Our Mission of Mercy, Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent, March 10, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Mary’s Cathedral, St. Cloud, Minnesota
Midwest Regional Meeting of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA
Tuesday of the Third Week in Lent
March 10, 2026
Dan 3:25.34-43, Ps 25, Mt 18:21-35

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• When we think about the mission of the Church, it is the continuation of Jesus’ saving mission. Jesus came to save. He came so that we wouldn’t perish but have eternal life. He came as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. He came to reconcile the human race to God. He came, in short, on a saving mission of mercy. The mission of the Church, therefore, is a mission of mercy. We having received the mercy of the Lord are summoned to pay that mercy forward.
• Therefore, in order to be effective missionaries, we must first grasp how precious is the gift of mercy we have received, how much we needed it, and how much we need it still. We make our own the words of the Prophet Daniel today, “Do not take away your mercy from us” and “deal with us in your kindness and great mercy.” We likewise echo those of the Psalmist, “Remember your mercies, Lord,” and remark that the Lord is “good and upright,” who “shows sinners the way.” But it’s in the Gospel that we realize the enormity of the gift of mercy we’ve been given and how thoroughly we’re supposed to be transformed by that gift that we want to spend the rest of our life paying it forward.
• St. Peter asks Jesus today, “If my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him?” One of the most difficult aspects of living the Catholic faith is the teaching about loving even our enemies and forgiving those who repeatedly wrong us, hate us and persecute us. When people hurt us, we think it’s magnanimous and generous to give them a second chance. If we forgive them yet again, we think we’re ready for canonization. But Jesus’ standards for us are 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 chances.  The Rabbis taught, based on a misinterpretation of passages of the Prophet Amos, that we needed to forgive three times, to give someone a fourth chance. Peter in his question to Jesus multiplied that by two and added one and said, “As many as 7 times?” This would be an astronomically high 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. Just as God never tires, as Pope Francis used to say, of forgiving us, and we must never tire of asking for that forgiveness, so we, too, must never tire of extending that forgiveness when someone asks it of us, when someone has wronged us — even and especially those who have really wounded us deeply.
• Jesus tells us why we must do this by means of the parable he gives us, which I’ve always found among his most powerful. He 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 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” (literally, he was sick to his stomach, his viscera exploded with compassion, splanchnizomai, the verb that the evangelists use to describe Jesus’ mercy) and he forgave the entire debt. He didn’t even make him pay what he could. He forgave it all. 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 world!
• But then the Parable describes that the servant who had been forgiven billions, who was a billionaire in merciful love, went off and met a servant who owed him 100 denarii (100 days wages), 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 had to remind 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 (in today’s money $10,000 at $100 a day) to pay him back. It was obvious that he 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 give another person a few months to pay back the debt he owed. At that point the other servants of the King, seeing the behavior of their colleague, were “saddened” and “disturbed” and they went to the Master, not so much to tattle-tale as to let him know of what was happening in his kingdom, that his standard of mercy was not being shown. He called in 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 that, because of the size of his debt, was impossible. Because he was unwilling to forgive a small debt, he would be in prison forever; his lack of forgiveness, rather than what he owed, was what got him sent to an unending incarceration.
• What’s the relevance for us in Lent and missionary disciples in communion in the whole of our life?
  • 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 first showed 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 unpayable. We owe more to God than the rising 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 sent his Son to pay for the debt with his own body and blood on the Cross. Our sins — even every single venial sin — have incurred an infinite debt that Christ needed to pay. Since we have received his forgiveness in baptism and in the sacrament of reconciliation, we are called to go out likewise and forgive others their much smaller debts to us, because nothing anyone could do to us — nothing!— amounts to what we’ve done to the Son of God made man through our sins. Very often we can think our sins are light matter, not that big a deal.  We can have very little compunction if we say a harsh word, or consent to an impure thought, or fail to help a needy neighbor. But every sin we’ve committed — even being impatient with others — makes us de facto crucifiers of the Son of God, because Jesus had to die to forgive even our least venial sin. This is a hard truth to bear, but I’m not exaggerating. That’s how horrible our sins are. Our sins are not peccadilloes; they led to the torture and execution of Jesus. If we stopped there, it would be hard for us not to feel infinitely miserable. But God loved us so much that he counted it a bargain to send his Son to die in payment of the debts we incurred by our sins. That’s the second lesson from today’s Gospel.
  • The third is that God’s mercy toward us — which is infinite and everlasting — can be forfeited. In the parable, the Master who had written off the $6 billion debt, revoked it when he saw the one he had forgiven refuse similar mercy to the person who owed him. God makes this point emphatically throughout Sacred Scripture. In the Book of Sirach, God tells us,“Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbor anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord? If one has no mercy toward another like himself, can he then seek pardon for his own sins?” In today’s Gospel, Jesus vigorously made the same point: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you” — treat us like the first debtor in the parable — “unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” And none of us should miss the eternal consequence if God revokes or we forfeit his forgiveness. We’ll go to Hell, where there will never be enough time to pay our debt —  since unless God forgives us our sins, our sins will prevent us from getting to Heaven. 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 liberally to share that gift with those who owe us because of the debts of their sins toward us.
• In calling us to forgive in this way, Jesus was himself calling us to follow his command to “love others as I have loved you,” and his love for us is always merciful. Therefore, our love for others must likewise always be clement. As he was dying to pay the debt for our sins, after his back had been shredded at the flagellation, after his head had been crowned with thorns, and the Roman soldiers were about to hammer his arms to the wood of the Cross, 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, to make his love our own, to make his mercy our own — by our receiving it from him in the Sacrament of Mercy and by our sharing that forgiveness lavishly, with others. He who is mercy incarnate has made us rich in mercy like his Father. He’s restored to us billions that we’ve squandered. And he wants us to spend that merciful love down to the last penny! That’s what each of us and all of us in the Church have the privilege to do. We are sent out as spiritual billionaires commissioned to share that wealth of mercy, so that all might come to the same Lamb of God who wants to take away their sins just like he took away ours and give them life to the full just like his mercy seeks to do in us.
• Ten years ago this year I was appointed by Pope Francis a Missionary of Mercy, one of about 1,000 priests of the 407,000 in the world given a special mandate to try to reconcile sinners in the Sacrament of Confession, with the Pope’s faculties for what are called sins reserved to the Holy See, and given a special mandate to preach mercy in the pulpit and through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. But in a sense every Catholic is meant to be a missionary of mercy. God forgives us not only for our own sake but to transform us so that we might be the instruments of his mercy to the whole world.
• Today at this Mass we pray this Mass open to receive and share the continuous living water of God’s merciful love that first welled up in us on the day of our baptism. Here Jesus gives us his body and his blood, given and poured out for the forgiveness of sins. We start Mass by calling to mind our sins and throwing ourselves on his mercy, so that as we leave this Church we can lavishly spend it. We cry out Kyrie, eleison. We invoke him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We proclaim that we’re not worthy to receive him but we beg him only to say the word and forgive our debts so that he may enter under our roof. And with Jesus inside us, with Mercy Incarnate abiding in us, how can we not forgive others like he forgives us? There’s a beautiful silent prayer that the priest says at the altar that describes what our whole approach should be to the Mass. The priest says it after offering the chalice, right before his hands are washed. It’s derived from today’s first reading from the Book of Daniel. “In spiritu humilitatis, et in animo contrito suscipiamur a te, Domine: et sic fiat sacrificum nostrum in conspectu tuo hodie, ut placeat tibi, Domine Deus.” “But with contrite heart and humble spirit let us be received [by you, Lord]; so let our sacrifice be in your presence today,”  that it may be pleasing to you, Lord God. We present ourselves with a humility and contrition so that God the Father can transform us by his mercy to become his mercy. Let’s present ourselves that way today because the Lord does remember his mercy and wants to help us never to forget it and as missionaries to help others come to know it!

The readings for today’s Mass were: