Forgiven and Forgiving, 24th Sunday (A), September 17, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
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 biggest challenges in human life, not to mention the Christian life, is to avoid the lure of self-centeredness and selfishness. 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 or dad attends 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 is strong to remain in an egocentric and entitled universe, thinking that everything should revolve around our desires and fears. And our culture increasingly abets this tendency as parents reflexively take their children’s side against every teachers, as consumerism convinces us that the customer is always right, as we lionize the lifestyle of high-maintenance celebrity divas, as we insist others use whatever preferred pronouns we declare, as our culture trumpets a theme song that says, “my life, my body, my choice, my death,” and exalts what we believe are our rights over every responsibility.
• In today’s second reading, to help us achieve human and Christian maturity, St. Paul tells the first generation of Christians in Rome and all of us a basic fact that is meant to translate into a way of life. Against the temptation to think or behave as if we are or should be the center of the solar system, he puts before us a moral Copernican revolution: “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.” The whole purpose of Jesus’ incarnation, passion, death and resurrection is to save us from sin, which as St. Augustine wrote in his City of God is the “love of self even to the contempt of God” (14:28). Jesus wants, rather, to help us follow him along the path of what Augustine termed the “love of God even to the contempt of self,” through doing what he mentioned last week, denying ourselves, picking up our cross and following him, losing our life so as to save it. St. Paul makes the point that, as Christians, we don’t belong to ourselves, but belong to God. Christian consecration in baptism is a change of ownership, in which we freely and trustingly hand over the title of our life to God. In response to a mentality that says, my life, my choice, my will, my name, we proclaim, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, thy name be hallowed.” And we do so not out of servile submission, but out of loving gratitude, recognizing that life isn’t a contest of wills between God and us, but a recognition that God loves us and wants us to be genuinely like him, to love like he loves, to be holy as he is holy, and, with his help, perfect as he is perfect. And so as mature Christians and human beings, we’re summoned to live not for ourselves or even die for ourselves, but to live and die for and as the Lord’s.
• The evil one obviously wants to frustrate this divine work and to help us remain obsessed with love of self to the contempt of God. And the most effective way he tries to do this is through lack of forgiveness. When someone wrongs us, when someone offends us, the devil wants us never to let the grievance go. He wants to get us to define ourselves by the injustices, perceived or real, we’ve suffered from others, and then to take us from the offense to hatred and ultimately to vengeance. And as we separate ourselves from others — from family members, friends, neighbors and others from whom against whom we have grievances — we gradually separate ourselves from God.
• Today’s other readings, however, are about the way God seeks to get us to live for him, die for him, and belong to him. He is, as we prayed in the Psalm, “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 your iniquities, heals all your ills, … redeems your life from destruction, crowns you 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.
• Our treating others with mercy is a prerequisite for our being able to receive God’s mercy. Sirach makes this point emphatically in the first reading. He tells us, “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” We hold on to our sins. We nurse our grievances. We addictively pick the scabs of our wounds and offenses. 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,” and 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, 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 today’s Gospel, Jesus makes the point about being merciful to others as a precondition to receiving God’s mercy even more emphatically. 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, which 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, as we see, Jesus’ standards for us are higher. Much higher. He wants us to become as merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful — and each of our autobiographies shows clearly that God has given us way more than one or two spiritual mulligans. 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, after asking Jesus how often he must forgive and while he was waiting for his response, doubled Amos’ figure and added a cherry on top and said, “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, 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. He 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 us, priests or nuns who have scandalized us, assailants who have attacked us, and 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 must forgive the a particular brother or sister 70 x 7 times for the same wound. Sometimes we have to forgive with love even those who have made themselves archenemies, who seem to live to hurt us.
• In some ways, forgiveness is one of the most difficult things to do in human life, but Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own. He gives us his help. That comes out in the parable he gives us to illustrate his point about forgiveness, which I’ve always found among his most powerful.
• 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, after he had fallen prostrate on the ground and begged 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 in order 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 absurdly 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. He forgave everything. 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!
• 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 pay it off. The first debtor must have recognized that the phrase and actions being employed reminded him of his own 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 10,000 talent he had been forgiven. At that point the other servants of the King, seeing 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 she 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; his lack of forgiveness, rather than what he owed, was what got him sent to an unending incarceration.
• There are several lessons for us:
  • 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! There’s no way we can ever pay it back. 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, because 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 emphatically 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 Lord’s Prayer 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.” None of us should miss the eternal consequence if either God revokes his forgiveness or we forfeit it: we’ll go to Hell, where there will never be enough time to pay our debt. At our judgment, we do not want the Lord 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 pay his mercy forward. We have been made rich in mercy by God’s generosity and we’re called to share it. It’s like God has made us billionaires and he wants us lavishly to share that gift with everyone who owe us, because of the debts of their sins toward us. 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 to the sins we’ve suffered or committed.
• 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 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 our Christian life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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