How to make prayers rebound on you as curses
Christ warns that unmercifulness destroys grace at its root, and shuts the very gates of God’s mercy upon thr unmerciful.
Christ warns that unmercifulness destroys grace at its root, and shuts the very gates of God’s mercy upon thr unmerciful.
Editor’s Notes
Can your prayers rebound upon you as curses?
St Paul, echoing Deuteronomy, reminds the Hebrews that “our God is a consuming fire,” and tells the Galatians:
“Be not deceived: God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap.”
Our Lord warns us that we must come to him with certain dispositions – and without certain others.
In this part on the parable of the unmerciful servant, Fr Coleridge explains…
How God’s mercy becomes the measure of our own forgiveness, for we who owe God an infinite debt must forgive without limit.
That hardness of heart destroys peace within the Church, drawing down chastisement – until repentance restores charity.
Why unmercifulness itself is a terrible sin, closing the very fountain of pardon on which the soul depends.
He shows us that forgiveness is not an optional virtue but the condition of divine mercy itself — the key by which God opens His treasures to the contrite.
For more on the context of this passage, see Part I.
The Measure of Forgiveness
The Preaching of the Cross, Vol. I
Chapter IX
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1886, 159-70
St. Matthew xviii. 21-35; Story of the Gospels, § 88
Burns and Oates, 1886.
(Read at Holy Mass on the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost)
Ingratitude and unmercifulness
A sinner reciting the Lord’s prayer in this state of heart is really imprecating on himself the merciless anger of God. For he asks to be forgiven as he forgives, and as he does not forgive, he asks not to be forgiven.
It is not the ingratitude which is irremissible, but the unmercifulness. There is always in every sin a large element of ingratitude, and we are probably none of us aware of the immense debt which we owe to God’s justice in this respect. To be fully grateful to God requires an enlightenment and a fervour which are found only in the saints. Unless we know all that we receive day after day, and hour after hour, from God, it is not possible for us to give Him the thanks which He deserves.
Therefore, the admixture of ingratitude in our service to Him is a fault which, in His infinite compassion, He may look on with greater mercy, though St. Paul tells us that one of the chief causes of the miseries to which the heathen world was abandoned was their deep ingratitude to God, as far as they knew Him. But mercifulness requires the most exquisite enlightenment. It ought to be the very air which we breathe, for it is by the mercy of God alone that we are what we are, and have all that we have, and hope for all that we hope for. We can only be unmerciful by forgetting our own relations and position with regard to God, by having false ideas of our own rights and claims, and by utterly ignoring our own need of mercy.
Thus, unmercifulness is inconsistent with the love of God and the love of our neighbour, and is in itself an almost sufficient sign of reprobation. And when a man has just been imploring for himself the mercy of his offended and justly incensed Lord and Master, and has just received from Him the forgiveness of all his debt simply out of compassion, there must be in his heart a revolt and revival of malignity of the blackest kind, if he can turn at once on his brother and refuse him his pardon.
All grace must be swept away from the soul in such cases, and therefore it is that there is no exaggeration in the figure used by our Lord in the parable where He describes the chastisement of this unmerciful servant, as being the exaction of all that he had himself been liable to before he was forgiven.
Our Lord dwelling on the chastisement
We have remarked that it has pleased our Lord in this passage to insist on the duty of forgiveness rather from the terrible motive of the punishments to which we may be exposed by the contrary fault, than by setting before us the innumerable blessings which are placed easily within the reach of those who are careful to practise the merciful and forgiving temper.
Just so He chose, in the passage of which this parable is the continuation, to dwell especially and more than once on the terrible punishment of the scandalous, although He did not altogether omit the immense blessings awaiting those who are careful of His little ones.
The form of our Lord’s teaching may be accounted for by the question of St. Peter. To ask how many times we are to forgive implies that there is to be a limit to our indulgence in this regard. It is not the language of one who looks on every possible occasion of forgiving any one anything as the most blessed of treasures. St. Peter seems to ask what was to be the precise limit put to his practice of a virtue which contained in itself so immense a treasure, as if it were possible for him to be too frequent in forgiving.
Therefore, the duty of forgiveness of his brother was put, by the terms of his question, as if it were more of a duty than a privilege, a thing the practice of which required urging on rather than checking. The true aspect of forgiveness is this which is placed second only in the question before us, and which is implied in the position which this virtue holds in the prayer of our Lord.
Our measure of forgiveness
In very truth, every opportunity of forgiveness of another is a precious gift from the mercifulness of God, putting in our hands the power to bathe ourselves afresh in the life-giving streams of His grace and compassion. It is an occasion on which we are told to take the key of God’s treasures and help ourselves to as much as we will.
Most truly, then, is it said by the Fathers that our enemies and all who injure us are our best benefactors, opening to us opportunities which otherwise we should never have. The teaching of our Lord, when taken into consideration together with the words of His prayer, suggests to us the careful study of every kind of mercifulness, as a skilful householder considers in how many ways and how quickly and most often he may multiply in profitable investments the resources which he has to dispose of.
The measure set before us in our practice of this virtue is simply the relation in which we wish ourselves to stand with God. We wish Him to think of us and deal with us and behave towards us, with the most unclouded confidence and the most perfect affection, without even the slightest remembrance that we have ever offended Him, as also with the most perfect substantial pardon for our offences, without reserve or mistrust, as if we had always been most innocent and most faithful, emptying upon us the choicest boons of His most magnificent beneficence.
All this, and more than we can imagine, more than our most soaring wishes can rise to, it is within our own power to obtain, by the exercise of the privilege of forgiveness to others, in this sense the highest of all the boons which He has placed in our hands, because it is the coin which purchases all boons whatsoever. We have but to carry out into every thought and word and action and feeling towards our neighbour this most perfect charity, and then we may be certain that all which we seek from God will be ours.
The Healing of the Nobleman’s Son
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