This week I would like to offer a few thoughts on the subject of forgiveness in the Fathers of the Church, and I would also like to use the opportunity to introduce our listeners to a new resource for quotations from the Fathers, but we’ll come to that in a moment. Firstly, the subject of forgiveness and the specific instructions given by so many of the Fathers as to this necessary virtue of repentance in the Christian life. Within the patristic corpus, one never has to look very far to find the subject of forgiveness broached directly. It is an absolute commandment, an insistent instruction, and a necessary building-block for the entire edifice of Christian life and redemption. It is a virtue and an act that needs to be practiced not simply at the heights of spiritual growth, where we find hearts of eternal forgiveness, but even at the very beginnings, at the first steps of Christian ascesis, where no progress can be made whatever without forgiveness, right at the center of our Christian practice.

Rather than focus today on one Father in an extended treatment, I would like to offer simply a few quotations on the subject of forgiveness, and a reflection on each. Let us start with a saying from the Apophthegmata, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, this one attributed to the great Abba Isidore. Abba Isidore relates the basic commandment to forgive in stark, practical, straightforward terms. The saying reads:

Abba Poimen said this also about Abba Isidore, that whenever he addressed the brothers in church, he said only one thing: “Forgive your brother, that you also may be forgiven.”

So here we have in the desert, known to all of us for its practical wisdom, its direct spirituality, precisely that kind of directness, a great saint, a great Father, known throughout the region, characterized by a single sentence, a single phrase uttered when he would meet the brethren in church: “Forgive your brother, that you also may be forgiven.” This is the practical adherence, the fierce clinging to Christ’s commandment in the Gospel, and it is good to remind us, in our day-to-day lives, of the need to be just so literal, just so practical in following Christ’s commandments. “Let us forgive, so that we may be forgiven.”

If we can move from the early Church to a much more recent Father, St. John of Kronstadt, we hear a different perspective on the same need to forgive. St. John said:

Often during the day I have been a great sinner, and at night after prayer I have gone to rest justified and whiter than snow by the grace of the Holy Spirit, with the deepest peace and joy in my heart. How easy it will be for the Lord to save us, too, in the evening of our life, at the decline of our days! Oh! Save me, save me, save me, most gracious Lord! Receive me in thy heavenly kingdom! Everything is possible to thee.

This comes from his text, My Life in Christ, and is a moving testimony to the degree to which we find ourselves forgiven. Here the great saint, acknowledging his sinfulness, is aware that through the power of the Spirit, through the grace of the loving Lord, his sins are wiped away. He is forgiven by the Lord; he is pure and whiter than the snow, characterizing there the psalm we hear so often in the Church.

St. John of Kronstadt was a man well aware of the mercy the Lord showed in the forgiveness he so freely offered. He said in another place:

Sometimes we do not see any outlet, any escape from our sins, and they torment us. On account of them, the heart is oppressed with sorrow, and it is weary. But Jesus looks upon us and streams of tears flow from our eyes, and with the tears all the tissue of evil in our souls vanishes. We weep with joy that such mercy has suddenly and so unexpectedly been sent to us.

This is the tender awareness, possessed by the saint, of the mercy of the Lord in his forgiving nature, that the sins which oppress us, from which we see no escape, can, in God’s great love, be lifted, be taken away. We can be forgiven and therefore redeemed. And so the tears of hopeless, despondent sorrow become tears of joy, tears of renewal.

This is the forgiveness that God gives to his people, and so when we think back to Abba [Isidore], paraphrasing the Lord, “Forgive your brother, that you may be forgiven,” we are reminded by St. John of Kronstadt of just what that latter half of the petition means. To be forgiven by God is the greatest of mercies, the greatest of joys. It is that which sets our life in the perspective of redemption and draws us into the sweet spirit of the kingdom. This is what we seek as Christian people, and this is what is opened to us by the mercy of the Lord, as St. John says. All that prevents us from receiving this forgiveness, from living in this spirit, is our own stubborn unwillingness to forgive those who have wronged us.

Another modern saint, Kosmas Aitolos, who wrote in the 18th century, was known to say the following.

Even if spiritual fathers, all patriarchs, all hierarchs, and every person you know forgive you, you are unforgiven if you do not repent in action.

Our forgiveness received from the Lord, our forgiveness shown to others must begin in our own heart. Forgiveness is intrinsically connected to repentance, and if we do not take up the cross of repentance within, it is impossible to receive forgiveness of others; it is impossible to grant true forgiveness, open and unconditional forgiveness. We must first seek our own repentance.

It is then, in the spirit of repentance, that is open to the love of others and is open to showing love to others, forgiving them whatever wrongs we may perceive they have committed to us, that we are able truly to become icons of the forgiving Lord. St. Philotheos of Sinai put this together succinctly.

Do we forgive our neighbors their trespasses? (he asks) God also, then, forgives us in his mercy. Do we refuse to forgive? God, too, will then refuse to forgive us. As we treat our neighbors, so does the Lord treat us. The forgiveness, then, of your sins, or their unforgiveness, and hence also your salvation or destruction, depend upon yourself, man. For without forgiveness, there is no salvation. You can see for yourself how terrible it is.

This is a powerful text in which St. Philotheos reminds us that our very salvation is at stake and is in a real way in our own hands. He is of course not suggesting that we are able to save ourselves, but we are able to throw down our foot, to turn our back in the face of a salvation so mercifully offered, and, by refusing to forgive, closing the door to our own forgiveness and our salvation. Every moment when we feel wronged, when we feel justified in our anger, in harboring a grudge, St. Philotheos ought to remind us that we are facing the choice of our own redemption. At that moment the choice before me is not simply: Do I have it in my heart to forgive my brother this wrong, or not? The real choice, the real question I face at that moment is: Do I wish salvation, or do I wish destruction? And we are speaking here not of the brother, but of ourselves.

For if we choose not to forgive a wrong committed against us, if we choose not to forgive a brother or a sister who may or who may not have wronged us, we are choosing the path of death for our own life; we are choosing hell over heaven, and it is a woeful, terrible choice. But in the same instant, the pathway to heaven is open to us, for if we engage in the sacrificial act of forgiving love, we are turning to the gateway of heaven that has been opened to us by the Savior; we are receiving our own forgiveness in that very act, in that very moment of forgiving another, and we are drawing closer to the kingdom.

This is a thought that was echoed by the 18th-century St. Tikhon of Zadonsk.

He who would be reconciled to God (he says), he who would have peace with God, must first be reconciled with his neighbor.

Here we have in the 18th century—we have in St. John of Kronstadt from the 19th and 20th—going all the way back to the Desert Fathers, and indeed back to the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the consistent message of the need to forgive. And the interconnection between God’s forgiveness of us to our own repentance, to our own forgiveness of others. These three are linked. Do we wish to receive the forgiveness that leads us to eternal life? Let us learn to forgive those around us. Do we wish to learn how to forgive those around us? Let us first learn how to repent of our own sin, to become aware of the wrongs we commit, of the sin in our own hearts. For once we see this truly, we begin to see those little faults of our brother and sister in a different light, a light of love, of empathy, of compassion, and not of condemnation. For how are we able to condemn in others what we have come to see in ourselves?

So if we are struggling to learn how to forgive, how to be forgiving people, let us first work on our own repentance, for it is here that our forgiving spirit is nurtured and born. And then, when we learn, by God’s grace, how to forgive the neighbor, how to forgive our brother, we find the sweet joy—the tears of joy, as St. John of Kronstadt called them—of true forgiveness from the Lord. And this harmony of our repentance, our forgiveness granted, and forgiveness received, is part of the very story of our salvation.

Let me perhaps conclude with a quotation from a very modern Father, St. Seraphim of Sarov. On forgiveness, he says the following:

Thus should we weep for the forgiveness of our sins. The words of the bearer of the purple should convince us: “Going they went and wept, casting their seed, but coming, they shall come with joyfulness, carrying their sheaves with them.”

We should also remember the words of St. Isaac the Syrian:

Moisten your cheeks with the tears of your eyes, that the Holy Spirit may abide in you and cleanse the filth of your malice. Move the Lord with your tears, and he will help you.

This quotation from St. Seraphim shows us the intimate linkage between repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. It is hard for us to be forgiving. In our sin, it is easy to bear a grudge; it is easy to feel wronged; it is easy to feel self-justified. But the act of becoming like unto Christ our Lord, to taking the image that he has built within us, and coming to manifest the likeness of our loving God requires forgiveness—forgiveness in those moments where the world says it is nonsensical, unnecessary, inappropriate—even then to forgive, to forgive the greatest wrongs together with the smallest, universally, unconditionally—to forgive and to love as the Lord himself has done.

It is necessary for us to do this because it is the very gateway to receiving that forgiveness we seek and need in our own lives. So the task of learning how to forgive is central to our Christian life, to our Christian identity, and that task, that process of learning, begins in the heart, as the Fathers say. Let us dive within and discover our own sin. Let us see ourselves as we truly are. Let us come to see our acts the way God sees them: perhaps at times noble in intention, but marred, deeply marred, by the extent of our sin. Then let us, with eyes clarified as to our own way of living, our own shortcomings, find the compassion, the love, and the joy that is to be had in the forgiveness of our brothers and sisters. This is the way into the kingdom of God. This is the way in to the forgiveness God promises to us—if and when we forgive our neighbor.

At the beginning of this broadcast, I mentioned that I would be telling you about a new resource for finding quotations from the Fathers of the Church. A few months ago, largely in response to requests from listeners to these broadcasts, we launched at monachos.net, one of the sponsors of this series, a new patristic quotations index which you can find by going to monachos.net or following the link from Ancient Faith Radio and clicking the “patristic quotations” link on the left-hand side of most pages. This new resources is designed around an open-editing model, which means that you can register in a matter of moments online for an account and then be able to contribute and edit the quotations that are found in the index. This is meant to be a topical listing of quotations from the Fathers, allowing the opportunity to find short quotations from the patristic era, ancient as well as modern, on any number of topics relevant to modern life.

In today’s broadcast, for example, all of the quotations that I have used came from the instructions on forgiveness page of this new resource, quotations provided by readers who have entered them from home and which are now available to Orthodox Christian readers all around the world. The topical index is expanding. It includes such subjects as forgiveness, clothing, demons, repentance, fasting, communion, almsgiving, etc., and beneath each of these, various more specific subtopics. I would encourage all of you to have a look at this new resource, to find quotations from the Fathers there for your own spiritual life and study, but also and perhaps most importantly, to contribute quotations that you have to hand, from books or that you’ve written down or that you simply know from memory, the pearls of wisdom from our Fathers in the faith, the Fathers of the Church. If many listeners and readers contribute even just a handful of quotations, this index will grow, as it already is, into what we hope will be a large and useful index of patristic wisdom for Orthodox Christian faithful around the world.

And join us next week for another broadcast from A Word from the Holy Fathers. Until then, through the prayers of our fathers amongst the saints, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us and save us. Amen.