Homily for 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
24th Sunday of Ordinary Time  

Sept. 13, 2026
Matt 18: 21-35
Sir 27: 30—28: 7
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

The Unmerciful Servant
(Willem van Aelst)

How often must I forgive?” (Matt 18: 21).

2 themes stand out in today’s readings and the collect (opening prayer):  God’s great mercy and forgiveness.

When Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive someone who offends him, he proposes 7 times.  In the Bible, 7 is regarded as a perfect number.  Peter’s making a generous suggestion.

Not generous enuf, however, in Jesus’ estimation.  “The Lord is kind and merciful, rich in compassion.  He pardons all your iniquities” (Responsory; Ps 103:3).

If we tallied all our iniquities, all our wicked deeds, they’d be far more than 7.  The Lord doesn’t keep count and say to us, “Enuf already!  Get your act together before I ‘hand you over to the torturers’” (18:34).

Instead, our Savior commands us, “Unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart,” you’ll be held fully to account for your debt, for all your wicked deeds.  It’s not a suggestion; it’s a command.  Mere words of forgiveness aren’t enuf; it must come from our hearts.

Forgiveness is hard.  We have a natural tendency to sulk and rub our wounds and look for revenge.

But Jesus himself gives us the example of mercy, not only in the parable we just heard in which a king freely pardons a servant who owes him, literally in the Gospel text, 10,000 talents (18:24), an impossible, incomprehensible debt—think the U.S. national debt; but also in his personal example.  From his cross, he prays to his Father, “Forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34).  He even makes an excuse for those who condemned him, tortured him, and executed him:  “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

The world is full of the misery caused by vengeance.  One nation or clan or drug gang offends another, and they engage in a non-stop cycle of retaliation.  Politicians wield their power to pursue their opponents rather than to dispense justice.  Families are torn apart by grudges.

With wisdom, someone once said that the best way to destroy an enemy is to make him your friend.  Abraham Lincoln proposed to do that, saying in his 2d inaugural address as the Civil War was coming to its end: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”  Perhaps our post-Civil War history would have been happier if Lincoln had lived and been able to bind up and heal those wounds.

More recently, after 27 years of harsh imprisonment, Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and worked to bind the wounds of racial injustice rather than to avenge the wrongs done to millions of black and bi-racial South Africans.

We don’t have to be presidents or otherwise important people to forgive someone who’s offended us.  We only have to be ourselves; because all of us get offended—by someone at work, by a family member, by some crazy driver on the road.  The offense may be real, or it may be only in our own perception.  Either way, we can choose to be calm, to extend mercy; or to seethe with anger and give the perpetrator what he (or she) deserves—in our opinion.

Imagine if God treated us as we deserve.  We read in Sirach this morning:  “Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?  Could anyone refuse mercy to another like himself, yet seek pardon for his own sins?  If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath, who will forgive his sins?” (28:3-5).  In a little while, we’ll pray as Jesus taught us, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  If we’re unwilling to forgive, then how will God treat us?

Yes, forgiveness is hard.  The 1st step, tho, is to recognize whatever hurt we’re feeling, then to ask the Lord to help us move toward forgiveness rather than resentment or retaliation.  We need the power of the Holy Spirit to act and speak as Jesus would have us do.  And then we need to pray for whoever has offended us.  Yes, turn them over to God!  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us; doing so makes us children of God, he says (Matt 5:44-45), and not children of the devil.

Children of the devil will meet the fate of the wicked servant in Jesus’ parable:  “In anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt” (Matt 18:34).  Better that we should “serve God with all our hearts,” as the Collect prayed, and then “we may feel the working of his mercy.”  “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice,” Sirach advised; “then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven” (Sir 28:2).