By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — God forgives and forgets the faults of
repentant sinners, unless they keep reminding him of their errors by pretending they have no need to change, Pope Francis said.
The new covenant in Jesus Christ, the new relationship God
wants to establish with each person, is sealed by being “faithful to this
work the Lord does to change our mentality, to change our hearts,” the
pope said Jan. 20 during his morning Mass.
Being a Christian, he said, is making a commitment to
changing one’s life by “not sinning again or reminding the Lord of that
which he has forgotten.”
The pope preached on the day’s reading from the Letter to
the Hebrews, which says God will write his laws on the hearts
of believers, “will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no
more.”
“Sometimes I like to think — joking with the Lord a
bit — ‘You don’t have a very good memory.’ It is God’s weakness that when he
forgives, he forgets,” the pope said.
By writing his laws on people’s hearts, he said, God wants
to renew creation at its roots. Obedience, then, is not an external matter of following
rules, but “there is a change of mentality, a change of heart,” a
different way of acting and of seeing things.
“Think about the ‘doctors of the law’ who persecuted
Jesus,” he said. “They did everything, everything prescribed by the
law, they had the law in their hands, all of it. But their mentality was far
from God. It was a selfish mentality, centered on themselves. Their hearts were
hearts that condemned.”
In forgiving rather than condemning, the pope said, God’s
call to believers is a call to sin no more and to change one’s life.
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