A seminary professor shares this story. He’s been teaching seminarians for many years, and in recent years, when teaching about the sacrament of penance, he is frequently asked this question, often as the first question in the class: “When can I refuse absolution? When do I not grant forgiveness?” The anxiety expressed here is not, I believe, triggered by a need for power but by a very sincere fear that we have to be rather scrupulous in handing out God’s mercy and that we shouldn’t be handing out cheap grace. And, undergirding that fear, Fr. Rolheiser writes, is the unconscious notion that God, too, works out of a sense of scarcity rather than of abundance and that God’s mercies, like our own resources, are limited and need to be measured out very sparingly. But that’s not the God whom Jesus incarnated and revealed. The Gospels rather reveal a God who is prodigal beyond all our standards and beyond our imagination. The God of the Gospels is the Sower who, because he has unlimited seeds, scatters those seeds everywhere without discrimination: on the road, in the ditches, in the thorn bushes, in bad soil, and in good soil. Moreover, that prodigal Sower is also the God of creation, that is, the God who has created and continues to create hundreds of billions of galaxies and billions and billions of human beings. And this prodigal God gives us this perennial invitation: Come to the waters, come without money, come without merit because God’s gift is as plentiful, available, and as free as the air we breathe. The Gospel of Luke recounts an incident where Peter, just after he had spent an entire night fishing and had caught nothing, is told to cast out his net one more time and, this time, Peter’s net catches so many fish that the weight of the catch threatens to sink two boats. Peter reacts by falling on his knees and confessing his sinfulness. But, as the text makes clear, that’s not the proper reaction in the face of over-abundance. Peter is wrongly fearful, in effect, wanting that over-abundance to go away, when what Jesus wants from him in the face of that over-abundance is to go out to the world and share with others that unimaginable grace. What God’s over-abundance is meant to teach us is that, in the face of limitless grace, we may never refuse anyone absolution.