Rev elations

Our reading from the Gospel of Matthew (18:21-25) today is a lesson in forgiveness. Most importantly the story highlights our responsibility to be humble in receiving and giving forgiveness. If God is merciful with us, so should we too be merciful with one another. Perhaps you would like to cast your mind to the last time you said sorry to someone, or to the last time somebody said sorry to you. How hard was it to say sorry and how hard was it to put aside the hurt that somebody had caused you? An assembly I remember from Primary School was one in which the teacher spoke about the hardest word there was to say in the world; the word he was talking about of course, was the word ‘sorry’ . Putting aside hurt is one thing when somebody has said something out of turn, or snubbed us in some way, but the work of forgiveness and repentance only gets harder when the hurt escalates; the nature of human failing means that the level of hurt and damage we can do to one another is almost