Forgiveness Sunday and Mutual Forgiveness
In brief
On the last Sunday before Great Lent — Forgiveness Sunday, also called Cheesefare Sunday — Orthodox Christians remember Adam's exile from Paradise and prepare to enter the fast reconciled with one another. That evening, at the Vespers of Forgiveness, the whole community asks and grants forgiveness face to face, each person bowing before every other. Lent begins not with a change of diet but with a cleared heart.
The last threshold before Lent
Forgiveness Sunday is the last of the preparatory Sundays that lead into Great Lent (see the pre-Lenten Sundays). It is also called Cheesefare Sunday because it is the last day dairy is eaten before the strict fast begins the next morning, on Clean Monday. The hymns of the day, drawn from the Triodion, set Lent's whole theme in a single image: Adam sitting outside the closed gate of Paradise, weeping for the communion with God he has lost. The Church invites each of us to weep with him, and to begin the journey home.
The Gospel appointed for the Liturgy that morning is Matthew 6:14-21, which joins two themes the Church wants held together as Lent opens: forgiveness and fasting. First the Lord's warning about forgiveness, and then His instruction that fasting be hidden — "anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast" (Matthew 6:17-18). The order is deliberate. Before the fast of food comes the harder fast: letting go of what we hold against one another.
The rite of forgiveness
On the evening of Forgiveness Sunday the Church serves the Vespers of Forgiveness, the first service of Great Lent. Partway through, the tone changes: the lights are lowered, the vestments and hangings are changed to Lenten dark, and the Prayer of St. Ephraim — "O Lord and Master of my life" — is read for the first time, accompanied by prostrations that will mark the whole season.
Then comes the rite that gives the day its name. After the dismissal, the faithful come forward one by one, and each asks forgiveness of every other — bowing or making a prostration and saying, "Forgive me, a sinner," and answering, "God forgives, and I forgive." In a parish this can take a long while, as everyone present asks and grants forgiveness of everyone else, often through tears. The exact words and gestures vary from place to place, but the meaning does not: no one enters Lent still nursing a grudge against a brother or sister. The community steps across the threshold of the fast reconciled.
Forgiveness in daily life
The rite dramatizes once a year what the Gospel asks every day. The Lord could hardly be plainer: "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matthew 6:14-15). Forgiveness, in this teaching, is not an optional generosity but the very condition on which we ask to be forgiven.
Orthodox tradition is realistic about what this means. To forgive is not to pretend a wrong did not happen, or to say it did not matter, or to feel a warmth we do not feel; it is a decision to release the debt and to stop demanding payment, made again and again as the memory returns. The Lord even tells us to leave our gift at the altar and "first be reconciled to thy brother" (Matthew 5:23-24) — reconciliation comes before worship. Asking forgiveness quickly and directly, of a spouse, a child, a coworker, is the ordinary form of a habit the Vespers of Forgiveness only makes visible: the daily work of not letting the sun set on our grievances.