Belonging to the God of Mercy, 24th Sunday (A), September 17, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
September 17, 2023
Sir 27:30-28:7, Ps 103, Rom 14:7-9, Mt 18:21-35

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• One of the most important insights left to us by Saint Augustine in his famous tome The City of God is that the contrast between the city of God and the city of Man, between a holy life and worldliness, happens as a result of two contrasting loves. The citizens of the city of God are characterized by a “love of God even to the contempt of self,” whereas the citizens of the city of man are marked by a “love of self even to the contempt of God” (CG 14:28). One love eventually comes to dominate against the other, something Jesus himself would describe in the Gospels when he said we cannot serve both God and mammon. And so one of the biggest questions that needs to be asked by every person, especially every young person, is whether we will seek to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and relativize all other loves to that divine love, or whether we will seek to love ourselves to the extent that we will seek to make ourselves a god in which we will come to look at God’s existence as an intrusion. Will we seek to love God, to want his name hallowed, his kingdom to come, his will to be done, or will we strive to have everyone instead love us, praise our name, build our kingdom and do things our way?
• That’s the drama behind St. Paul’s words to the Romans in today’s second reading. In the midst of an arrogant culture that was seeking to have all aspects of life bow down toward Caesar and the Roman empire, the apostle reminded the first Christians of the Christian difference. Rather than living for ourselves or for the regime, he emphasized, “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” We don’t belong to ourselves, he says; we belong to God. And he adds, “This is why Christ died and came to life.” Christ came to set us free, to lift up our hearts to him, to help us live in the world but not of the world. Christian baptism is a change of ownership: we no longer belong to ourselves, but belong to God. We freely and trustingly hand over the title of our life to God and live for him who took on nature to live and die for us so that we might live with him forever.
• This central truth of St. Paul is key for us to grasp, because we’re living at a time in which we are trained by our culture and the effects of original sin toward self-centeredness and selfishness, that seeks to form us in the values of the city of man rather than as citizens of the eternal Jerusalem. When we’re infants, we crave attention and think the satisfaction of our desires is the most important things in the world. We’ll cry, howl, throw pacifiers and food, and engage in all types of other behaviors until our mom, dad, siblings and other caretakers attend to our wants and needs. We’ll pronounce everything “mine,” and take what our brothers, sisters or friends are playing with, as if we have a right to anything we want. When we grow into childhood and adolescence, the temptation to live in an egocentric and entitled universe remains. We expect our parents to defend us no matter what against teachers who give us a low grade or coaches that keep us on the bench. We become picky, rather than grateful, for the food set before us, dominated by our likes and dislikes as if we were all high-maintenance celebrity divas, persuaded by a consumerist ethos that we have a right to have our desires satisfied. We live in a culture that absolutizes personal freedom and takes offense when others don’t freely affirm and applaud the use we make of it, exalting personal rights over basic responsibilities. The city of man trumpets as its theme song “My life, my body, my choice, my death,” and in its exaggerated self-love begins to exclude not just God but even the family members and friends who love us the most. That’s why St. Paul’s words are such an important corrective to the egocentrism of our age. We, Christians, do not live for ourselves or die for ourselves, but we live, die, move and have our being in the Lord who loves us and calls us to live as citizens of the holy ones in light.
• One of the biggest contrasts between the city of man and the city of God has to do with forgiveness, which is the theme of the other readings today. In the city of man, justice, particularly against those who wrong us, is paramount. While justice is obviously a cardinal virtue and is essential to any functional society, we’re living in an age increasingly defined, both right and left, by grievances, movements of recrimination, and multiple-and-intersecting-forms of victimization. This is not the road to happiness, holiness and heaven. The other readings today all help us to understand and appreciate the role of mercy and forgiveness in the city of God, in the lives of those who belong to and be like God. Even though Christians will suffer injustice like anyone else and in some professions and societies far more, we’re called to respond differently.
• In the Psalm, we focused on how the Lord “kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion,” and he wants us to be merciful as he is merciful. If he “pardons all [our] iniquities, heals all [our] ills, … redeems [our] life from destruction, crowns [us] with kindness and compassion,” then he wants us to imitate him. If he “does not keep his wrath forever” or “requite us according to our crimes,” and if he seeks to put our transgressions as far away from us as California is from New York, then he wants us to treat those who sin against us the same way.
• Sirach underlines this point in the first reading. He tells us, “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” When someone wrongs us, when someone offends us, the devil wants us never to let the grievance go. He wants us to define ourselves by the perceived or real injustices we’ve suffered from others, and then to take us from holding onto the offense to hatred and finally to vengeance. He wants to use those offenses to get us to divide ourselves from family members, friends, neighbors and ultimately from God. But Sirach warns that the consequences of hugging wrath, anger and lack of mercy are enormous. He says, “The vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance, for he remembers their sins in detail.” He therefore urges, “Forgive your own neighbor’s injustice; then, when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven,” He poignantly asks, “Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? Could anyone refuse mercy to another like himself, can he seek pardon for his own sins? If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath, who will forgive his sins?” He reminds us that we will die and meet our Maker and urges us to approach forgiving others with that wisdom in mind: “Remember your last days,” he says. “Set enmity aside, remember death and decay, and cease from sin! Think of the commandments, hate not your neighbor; remember the Most High’s covenant and overlook [others’] faults.”
• In the Gospel, Jesus, in his conversation with St. Peter and in the Parable he gives, makes even more explicit our need to forgive as a precondition for receiving God’s mercy. Peter asks Jesus, “If my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him?” When people hurt us, we think it’s magnanimous and generous to give them a second chance, and it is. If we forgive them yet again, we think it’s an act of heroism, and sometimes it may be. If we forgive them a third time, we think we’re fit for canonization. But Jesus’ standards for us are much higher. He wants us to become as merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful, to love as God loves, to be holy as he is holy and, with his help, perfect as he is perfect. The Rabbis taught, based on a misinterpretation of a passage from the Prophet Amos, that we needed to forgive three times; in other words, to give someone a fourth chance (see Amos 1:3,6,9,11,13; 2:1,4,6). Peter doubled Amos’ figure and added a cherry on top, volunteering, “As many as 7 times?” This would be an almost astronomical standard, giving someone an eighth chance, before writing someone off as incorrigible. Jesus replied, however, “No, not seven times but seventy sevens.” Whether that means 70×7 (490) or 70+7 (77) times really doesn’t matter, because seven is a number already with a sense of infinity. It means to forgive without limit. Jesus says Peter must forgive every time a brother or sister wrongs him. And what Jesus says to Peter, he also says to us. We, too, must never refuse forgiveness to anyone who has wronged us — even and especially those who have really wounded us deeply. We must forgive fathers and mothers who have hurt us when we were younger, brothers and sisters who have betrayed us, friends who have deceived and backstabbed us, priests or nuns who have scandalized us, assailants who have attacked us, even terrorists who have mercilessly killed those closest to us. When a wound has cut really deeply and we’re tempted toward hugging tight wrath and anger, we may need to forgive a particular brother or sister 70 x 7 times for the same wound. Sometimes we will have to forgive with love even those who have made themselves archenemies. Without a doubt, forgiveness is one of the most difficult things to do in human life. It’s one of the things that demands the most human and spiritual maturity. But Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own. He gives us his help. That comes out in the parable he presents to illustrate his point about forgiveness. I’ve always it one of his most powerful and underappreciated stories.
• Jesus describes two debtors. The first is brought into the King for owing what our translation says is a “huge amount.” The actual term used by St. Matthew is “10,000 talents.” A talent was equivalent to 6,000 denarii and a denarius was a full day’s wage. That means that the man owed 60,000,000 days’ worth of work, something that would take him 164,271 years to pay off. His request, falling prostrate on the ground and begging for time to pay it back, was totally absurd: he would need to live to be at least about 165,000 years old! To monetize his debt in today’s terms to better understand it, if he were making $100 a day (or $12.50 an hour), he would have owed $6 billion. But the text tells us that when the King saw the man on the ground begging for time, his “heart was moved with pity,” he was “filled with compassion,” and he forgave the entire debt. He didn’t even make him pay what he could. We’re supposed to see in this what God does for us. He forgives our entire debt — 10,000 talents worth — seven, seventy-seven, 490 times and more. His merciful generosity is the most distinctive reality about the redeemed world, of the city of God!
• But then the Parable describes that the servant who had been forgiven the equivalent of billions went off and met another servant who owed him 100 denarii (100 days wages) — by the same pay rate about $10,000, something that could be paid off in a few months. This second debtor, using the very same words and actions as the first, fell down begging for time to make good on it. The first debtor must have recognized that the phrase and actions being employed reminded him of his own very recent condition. But instead of sharing mercy with the second debtor, instead of even just giving time to pay it off, he went up and started to choke him in anger and threw him into prison until his family was able to raise the 100 denarii to pay him back. It was obvious that the first debtor hadn’t been transformed by the incredible act of mercy of the King. He had received the King’s debt forgiveness superficially; even on a day on which he had been forgiven billions he couldn’t even be patient to a small-time debtor, even if the 100 denarii he had loaned had likely come from the 60,000,000 denarii he had just been forgiven. At that point the other servants of the King, observing the behavior of their colleague, were “saddened” and “disturbed.” They went to the Master, not so much to tattle-tale as to let him know of what was happening in his kingdom, that the standard of mercy he had shown was not being emulated. The king summoned the first debtor, called him “wicked” and asked the poignant question: “I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?” Rather than paying the mercy forward, he stifled the flow. And he was sent to prison until he should pay back the last penny, something, because of the size of his debt, was obviously impossible even in many lifetimes. Because he was unwilling to forgive a small debt, because he was hugging tight to wrath and anger, he would be in prison forever; what got him sent to his eternal incarceration was not ultimately what he owed, the accumulation of all his sins. What got him condemned was his lack of forgiveness.
• There are several lessons for us to draw about what it means to live for God and belong to him in his kingdom:
  • The first lesson is that we’re either “merciful like the Father” and forgive others their sins against us or we’re “wicked” because we do not extend to our fellow servants the pity that the Lord has first shown us. Merciful or wicked. There is no third option. If we’re not merciful to others, we’re not faithful to our baptism and Christian identity.
  • The second is about the debt we’ve incurred to God because of our sins. It’s We owe more to God than the U.S. national debt! We’re always debtors, not creditors, in the forgiveness department. God the Father did not “write off” our debt but rather sent his Son to pay the debt for us with his own body and blood on the Cross. Since we have received his forgiveness in the Sacraments of Baptism and Reconciliation, we are called to go out likewise and forgive others their much smaller debts to us, mindful that nothing anyone could do to us amounts to what we’ve done to the Son of God made man through our sins.
• The third lesson is that God’s mercy toward us — which is infinite and everlasting — can be forfeited by our failure to be changed by that mercy. In the parable, the Master who had written off the $6 billion debt, revoked it when he saw the one whom he had forgiven refuse similar mercy to the person who owed him. God makes this point in bold letters throughout Sacred Scripture. Jesus says after the Parable in today’s Gospel, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you” — treat us like the king treated the first debtor at the end of the parable — “unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” He says the same thing after he teaches us in the Our Father to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us,” commenting, “But if you do not forgive others their sins, neither will your heavenly father forgive you yours.” The reason is not because God would arbitrarily retract his gift, but because we would prove by our hardened heart that we are not able to receive his mercy. As Pope Francis likes to say, the heart has a systolic and diastolic function: if we’re not pumping out God’s mercy toward others, then our heart is dead and can’t have God’s mercy pumped in. None of us should miss the eternal consequence if we forfeit God’s mercy through lack of forgiveness of others: we’ll go to Hell, where there will never be enough time to pay our debt. At our judgment, the Lord will be able to say to us, “I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant as I had pity on you?” We can add, however, that if we fail to forgive others, we will not have to wait until we die to go to Hell, because we’ll already be experiencing a type of hell on earth. The past pains due to others’ sins against us will always remain in the present, raw and heavy, dragging us down by their weight. Jesus gives us the command to forgive others not just so that we might imitate his merciful love, and not even so that we won’t revoke it by our failure to be merciful to others, but so that we might experience the liberation and joy mercy brings the giver. Framed positively, this third lesson that Jesus is teaching us in this parable is that we need to share his mercy. We have been made rich in mercy by God’s generosity and we’re called lavishly to give it away. God has made us spiritually billionaires and he wants us generously to share that gift with everyone who owe us, because of the debts of their sins toward us are so much smaller than ours toward him. That’s the way we will become merciful as our heavenly Father is mercy, love as he loves, and holy as he is holy. That’s the way we will show that we belong to him, rather than to our grievances or our sins.
• In calling us to forgive in this way, Jesus was summoning us to imitate his example. As he was dying to pay the debt for our sins, Jesus cried out not in pain but in mercy: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” (Lk 23:34). The “them” and the “they” he was referring to were not just the Roman Soldiers who clearly knew how to crucify someone, but to all of us who when we sin really do not have a clue about how they crucify and kill our Savior. There is a similar consequential ignorance when we sin against others and others sin against us. Today Jesus is asking us to make his words our own. By his forgiveness, he has made us rich in mercy like his Father. He’s restored to us ten thousand talents that we’ve squandered and wants us to spend that merciful love down to the last penny!
• As we prepare to receive in Holy Communion the one who revealed himself to St. Faustina as “Mercy incarnate,” who gave his body and shed his blood “for the forgiveness of sins,” let us ask him to strengthen us from the inside to live for him, die for him, belong to him, and become like him. May he help us, like Sirach advised, remember our last days, think of the commandments, hate not our neighbors, and by, keeping the Most High’s covenant, overlook others’ faults with the same mercy that Christ died and rose to bring into our world and to your and my Christian life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download