This Sunday, Forgive the Way You Expect To Be Forgiven

We need this Sunday’s Gospel reading after last week’s. The Gospel at last week’s Mass instructed us to correct people who have sinned against us. This week we get the necessary corollary to correction: forgiveness.

Here are five takeaways for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: When Peter offers to forgive seven times, he thinks he’s generous.

“Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive?” Peter asks, then ventures an answer. “As many as seven times?”

Peter here more than doubles the “three strikes, you’re out” rule that prevailed in some Rabbinic readings of the law, and he does it by naming the number of “completeness,” seven. But Jesus surprises him with his answer: “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”

To illustrate the point, Jesus tells the parable of the Unforgiving Servant. The debtor in the parable owes the king “a huge amount” — which most translations specify as 10,000 talents, or 200,000 years’ wages. Think of that. He owes far more than he or generations of his descendants could ever repay. And when he can’t pay it back, he stands to lose everything, including his entire family: “his master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his property, in payment of the debt.”

It’s clear what this debt stands for: his whole world and everything he holds dear. But his master magnanimously forgives the debt.

Then, the forgiven servant meets a man who owes him 100 days wages — a truly significant debt, representing much of the year’s earnings — and he grabs him and chokes him and refuses to forgive him. His fellow servants are “deeply disturbed” and report him to the king, who “handed him over to the torturers.”

Jesus provides a chilling moral of the story: “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from the heart.”

Second: The difference between the two amounts is even more extreme in our lives.

We each owe God far more than we could ever pay for all he has given us: our free will and intellect, the ability to choose and know and remember; every good thing we have ever had or ever will have, every loved-one and every kindness, every color in nature, every song, every poem, every good, true, and every beautiful thing we have ever marveled at, or will ever marvel at — every joy, every accomplishment, every comfort.

And not just that.

We owe him even more — because with every sin, we took what God gave us and handed it to his enemy. We took the gift of free will and enslaved it to sin. We took the gift of our intellect and used it to plot against God. We filled our memory with sinful pleasures so that we could return to them again and again. We repaid good with evil, kindness with selfishness. We chose the false beauty of sin over the true beauty of God’s will.

And not just that.

God not only forgave our debt, he handed himself over to the jailers and torturers in our place to pay our debt for us, dying and rising to place us on the shore of an ocean of mercy.

If we repent like the servant in the story — if we fall down, do him homage, and pray, “Be patient with me,” we will be forgiven.

Third: But the next part of the story applies to us also.

He sounds dastardly in the story, but we all do what the Unforgiving Servant does. Our neighbors owe much less to us, because their sin isn’t against their creator and redeemer, but against us. They have offended us by something they said or didn’t say. Perhaps they caused us financial hardship. Maybe they offended us at home, or maybe they got crosswise with us at work too many times.

At any rate, we are done with them. We don’t forgive them. We don’t speak with them if we don’t have to. We can hardly even pray for them. We say with our words or with our silence, “You can never pay back what you owe.” Like the servant in the parable, we put them into a prison, at least in our hearts, until they make up for what they did; an impossible situation for both of us.

But Jesus is really only asking for us to forgive others the way the way we keep expecting them to forgive us.

We get forgiven over and over again by people in our life. Our friends look the other way at our faults so often that we don’t even realize they’re doing it. They tolerate the ways we overstep, and judge, and misspeak, again and again. Our parents do, too — our mother forgave how drastically we disrupted her life as a baby, how we bumbled through life needing her constant attention as a child, and how often we ignored her or gave her the cold shoulder once we grew up.

They forgave all these things because their ego disappeared behind the love they have for us. But our ego takes center stage when we look at others.

Fourth: It is an absurd way for us to behave, because it’s ultimately not about us.

Of course, ultimately, sinners don’t sin against you or me alone; to sin at all is to oppose God, and to sin against another human being is to sin against the image and likeness of God. When they harm you or me, it is part of a cycle of harm that we all share in. And when we forgive them, rather than acting as though we are personally magnanimous, we are simply extending the love of the God we describe in the Psalm: “The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.”

St. Paul describes this in the Second Reading. “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself,” he says, “For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.”

So when we deny forgiveness to our neighbor, we are doing the same thing we do when we sin: treating God’s gifts as our own possessions to use according to our will, not his.

Nothing is ours. Our goods aren’t ours, our fate isn’t ours, and it isn’t our place to judge those who offend us. All is God’s.

“Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the LORD?” asks the First Reading, from Sirach. “If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath, who will forgive his sins? Remember your last days, set enmity aside; remember death and decay, and cease from sin!”

This is the fifth petition of the Our Father: “Forgive us as we forgive others.” The Catechism calls it “astonishing,” and St. John Paul II said, “is this not perhaps the most difficult petition of the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ precisely because what is asked of us is so clear and uncompromising?”

Fifth: This is hard. It’s hard to forgive. Here is some help.

Here are two practices to help gain a heart for forgiveness.

First, review daily the many gifts God is pouring out on you. Here is a help to guide you through what God gives you each day, from material blessings to beauty, goodness, truth, and the faith. When you see how much God has given you, and how much you are indebted to him, it is easier to forgive the smaller debts you are owed.

Second, these Forgiveness Prayers are an opportunity to forgive 77 times whenever you pray them. They go through categories of those you may need to forgive, including some you might not have thought about. Doing a thorough inventory like this also brings about painful realizations: Those closest to you — spouse, mother, father, children and relatives — are the people who have helped you the most and hurt you the most. They need a lot of gratitude and a lot of forgiveness, both.

The Forgiveness Prayers end with this great explanation from Father Robert DeGrandis:

“Forgiveness is an act of the will, not a feeling. If we pray for a person, we can be assured that we have forgiven that person. To help accept an individual and open ourselves to a particular person more, picture that person with the Lord Jesus and say to the Lord, ‘I love him because You love him. I forgive him because You forgive him.’”

When we meet Jesus Christ in the afterlife, he will look at what we have done with what he gave us. Then he will look at how we treated those who took valuable things away from us, just as we did from God. Only those who “forgive each other from their hearts” will be able to receive the even greater gifts he has in store.

Each Mass is practice for that day. He comes before us on the altar when the priest says, “this is my blood” poured out “for the forgiveness of sins.” Then we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” in the Our Father. We greet each other with the sign of peace to show that we are reconciled, and only then do we receive communion, uniting ourselves to the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world — ours and our neighbor’s.

 

By Tom Hoopes