📌 The main idea of the lecture

His Holiness Pope Shenouda III explains the meanings of the word “forgives” as it appears in the Holy Bible, and presents three occasions of forgiveness: God’s forgiveness, the priesthood’s forgiveness, and humans forgiving one another. He clarifies the functional and spiritual differences between these types and the conditions of each type.

🔹 First: God’s forgiveness

• God’s forgiveness is direct because He has the right and authority to forgive, and it is the wiping away of sin and non-accountability on the last day.

• When Christ said to the paralytic “your sins are forgiven,” the Jews objected because forgiveness is a property of God, and the meaning is that Christ forgives by the power of His deity.

🔹 Second: priestly forgiveness

• Priests do not forgive by their own authority; rather they are agents of God and ask God to forgive. Priestly forgiveness is embodied in the prayer of repentance and absolution where the priest prays: “Bless them, releasing them, purify them,” and it is mentioned that the Holy Spirit in them is the one who forgives, not their humanity.

• The priest first ensures the repentance of the one asking and his knowledge of the law, because the law teaches that the penitent is forgiven, then declares reassurance that the Lord forgives.

🔹 Third: humans forgiving one another

• Humans forgiving one another means renouncing the human right and pardoning, as Christ taught: “forgive and you will be forgiven,” and we ask in the prayer: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

• This forgiveness does not erase the sin eternally before God; the eternal wiping away requires God’s forgiveness which depends on true repentance.

🔹 The forgiveness process as explained

• The spiritual covering of forgiveness includes transferring the sins of the penitent to the account of Christ, as Nathan told David: “The Lord has taken away your sin.” Christ bore our guilt like all and the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all according to Isaiah.

• Thus the priest’s understanding of forgiveness is: being an agent of God, his knowledge of the penitent’s repentance, and his confession that true forgiveness from God is based on sincere repentance.

📚 The spiritual and educational dimension (from a Coptic Orthodox faith perspective)

• The lecture emphasizes the necessity of repentance as an essential condition for God’s forgiveness, and preserves the importance of the church’s sacraments and the priest’s role as an intercessor and agent of the divine mysteries.

• It teaches that pardon among people is a virtue that trains the heart, but it does not replace the need for God’s forgiveness which cleanses the soul and secures salvation.

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