I ask for apologies and forgiveness from those who follow this blog and access it every week to check for news, and I thank each one for their faithfulness. Some difficulties are getting in the way of us continuing this work, but the grace of God in us makes us overcome all barriers. It is the certainty and guarantee of the Lord's faithfulness that keeps us standing. (In honor of those who are faithful, we will deepen this theme of faithfulness in other posts).

What a beautiful and wonderful grace it is to be able to fall at Jesus' feet this week with the help of this post: the holy, the blessed, the glorious, the magnificent, the perfect, the beautiful, the infinite forgiveness of God.

And how can we not ardently desire the Lord's forgiveness!? Lift up your prayer with me: "Forgive me, Lord, for all that I have done in my life and with my life. I believe it is a gift from You, but often it is difficult to offer it to the Lord in the face of so many sins I commit and have committed. I ask You to free me from sin, from occasions of sin, from all the evil of sin in my life: its effects and consequences. Even if I am living in death or dying in life, I ask You to let me revive; revive through forgiveness, revive in Your love and mercy... I want to cast myself at Your feet! I desire with all my heart to give You my sins and receive the life that the Lord has for me."

We want to start with a passage from the Bible that already motivates us to this forgiveness:

"But they refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader to return to their slavery. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them. Even when they made for themselves an image of a calf, and said, 'This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,' and committed great blasphemies, you in your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness; the pillar of cloud that led them in the way by day did not depart from them, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go." (Neh 9:17-19)

A few weeks ago we reflected on the forgiveness of men and how we need to live in peace with everyone. Today we will reflect on God's forgiveness. And some questions are raised: Do I need to ask God for forgiveness for what I did and what I didn't do? What is the meaning of asking for this forgiveness? How to ask for forgiveness? Let us delve deeper and resolve our doubts, for we do not want superficial answers, but deep ones full of truth...

What does it mean that God is always ready to forgive? It means that there is no bad time for God! It doesn't matter the hour, the day, the place, the reason, the cause, the culprits, what led you to fall into sin, how your life is. What matters is that God is ready to forgive us at any time and in any place, for we already know of the Lord's omnipresence (cf. Ps 139), what we may not yet know is the certainty of forgiveness.

Are you close to or far from God? Do you know Him or not? Do you walk with Him or not? Do you talk to Him or not? Nothing matters to God! What matters is that He is ready to forgive you in any situation you have lived, are living, or will live. How beautiful it is to know that our God, besides not abandoning us (a topic we will address in another post), always forgives us.

Perhaps we know people who illustrate the opposite of what God is. And by thinking of them, we can get an idea of how the God of forgiveness treats us. Imagine a person who gets easily irritated, full of malice and empty of goodness... Very often we find people like this: stressed, nervous, selfish, pessimistic, with malice in their hearts, who only think of death and bad things, right? Now imagine the complete opposite. Imagine if these qualities were totally the opposite in someone, what would it be like? That's how it is in God: an INFINITE GOODNESS, ETERNAL CALM and PATIENCE, an unusual TRANQUILITY, a profound LOVE, a divine COMPASSION, and a tender and human WAY of relating to us.

In the book of Maccabees there is a beautiful passage in which Judas recognizes that it is necessary to ask God for forgiveness and the effect of sin in the life of those who practice it.

"Then they blessed the hand of the just judge, the Lord, who makes manifest the things that are hidden, and they betook themselves to prayer, beseeching him to grant full pardon for the sin committed. And the noble Judas exhorted the multitude to keep themselves free from sin, having seen with their own eyes what had happened to those who were slain because of their sins." (2 Maccabees 12:41-42)

How many wonders happen in our lives when we bless the Lord! In this short passage we already have a direction that tells us HOW to ask for forgiveness: in prayer. What more wonderful, more beautiful, more pleasing way in the eyes of the Lord to ask for forgiveness than in prayer?

We seek to please God and not men, so here's a secret: even if it means crying, shouting, doing penance (we will talk more about this in other posts), praying, loving, forgiving, let us do it and we will obtain the Lord's forgiveness. But Judas doesn't stop there, just asking God for forgiveness, he goes further by exhorting the people to AVOID ANY TRANSGRESSION! How beautiful!

It is about the recognition of guilt and the misfortunes that are consequences of this guilt (it is not God who does evil, but we are, and the evil we receive in return is a consequence of our sin), contrition of heart (as it is written in Acts 3) and the great desire for reparation (a topic addressed in previous posts). How good it is to recognize that we are sinners, after all, if we say that we are not sinners, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But what is the benefit of recognizing oneself as a sinner?

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:8-9)

It's not about hiding sin or pretending not to have it; the point is to recognize oneself as a sinner and allow God's forgiveness to reach us, touch us, purify us. The truth is that we are sinners by nature, which is why we always sin. But God's nature is love, mercy, holiness, forgiveness. He forgives us because He knows our nature! But that's not why we should want to sin and sin and sin; we must always seek to improve, always seek to abandon sin, always flee from sin. God sees our heart (cf. 1 Sam 16:7) and the right intention we have. We need to feel disgust, to repudiate sin. To imagine it as it truly is: a trap, an ambush to distance us from grace and the Lord's ways.

But let's get to the central passage of today's post:

"Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, 'Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?' They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, 'Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.' Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' 'No one, sir,' she said. 'Then neither do I condemn you,' Jesus said. 'Go now and leave your life of sin.'" (John 8:1-11)

This story of the adulterous woman is a reality in the lives of many of us. Some day in our lives, whether we were with God or not, we may have been caught committing that sin from which we still cannot free ourselves; and our sin became public, to the point that people condemned us for it. And it may be that many demanded justice in the face of such a thing; and we were humiliated. How must that woman's heart have been, exposed in such a brutal and humiliating way?

Crushed and shattered! She no longer believed in herself... And as if she herself wasn't enough to remind her of her sin, there was a crowd accusing her and they were going to stone her, for that is what the law commanded. What could Jesus do against the crowd? We had already raised this question in another post, but we ask the same question here in this context of forgiveness: WHAT IS ONE MAN AGAINST A CROWD?

If we analyze it from a human point of view, it would be impossible for Jesus to do anything, for it would be two against a crowd. But we are not talking about just any man, we are talking about the God of love and mercy, the God who forgives us in all situations. To demonstrate in a practical way that God forgives not only in theory, we have this beautiful example. If it were another sin, perhaps it would not be so difficult to forgive, but adultery is something that destroys a family, destroys a community. In the face of the worst situations, God is with us and always READY TO FORGIVE!

What did Jesus' forgiveness accomplish in that woman's life? She began to believe in herself again, she began to value herself, she found herself welcomed in the compassionate heart of the Lord, she had hope of being able to change, of having a life with God. And it is she herself who will pour out her life at the feet of the Lord, for nothing else will make sense to her. In this attitude she asked forgiveness for everything she had done, even those things no one knew about, but God already knew. She wanted to hide nothing! That is why Jesus will say that to whom much is forgiven, much is loved. She did not become fanatical, she simply became aware of her life and began to live for the Lord.

This is what the Lord's forgiveness accomplishes in our lives: nothing that displeases the Lord makes sense anymore, for we have received His forgiveness. How good it is to receive the Lord's forgiveness! HOW WONDERFUL IT IS TO RECEIVE THIS FORGIVENESS WITHOUT DESERVING IT! And the Lord forgives us because He loves us.

Even if it is at the last moment of your life, God forgives you. That is why, to conclude this post, I invite you to do as this soldier did: be at the feet of Jesus. Perhaps you have been in positions of respect and have maintained a role, or have performed a function with great consistency; or it may be that you do things for others and when it is your turn to be rewarded, there is nothing left. Do you feel weight, burdens on your back, things that want to make you fall?

Difficulties in your walk with Jesus? Lack of firmness, of commitment? Lack of shame? It doesn't matter! What matters is that you place yourself at the feet of Jesus and live this experience with God. It is not a magical thing, but it is a conscious action that we take. By placing our whole life at the feet of Jesus, we are edified; being weak, we receive the strength that comes from the blood of Christ; being poor, we are enriched with His love; being nothing, we are made the true friends of Jesus.

Do not allow anything, no barrier or difficulty that stands in your way, to make you stop walking with the Lord, no matter how bad your sin may be. The Lord's forgiveness is there to lift us up just as our sin is there to bring us down. The stronger one always wins... Do you trust in the Lord's forgiveness?

We believe and hope that by receiving this forgiveness we are strong to overcome whatever comes, but to continue with the Lord to the last consequences, to the last breath...

May God bless us and give us the certainty of being forgiven!