Paying Forward the Mercy We’ve Received, 19th Thursday (I), April 12, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Jane Frances de Chantal
August 12, 2021
Josh 3:7-11.13-17, Ps 114, Mt 18:21-19:1

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we focused on fraternal correction in seeking to bring people back into communion from a wayward life. But it’s not enough merely to correct. There needs to be forgiveness offered as well for genuine reconciliation to be effected, so that people can pray and live “into the name” of Jesus. So, picking up on the theme of yesterday, Peter asks how often must he forgive his brother when his brother sins against him. The Rabbis taught, based on a misinterpretation of passages of the Prophet Amos, that we needed to forgive three times, to give someone a forth chance. Peter multiplied that by two and added one and said, “As many as 7 times?” This would be a very high standard, giving someone an eighth chance, before writing someone off as incorrigible. Jesus replies, “No, Seventy Sevens.” Whether that means 70×7 (490) or 70+7 (77) times really doesn’t matter, because seven in the Biblical mentality is a number already with a sense of infinity. It means to forgive without limit.
• To drive home his point, Jesus then gives us a parable that I think is one of his most powerful for us to understand, if not nearly as well known as it ought to be. 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) 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. He forgives us 7, 77, 490 times and more.
• But then we see 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, something that could be paid off in about 3 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, 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 for 100 days) to pay him back. 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!
• We learn two great lessons from this Parable. The first 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 in the trillions. There’s no way we can ever pay it back. That’s why Jesus needed to come to pay it for us. An infinite debt needed an infinite payment, something Jesus himself could do as the sinless God-man but we can never do. It’s key for us to grasp this. Many times we think all our sins are venial, easily forgiven, “peccadillos,” whereas they were what required Jesus’ death to repay in justice. Our sins against God in justice require an infinite punishment. The sin of Adam and Eve at the beginning of time required an infinite punishment. The sin of the Israelites in the desert preventing Moses and his contemporaries from entering the Promised Land required an infinite punishment. The sins of the Israelites after entering the Promised Land that eventually led to the exile required an infinite punishment. Our sins require an infinite punishment. Because of this, we all have to be more grateful to God for the gift of his mercy than someone who has just been forgiven of a $6 billion debt would be to his creditor. In the Psalms we pray, “Do not forget the works of the Lord!,” and the greatest work we should never forget is how much he has forgiven us!
• That leads to the second lesson we learn. We need to pay the 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. Even when people have amassed big debts to us — they killed a loved one drunk behind the wheel, they’ve abused us, they’ve tortured us or our loved ones, they’ve made it their life’s purpose to spread calumny against us to hurt our reputation — those debts are nothing in comparison with the debt we have incurred against God. When others come to us asking for our forgiveness, we need to remember that what they’re requesting is $10,000 in comparison with the $6 billion remitted to us. We who have received much need to give much, knowing that what we give is nothing compared to what we’ve been given. Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts (sins) as we have forgiven our debtors,” commenting afterward, that unless we forgive our brothers their sins our heavenly Father will not forgive us ours. Jesus made the same point just as emphatically at the end of the parable: “So will my heavenly Father do to you” — send you into prison until you pay back an unpayable debt — “unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.” We’re supposed to forgive not just with words, but with a compassionate heart, just like God has forgiven us so many times. If we don’t grasp this lesson, we will end up in Hell not so much because of the sins we’ve committed but because of our failure to forgive others their sins against us. We won’t receive God’s mercy unless we first share it, not because he doesn’t want to flood us with his merciful love but because our hearts can’t receive it unless they are in turn forgiving others.
• This lesson about forgiveness and paying it forward is hinted to in today’s first reading. God has the Israelites cross through the Jordan on dry ground, which is meant to be a reminder to them of what he permitted at the Red Sea 40 years earlier. The miraculous crossing at the Jordan is a sign of God’s forgiveness of the sins of the desert and a foreshadowing of what happens in Baptism, where something that could drown us actually gives us life. The early saints used to call the Sacrament of Confession a “second baptism,” as our souls are restored to their baptismal beauty. In Confession we are able to enter into the waters anew and God miraculous leads us through them safely with Jesus being or carrying the “ark of the new and eternal covenant” that prevents the waters from submerging us, but instead helps them to cleanse us.
• Someone who shows us how to live this reality of God’s mercy is Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, whose memorial the Church celebrates today. She was the daughter of the President of her region of France and was married at the age of 20 to a baron in the late 1592. She had 7 kids in 8 years, though she needed to mourn the death of three of them soon after childbirth. When he was 28, her husband was killed in a freak hunting accident by a friend, which devastated her. But in her grief she turned like a child toward God. She begged him to send her someone to guide her and God allowed her in a vision to see the person who he would send to be her spiritual director. She had never seen the person before but a couple of years later, at the invitation of her father, she returned to her hometown to hear the celebrated preacher and bishop of Geneva, the future St. Francis de Sales. She recognized him as the one in her dream, dressed exactly as God had shown her. He took her on as a directee, helping her grow in faith and piety, dealing with the situation of living with her difficult father-in-law, advising her about raising her kids and more. He taught her the gentle mystery of mercy and after he died, St. Vincent de Paul, continued to guide her soul on that path. One thing I have always appreciated about the Visitation Nuns that she and St. Francis founded was that they had an aim to receive women into religious life who wouldn’t be able to get into other Congregations because of age or poor health. Today many great religious communities — just like many Dioceses, including my own, used to — have as part of their rules something I do not believe comes from God, that if a woman is older than 30, or 35, or has some illness, or wasn’t born of unmarried parents, etc., they’re not able even to apply to that Institute, as if God could never call anyone to their community who was a month, or a year, or a decade older, or who was ill, or whose parents had sinned. There’s no question that age can, or illness, or some family of origin issues make it harder is to adapt to religious life. There’s no doubt that communities can’t have a special postulancy or novitiate in the infirmary with sick sisters. But there’s no doubt that God does call older women (like St. Jane!), or sickly women (like so many saints we cover over the course of the year!) to serve him in religious life and the Visitation Nuns have always been open out of mercy and faith to receive the spiritually childlike applicants in Christ’s name as if they were receiving Him. Part of building a culture of life is that we accept persons as infinitely loved by God, we see in them great potential, and we help them fulfill their vocations, and it’s contrary to a culture of life when those directing religious life or running Dioceses reject out of hand those who don’t meet their human criteria, as if God would never call somebody outside of their criteria. In the Office of Readings today, the letter by St. Jane de Chantal is quite beautiful, in which she was encouraging her sisters all to become “martyrs of love.” We are all being called by the Lord to become “martyrs of merciful love,” spreading to others what we first have received.
• We relieve this mystery of God’s wondrous mercy, and are renewed in our calling every day, here at Mass, when we are enriched by God in the new Covenant in his Blood for the forgiveness of sins, enter with him into the Ark, and pass with him into the kingdom he established. Let us ask him, as we receive the riches of his mercy, to “do this” in memory of him and pay his mercy forward.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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