Fr. Michael Williams

God has been sending messengers to humanity for thousands of years, but it’s interesting to note that the message hasn’t changed that much. About two hundred years before the Birth of Christ, God sent a scribe called Ben Sirach to Jerusalem; he was sent with God’s Wisdom for the people of the time. What Ben Sirach said has been recorded in the OT book of Ecclesiasticus; we heard a small section of it in the first reading today.

Ben Sirach counseled that we should remove, ‘resentment and anger’ from our hearts, as these are ‘foul things’. They are base instincts. Resentment and anger often develop in someone’s heart, when they have suffered a wrong. It’s often understandable that resentment can spring up as a result of an injury suffered. Nevertheless resentment, and the unwillingness to forgive, is like a cancer that grows to destroy a person’s inner peace. Resentment, anger, and the failure to forgive is ultimately what leads to murder and war. Murder and war always first start in people’s hearts. But when hearts are renewed through God’s grace of compassion and forgiveness, great changes can take place.

At the beginning of the 1980’s, God sent Our Lady to a small number of young people in Kibeho, Rwanda. (These apparitions have been approved by the local bishop, and so they have the same status as the apparitions at Lourdes or Fatima). Through the visionaries, Mary told the people of Rwanda- and the world- to remove the bitterness and hatred from their hearts by getting closer to God and their neighbours through prayer, penance, and Christian charity. It was essentially the same message that God sent through Ben Sirach. Most of the Rwandan’s were Catholics, but their tribal divisions of Hutu and Tutsi caused great animosity. The hatred that existed in the hearts of many there led to the Rwandan Genocide, which led to the killing of a million people in 1994.

Following the advice of Ben Sirach, Our Lady, and Our Lord, let’s be people of forgiveness, always remembering that our Heavenly Father is eager to forgive us our shortcomings and sins, but He expects us to do the same, when we are slighted in any way. Not to forgive and to be resentful is to follow one’s base instinct, but to be a person of forgiveness is to participate in the Divine Nature of Christ, who forgave those who sinned against Him.

Let’s pray for the graces necessary to imitate Him in forgiving.