Paying Forward the Mercy We’ve Received, Third Tuesday of Lent, March 17, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Tuesday of the Third Week in Lent
Memorial of St. Patrick
March 17, 2020
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: 

• The point of Lent is to become holy like God is holy, perfect as he is perfect, merciful as he is merciful, loving as he himself as love us first. Today’s readings are placed in this “second phase” of Lent — from the Third Sunday through Friday of the Fourth Week — precisely to help the Elect preparing for baptism, and all of us who have already entered the Sacred Waters, to know the demands that flow from baptism into God’s mercy. In Baptism we received God’s incredible gift of mercy and to live in accordance with our baptism means to allow that living well of mercy spring up to overflowing from us. Jesus stressed when he taught us the Our Father that unless we forgive others their debts, neither will our heavenly Father forgive us ours; he won’t withhold forgiveness from us as a punishment, but rather we won’t be able to receive that gift: unless we have a heart that’s ready to forgive others, our heart will be closed to absorb the gift of his mercy. And so Jesus wants through baptism to take away our stony hearts and replace them with a heart of flesh, a heart that can receiving the in-pouring of the Father’s mercy systolically and pump it out diastolically. As we pray today with the Prophet Daniel, “Do not take away your mercy from us” and “deal with us in your kindness and great mercy,” God shows us how never to lose that mercy. As we beseech God in the words of the Psalm, “Remember your mercies, Lord,” and remark that the Lord is “good and upright,” who “shows sinners the way,” the Lord today instructs us in his way by helping us not only to remember his mercies but also never to forget the need to pass that mercy on.
• That’s what today’s Gospel is all about. St. Peter asks Jesus, “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 mulligans.  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 in his question to Jesus multiplied that by two and added one and said, “As many as 7 times?” This would be an 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.
• 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 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 (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 time 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, 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 in 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 — even if he or she were to torture us or kill those closest to us — amounts to what we’ve done to the Son of God made man through our sins. This is a very important point for us to get. 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, and I know there will be some people who will think that I must be exaggerating. I’m not. That’s how horrible our sins are. Our sins are not peccadilloes; they led to Jesus’ brutal torture and murder. 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 the Office of Readings today, St. Peter Chrysologos made the same point. He wrote, “If you hope for mercy, show mercy. … If you ask for yourself what you deny to others, your asking is a mockery. … Show mercy to others in the same way, with the same generosity, with the same promptness, as you want others to show mercy to you.” 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 in 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!
• Someone who was transformed by the mercy of God and then spent the rest of life heroically trying to share that divine mercy with others is the great saint we celebrate today. Born in Britain, Patrick did not have much of a life of piety until he was captured by raiders at the age of 16 and sold into slavery in Ireland. But the Lord used his slavery as a time to liberate him spiritually and help him to grow in faith. He wrote his autobiography, called his Confessio, as a hymn of praise for God’s merciful love. It begins, “My name is Patrick. I am a sinner.” About being taken into slavery, he said, “We deserved this, because we had gone away from God and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests who advised us about how we could be saved.” About all their instruction he admitted, “My sins prevented me from really taking in what I read.” His slavery was ultimately a gift, he later realized, because, “I know for certain, that before I was brought low, I was like a stone lying deep in the mud. Then he who is powerful came and in his mercy pulled me out, and lifted me up and placed me on the very top of the wall. … [He] looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance. He guarded me before I knew him and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil. He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.” That experience of God’s mercy changed him: “That is why I cannot be silent – nor would it be good to do so – about such great blessings and such a gift that the Lord so kindly bestowed in the land of my captivity. This is how we can repay such blessings, when our lives change and we come to know God, to praise and bear witness to his great wonders before every nation under heaven.” He whole life had become a mission to “shout aloud in return to the Lord for such great good does of his, here and now and forever, that the human mind cannot measure.” And he sought to form a people through the reception of God’s mercy, seeing in what happened in Ireland a modern commentary on God’s words through the prophet Hosea, “Those who were not my people, I will call my people; and her who has not obtained mercy, I will name the one who has obtained mercy.”
• During the six years he tended his master’s herds, having been touched by God’s mercy and the grace of conversion, he prayed constantly in the daytime and prayed almost as much at night, sometimes spending all night outdoors in prayerful vigil of the dawn. One night in a dream, he heard a voice telling him to be ready for a brave effort to secure his freedom. And he trusted in the dream. In the morning, Patrick escaped and hustled 200 miles to a boat that he saw in the dream was about to depart. After adventures and hardship during which he was able to bring many of the ship’s crew to conversion — another marvel of the Lord! — he arrived home. But after several days of joyous reunion with the family he loved very much, he began to be moved in prayer and in dreams to think of all those back in Ireland who had never known the Gospel, who had never experienced God’s mercy, who were like that stone in the mud he had once been. Against the wishes of his beloved family, he decided to use his newly found freedom to dedicate himself to returning to the land of his captors, to preach to them the truth that would set them free. The Lord used his slavery to teach him the language he would need, to help him develop the necessary zeal, to return to lead the Irish to salvation. He had no illusions, however, about how difficult the task was that lay in front of him. He went to France to prepare for the priesthood so that he would be able to bring the greatest gift of all, the presence of the Lord in the sacraments, to his missionary land. In France, he prayed, fasted and readied himself for 20 years. At the age of 43, having been consecrated bishop so that he could found churches and ordain priests, he set off with a few apostolic collaborators. Over the course of the next 30 years, he labored tenaciously for the conversion of the nation. As one of the great “Lenten” saints, he famously fasted for 40 days and 40 nights on what is now called Croagh Patrick in prayerful bodily supplication that those entrusted to him would receive the Gospel with faith. Village by village, chieftain by chieftain, he planted the seed of the Gospel. Though his life was in constant peril due to the hatred of the druids, he soldiered on, and through prayer, mortification, disputation, and miracles, his life of faith bore enormous fruit. Twelve years after his arrival, he was able to found the Church of Armagh, Ireland’s primatial see. By the time of his death in 461, the whole nation was Christian.
• Today at this Mass we identify with St. Patrick. We confess that we are sinners saved by the Lord’s mercy. And we come here to be strengthened by 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, like he helped Patrick, never to forget it and to help others come to know it!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 18:21-35

Peter approached Jesus and asked him,
“Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive him?
As many as seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
That is why the Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting,
a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold,
along with his wife, his children, and all his property,
in payment of the debt.
At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.’
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
‘Pay back what you owe.’
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
But he refused.
Instead, he had him put in prison
until he paid back the debt.
Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened,
they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master
and reported the whole affair.
His master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant!
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?’
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my heavenly Father do to you,
unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.”