24th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
“Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Peter probably thinks he is being generous. Seven times! Surely there must be a limit somewhere. You forgive once, twice, three times… perhaps even seven times. But after that, enough is enough.
And Jesus answers: “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Jesus is not giving Peter a more generous number to put into his forgiveness calculator. He is blowing up the calculator. In other words: Stop counting! Because forgiveness in the Kingdom of God is not a matter of keeping accounts. It is a different way of living.
And then Jesus tells a story. A king decides to settle accounts with his servants. One man is brought before him who owes him an absurd amount of money: ten thousand talents. For Jesus’ listeners, this was not simply a large debt. It was an impossible debt. He could never repay it. Never. The king orders him to be sold, together with his wife, his children and everything he owns. The man falls on his knees: “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.”
It sounds almost touching—but it is completely unrealistic. He cannot possibly pay it back. And then comes the astonishing sentence: “The master of that servant had pity on him, and released him, and forgave him the debt.”
Not postponed. Not reduced. Not renegotiated. Forgiven!
Imagine having a debt so enormous that you know you will spend the rest of your life trying to pay it. And then someone simply says: “You owe me nothing.” That is the image Jesus gives us for the mercy of God. God does not merely give us more time to become worthy of him. He forgives. And here the story could have ended beautifully.
But it doesn’t. The servant walks out of the king’s presence and immediately meets another servant who owes him a small amount. The second man falls down and says almost exactly the same thing: “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.”
But this time there is no mercy. The first servant grabs him, demands payment and has him thrown into prison. And Matthew gives us one of the most devastating little sentences in the Gospel: “He was unwilling.” He had received mercy. His enormous debt had been erased. But he was unwilling to show mercy to another.
And this is precisely where Jesus puts his finger on us. The problem is not that the first servant has never experienced forgiveness. Quite the opposite. He has experienced extraordinary forgiveness. But the mercy he received never reached his heart. He has been forgiven, but he has not become forgiving.
Perhaps this is one of the great temptations of Christian life. We come to church, hear that God loves us, ask for forgiveness, receive the Eucharist, and pray: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And then we go home and think: “Yes, but what he did to me is different.” “She has done it three times already.” “I will forgive him—but I will never forget.”
Or perhaps the most dangerous sentence: “He doesn’t deserve to be forgiven.”
Maybe not. Neither did you. That is the point of the parable. Jesus is not saying that evil does not matter. Christian forgiveness does not mean denying injustice, excusing abuse or refusing to establish necessary boundaries. But Jesus says something much more radical: Do not let another person’s sin turn your heart into a prison.
The first servant has been liberated from his enormous debt. Yet he immediately becomes a jailer. And perhaps that is what unforgiveness does to us. We think we are punishing the other person, but often we are the ones who remain imprisoned. We replay the conversation, remember the insult, rehearse what we should have said. We keep the account open.
Jesus says: Close the account. Not because what happened was unimportant. But because you are more than what happened to you. And because God’s mercy is bigger than your wound.
There is something else striking about this Gospel. Peter does not ask: “How often must I forgive my enemy?” He asks about my brother. The difficult person is inside the community. This is therefore also a Gospel about what kind of community the Church is meant to be. The Church is a community of people who know that they themselves live by mercy. It cannot be built on power, prestige, status or the illusion that some people are above others. It is built on something much more demanding: people who know that they have been forgiven, and therefore learn to forgive.
Of course, there must be boundaries. Matthew’s Gospel takes sin seriously. Sometimes someone must be confronted. Sometimes separation is necessary. We must not call evil good or protect people who cause harm. But the goal is always restoration. The Church is most truly Christian not when it is most successful at excluding sinners, but when it is most determined to find the lost, restore the broken and open the door again.
That is why Jesus ends the parable with a warning. The king says: “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?”
And Jesus concludes: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” That is a hard word. Jesus is telling us that there is a connection between the mercy we receive and the mercy we give. We cannot sincerely pray: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” and then add in our hearts: “…except that person.”
The question is not whether we have been hurt. The question is: What will we do with the hurt? Will we turn it into bitterness? Will we keep the account open? Or will we place it into the hands of God? “Lord, this person owes me something. I cannot make it right. I cannot simply forget it. But I refuse to carry this debt forever. I leave it with you.”
That may take time. Forgiveness is not always a feeling. Sometimes it is a decision we have to make again and again. “Seventy-seven times.” Until one day we discover that the person who hurt us no longer has the power to determine who we are.
And perhaps this is the deepest point of today’s Gospel: The Christian is not someone who has no debts. The Christian is someone who knows that his debt has been forgiven. And therefore he cannot remain a collector of debts. We live because mercy has been shown to us.
So let us not be like the servant who walks out of the king’s presence forgiven—and immediately goes looking for someone to make pay. Let us become what we have received:
Forgiven people who forgive.
Mercied people who show mercy.
People who have been set free—and therefore refuse to imprison others.
Because in the Kingdom of God, the question is never simply: “How much do they owe me?”
The question is:“How much mercy have I received?” And the answer is: More than I could ever repay.
Dominik Terstriep S.J.
