderful passage of the Gospel where Christ says to the woman caught in sin: “Go, and sin no more!” (Jn 8:11).

How many men who were great sinners ended up as canonized saints? Every time Saint Augustine thought about converting, he would say to God: “Not yet, Lord, for I find chastity very hard.” And like Saint Augustine, there are many of us who have taken hard knocks in life for leaving the Child Jesus waiting for us in a corner. We don’t understand that He is there in His little crib, with His arms open, longing for us to decide quickly to begin a New Life, a life that puts Christ into our plans.

Advent is a very fitting time to prepare ourselves and let Christ into our hearts. Let us not leave that encounter for the last minute, as the Republican did, or the good thief, because we do not know when God will call us into His presence; much less living in a country like Venezuela, where death can be waiting just around the corner.

This Christmas, every time we see the Child Jesus in His little crib, may we remember that He was born to save us, and that He is waiting for ALL of us with open arms!