Welcome to our daily reflection for this Tuesday, March 10th.
And today we see Daniel, from the book of Daniel, we see these three righteous Jews who
are faithful, and they're willing to sacrifice even themselves out of fidelity to God's
law. And we, and they even say, you know, those who trust in God cannot be put to shame.
And we follow, they want to follow God with their whole heart. It's a beautiful thing.
And then speaking of the heart, Jesus says, we have to, in the gospel, they forgive our
brother from our heart, if we are to be saved. And he tells the parable, and we'll actually
answer to the question with Peter, you know, how many times should I forgive my brother
seven times? And Peter's thinking, ah, you know what? I think I'm going to be generous
since I got this read on Jesus. And I better say something, you know, generous. How often
do I need to forgive my brother seven times? And maybe this is his subtle way of complaining
about Andrew? I don't know. But Peter says this to Jesus, and our Lord gives him an answer
that's extraordinary. And that blows Peter, you know, probably away. He says, ah, not seven
times, but how? Try 70 times, seven times, 490, right? So that's, and that's an intentional
number for Jesus because 70 times seven is the number of years for the coming of the Messiah
according to the prophet Daniel and Daniel chapter nine. So it's the number of the Jubilee.
It's 10 times 49, which is the Jubilee year. And so God is forgiving Israel over this time.
And so they need to forgive their brother. And so he talks, tells a story about somebody
who had a debt and he had it canceled. And then he took a friend of his who owed him
or somebody a servant who owed him and he didn't forgive him. And then the master calls
him in and who had pardoned him of a great debt and then throws him into prison, right?
And so what Jesus is saying by this is, look, if you want God to forgive you of your debt,
you need to forgive those who are indebted to you. And that is going to be crucial. And
so in our Lenton journey, what the Word of God has teaching us today is that who do I need
to forgive? Who owes me a debt? Well, I need to forgive them. And if that's hard to forgive
them to be merciful towards them, maybe it would have been hard for Peter that day to forgive
Andrew. Reflect on how much God's forgiven you and how much you need God's mercy to forgive
you on that last day. And then you'll have a little bit of a motive to realize, okay, I can do
this, right? I can forgive even great things because I need to be forgiven myself. May the Lord
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