“Even if your sins were as repulsive as mud, your confidence and your love will make Me forget them, so you will not be judged! I am just, it is true, but love pays for everything!” (Father’s message to Sr. Eugenia Ravasio).
Our Father speaks here of grave and repugnant sins, which perhaps we ourselves find it difficult to forgive. Not infrequently it happens that people, once they recognize the magnitude of their faults, fall into despair and are unable to forgive themselves. Thus, they block their own lives and, despite having received God’s forgiveness, sin continues to cast its shadow over them.
It is in this context that the Father’s invitation comes to us, in which He counteracts with His love every self-destructive tendency we have. He wants to restore to us the freedom and dignity that have been wounded by sin.
Let us listen carefully: our trust and our love will make God forget our sins. He no longer wants to dwell on them; our debts have been paid; Jesus has ransomed us at the price of His own blood! Now it is a matter of allowing our Father’s love to enter us as an unshakable certainty, and this love will drive away the shadows of sin.
Then we see that God does not keep our sins in His memory, but He does remember every small gesture of love, every look we give Him, every word of thanksgiving to Him, every act of trust in Him… Thanks to the forgiveness of sins, even the most serious and repugnant ones, our gratitude grows even more and we praise God’s generosity all the more fervently.
In this way, our hearts will also be enlarged in relation to other people, even if they have been contaminated by the most repugnant and repulsive sins. If they are ready for conversion and God forgives and forgets their sins, who are we to throw them back in their faces and accuse them? Are we not thus exercising an illegitimate manipulation over them? Such an attitude on our part would be very different from how God treats us.
Are we not called to be like God? He does not allow Himself to be outdone in generosity, but we can try to catch up with Him and imitate Him.