Sunday, September 17, 2023

Homily for 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Sept. 17, 2023
Responsorial Psalm
Matt 18: 21-35
Sir 27: 30—28: 7
Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion” (Resp Psalm).

The word that recurs in today’s liturgy—in the collect, Sirach, the psalm response, and the gospel—is “mercy.”  We praise God for his “surpassing kindness” (Ps 103:11).  We remember his covenant with us and his overlooking our faults (Sir 28:7).  We’re grateful for his compassion in the face of our overwhelming debt to him (cf. Matt 18:24-27), the debt of sin.

The apostle Peter has grabbed our attention in several recent Sunday gospels.  He didn’t appear in last week’s, in which Jesus spoke of a reconciliation process for dealing with someone who’s offended—against an individual or against the whole fraternity of disciples (Matt 18:15-20).  But Peter jumps right on that teaching to ask about forgiveness, specifically about how extensively we must forgive our brothers (or sisters) who “sin against” us (18:21).  Peter proposes a generous enumeration:  “as many as 7 times” (v. 21).

The Unmerciful Servant
(John Everett Millais)

Jesus, instead, demands limitless forgiveness.  He does so thru a parable, and in doing so he follows what the Book of Sirach teaches:  “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven” (28:2).  He illustrates the more general teaching he gave us in the Our Father:  “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us” (cf. Matt 6:12).

In the parable called “the unforgiving servant,” the king is an obvious stand-in for God.  He writes off completely an unimaginably gigantic debt, literally 10,000 talents.  A talent was a sum of money equivalent to about 20 years’ pay for a common laborer.[1]  Who could possibly even accumulate a debt of 200,000 years’ wages, much less repay it?  We’re told that King Herod’s annual revenue was a mere 900 talents.[2]

            That enormity, we are to conclude, is equivalent to the enormity of our sins in the face of God’s divine majesty.  There’s no way any of us can atone for any sin in our personal ledger.  Our only salvation is God’s limitless mercy:  “Moved with compassion, the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan” (Matt 28:27).

We can merit such compassion only be exercising a like compassion, by forgiving our fellow servants.  “Could anyone refuse mercy to another like himself…?  If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath, who will forgive his sins?” (Sir 28:4-5).  Can Jesus be any blunter than when he tells us unless we forgive our brother from our heart, our heavenly Father will condemn us “to the torturers” until we repay our debt in full? (Matt 18:34-35)?

A demand to forgive those who’ve injured us, sinned gravely against us, isn’t a demand to forget or to become friends.  It is a demand to put aside vengeance, to trying to even the score, to making some enemy pay up in full, to desiring that some person or group be condemned to hell.

After we’ve been gravely injured, accidentally or maliciously—by some gross mistreatment by a co-worker, for example; by some insult from a relative; by the 9/11 attacks (which killed a friend of mine)—what does Jesus require of us?  In the Sermon on the Mount, he commands, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father” (Matt 5:44).  The least we can do is pray for those who’ve hurt us, as individuals or even as a nation.  Jesus gave us his personal example when he prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).  St. John Paul II went to the prison where his would-be assassin was held, met with him, and forgave him.

We can pray for the conversion of whoever has sinned against us—that they have a change of heart, that they become more virtuous.  God can bring that about, as he did with St. Paul, for example.  We ought to pray for ourselves, that God’s mercy might touch our own hearts, might soften us, make us less harsh.  Are we not sinners too?  Should we not have pity on our fellow servants, our sisters and brothers under God’s fatherhood (cf. Matt 18:33)?  Should we not desire what God desires, that “everyone be saved and come to know the truth,” that Christ Jesus “gave himself as a ransom” for the redemption of the entire human race (1 Tim 2:4-5)?

 That desire for God’s grace to be effective in every human heart applies to ourselves, to individuals who’ve offended us personally in any way great or small, to leaders and entire nations or groups who’ve offended against others by aggression or terror.  May God have mercy upon us all; may Christ “be Lord of both the dead and the living” (Rom 14:9).



[1] Equivalent of 6,000 denarii; the denarius was a day wage for a laborer.  In the parable, the 2d debtor owed 100 denarii.

[2] Raymond E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (NY, 1984), p. 145, n. 198.

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