Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 16, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
September 16, 2023

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which Jesus will talk to us about his mercy toward us and how that is meant to transform us to love others with the same merciful love with which he has loved us first.
• 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 sometimes to give them a second chance. If we forgive them yet again, we think it’s an act of heroism, and sometimes it is. If we forgive them a third time, 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 a passage from the Prophet Amos, that we needed to forgive three times, to give someone a fourth chance. Peter, after asking Jesus how often he must forgive and while he was waiting for his response, multiplied Amos’ figure by two and added one 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.
• Jesus makes this point clear 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 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” 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 the equivalent of billions went off and met a 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, 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 are the 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. Our sins have incurred an infinite debt to God that God himself mercifully paid. 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.
  • The third lesson 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 whom he had forgiven refuse similar mercy to the person who owed him. God makes this point emphatically throughout Sacred Scripture. Jesus says in the 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.” 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. 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 those who owe us because of the debts of their sins toward us.
• In calling us to forgive in this way, Jesus was calling us to imitate him. 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, 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 generously, with others. He who is mercy incarnate has made us rich in mercy like his Father. He’s restored to us ten thousand talents that we’ve squandered. And he wants us to spend that merciful love down to the last penny!

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was: 

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