It is common to present love as the primary Christian commandment, love of God and love of neighbour. On these two commandments rests the whole law and the prophets, according to Jesus in John's gospel. No one in the wide world would disagree with that, I think. We all know that love is the answer to all our ills. Yet something within us warns us that there is more to it that than. To say that love is the answer doesn't add an awful to the accumulated wisdom of humanity. It is merely a glib, sentimental attempt to avoid rather than to answer a very complex question. While every human being has a capacity for love, it doesn't necessarily mean that every human being is loving, or is loved. We are not born with a quality called love. There is nothing spontaneous about it. Love is a habit, a way of live, a set of attitudes and responses that are learned over many years. Love is something that cannot be learned alone, in isolation. We pick up various ingredients as we advance along the road from childhood to adulthood. And two of today's readings highlight the most important and most unpalatable ingredient of love, that is forgiveness. Forgiveness is the treadmill on which we learn to love. Forgiveness redeems Christian love from mawkish sentimentality. 'Resentment and anger, these are foul things', our first reading tells us. Because if we fail to forgive, wallowing instead in our resentment, we destroy not the object of our resentment, but ourselves. As we seethe with futile anger, the world passes us by. Unless we ourselves have trained ourselves in forgiving others, we will not ourselves have the capacity to receive forgiveness. In other words, unless we ourselves are familiar with forgiveness in our own experience, we will not recognise it when it is offered us.

What Christ has to say about forgiveness and love applies to our personal inner lives, to our domestic lives and indeed to the way men and women throughout the world relate to each other. Whether we are talking about family life, about our relationship, or about international political dealings, resentment and anger are always foul things. Bitterness and anger are destructive emotions. As we all know, bitterness can turn a man into a monster. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is a liberation. It liberates both the forgiver and the one who is forgiven. To forgive is to live and let live. To refuse forgiveness is to die and make die. A glance around our world today reveals the rotten fruits of failed forgiveness. There are prisoners of the past everywhere. Hatred and anger reign in so many places and suffering continues unremittingly. The gospel truth is that wars cannot end, discrimination cannot conclude, ethnic divisions cannot be healed until someone says "I’m sorry." The north of Ireland is a prime example of this truth: Peace processes are cosmetic exercises unless old resentments are healed. Communal hatred is infectious. People get high on it. It makes the adrenaline flow.

Forgiveness, then, destroys the tyranny of the past. The person who cannot forgive others breaks down the very bridge over which he or she must pass one day. If you have long since given up the idea of entering heaven through the door marked "Canonised Saint" or "Martyr", the good news is that you and I can still enter by the back door marked "Forgiveness."

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