24 Sunday of Ordinary Time
God forgives us a debt we could never repay, and that mercy becomes the foundation of our own call to forgive others. Forgiveness is difficult, especially when wounds are deep, but it can free us from resentment even while healing takes time. The more deeply we recognize the mercy we have received from God and from others, the more able we become to extend that same mercy ourselves.
Listen to homily here:
Read homily here:
After reflecting on this Gospel, I realized it is one of those situations where there is good news and there is bad news. So, do you want the good news first? The good news is that God is infinitely merciful. God always forgives us. God has forgiven us a debt that we could never hope to repay. Do you want to hear the bad news? We also have to forgive. And we do not get to choose who we forgive.
Let us start again with the good news. In this parable, a servant owes the king an enormous amount of money. Another translation simply says that he owes “a large sum,” which is one of the understatements of the century. Our translation says that he owes ten thousand talents. A talent was a measure of wealth, and it is difficult to know exactly what that amount would be today, but one talent could represent roughly fifteen years of wages for an ordinary worker. Ten thousand talents, then, would be something like 150,000 years of wages. Just let that settle in for a moment: 150,000 years of wages. The servant could never repay that debt. It was impossible. Yet when he falls before the king and begs for mercy, the king forgives him completely.
That tells us something important about God. In different ways, all of us have done things in life that we cannot completely repair. We have broken relationships. We have hurt people. We have made choices whose effects continue in ways we cannot always see. It is a bit like throwing a stone into a pond. The ripples move outward, and we do not always know how far they go. There are things we cannot simply undo, and yet God gives us mercy.
There is an old story about a man who dies and arrives at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks him, “Why should I let you in?” The man begins listing all the good things he has done. He tries to explain that he has lived a decent life and helped others. He goes on for a while, but St. Peter does not seem convinced. Finally, the man gives up and says, “You should let me in because of Jesus.” That gets to the heart of it. Of course, we are called to follow Christ, to do good, to love others, and to respond to God’s grace. But ultimately our salvation is a gift. It is because of Jesus Christ, because of what he has done for us, because God sent his Son to reconcile us to himself. God has forgiven a debt that we could never repay. Whatever we have done, wherever we have fallen, God is always ready to show mercy when we turn back to him. He gives healing. He gives us another beginning. That is the good news.
The challenge is that Jesus then asks us to become merciful as God is merciful. And this is where the parable becomes uncomfortable. The servant who has just had this unimaginable debt forgiven goes out and meets a fellow servant who owes him one hundred denarii. That is roughly one hundred days of wages. It is not nothing. It is a real debt. But it is nothing compared with the 150,000 years of wages that he has just been forgiven. And yet he refuses to show mercy. He grabs the other servant and demands, “Pay what you owe.”
We can hear that and think, “I would never act like that.” But if I am honest about my own life, I do this more often than I would like to admit. When someone hurts me, especially when there is a history there, part of me can begin to say exactly the same thing: “Pay me what you owe.” Maybe I do not say those words aloud. But I can hold on to the hurt. I can hold on to resentment. I can rehearse the offence in my mind. Forgiveness is difficult. Christianity challenges us in many ways, but perhaps one of the hardest things Jesus asks us to do is to forgive, especially to forgive those who have really hurt us. God is merciful, and we are called to be merciful. And we do not get to choose who is worthy of our forgiveness.
So how do we grow in this? I would suggest three things. First, forgiveness is also a gift that brings peace to us. There is an expression you may have heard before: resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person gets sick. When we hold tightly to resentment, we often think somehow that it punishes the other person. But in reality, it usually harms us. It weighs on our hearts. It robs us of peace. Forgiveness is certainly something we offer to another person, but it is also, in a sense, a gift we give ourselves. It frees us from allowing the hurt to control our interior life.
Second, I think it is important to distinguish between forgiveness and healing. Sometimes people say, “I cannot forgive that person because I still feel hurt.” But those are not exactly the same thing. Forgiveness can be a decision before it becomes a feeling. Jesus tells us to pray for those who hurt us. Sometimes forgiveness begins simply by saying, “Lord, I give this person to you. I do not want hatred or resentment to control me.” That does not mean the hurt disappears immediately. Healing often takes time. If someone has hurt us deeply, we should not expect all the pain to vanish because we prayed one prayer. We should not become discouraged because we do not suddenly feel warm and positive toward that person. Forgiveness may be the first step. Healing may take much longer.
Third, and this is really the main message of the parable, when we struggle to forgive, we need to remember how much mercy we ourselves have received. Sometimes when I find it difficult to forgive someone, I need to remind myself how often I have failed. I need to remember how often others have been patient with me, how often people have forgiven me, and above all, how often God has forgiven me. The more aware we are of mercy received, the more capable we become of mercy given. Mercy can flow through us. When we recognize how much we have been forgiven, it becomes a little easier to forgive.
So perhaps during this Mass, we can ask the Holy Spirit for a very particular grace. We can ask the Holy Spirit to shine a light into our hearts and show us whether there is someone we are struggling to forgive. Maybe there is a person whose name still brings up resentment. Maybe there is a hurt we continue to carry. Perhaps the Lord is inviting us today to take one step—not necessarily to pretend the hurt never happened, not necessarily to feel completely healed right away, but to begin. To place that person before the Lord. To pray for them. To say, “Lord, as you have been merciful to me, help me to become merciful too.” God’s mercy is the good news, and because we have received that mercy, we are called to let it flow through us to others.
