Some people will talk about God's forgiveness and they will describe it as unconditional. It sounds very nice. This is, however, wrong.
God's love is unconditional. That's true. But God's forgiveness is conditional. The Scriptures repeat over and over again that it has one condition and we hear it in today's Gospel, twice.
In the Our Father:
forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us;
And interestingly, Jesus feels that this is the one thing from the our father that he needs to reiterate and so he says again:
“If you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.”
And we should take note that he doesn't give us any outs.
The text doesn't say, "if you forgive men their trespasses when they apologize " or "if you forgive men their trespasses when you believe they've actually changed"We are not God and we cannot judge another person's heart. Therefore, God simply tells us to forget, period, end of discussion. We leave the judging of another person's intentions or heart to God.
