Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

          For the second week in a row there is a theme of forgiveness in the Sunday readings.  Last week we heard about the “power of the keys,” the power “to bind and to loose,” and I preached about how all of us share in that power by forgiving others, by seeking forgiveness ourselves and by gently and appropriately offering correction to our brother or sister when necessary. 

But it would seem there is more for us to learn about this, as both the first reading and the Gospel that the Church proposes for today speak of forgiveness, and in a much more explicit way than last week.

Just because we heard it first, let’s look first at the reading from Sirach.  There is an image there that I think is particularly instructive: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”  What a great image!  Being a bit of a fantasy literature nerd, I can’t help but think here of the character Gollum from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (a daily Mass-going Catholic, by the way).

Without giving too much away, Gollum is a pitiful character who is enslaved by a magical ring, so much so that, over time, it has transformed him into a hideous creature.  He is so obsessed with the ring that it is as though his whole person is curved or wrapped around it.  He clutches it tightly to himself and spends countless hours gazing upon it and caressing it.  He refers to it as his “precious.”  When he is parted from the ring, he wants nothing more than to regain it.

Perhaps this is not a bad image for that “wrath and anger” spoken of in the Book of Sirach.  When we have been hurt, there is a part of us that, for whatever reason, almost seems to prefer to hang on to that hurt.  Maybe we try to forgive, because we know that’s what we should do, but no sooner have we set it down than we pick it right back up again.  As the expression goes, we truly “hold” a grudge.  More than this, we become obsessed with it.  It becomes “precious” to us.  Even as we feel enslaved by it, if we’re honest with ourselves, there’s something about us in our fallen human nature that almost likes that feeling, that relishes in it.  “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”  To say “hug” or “embrace” here suggests a twisted kind of affection for these “hateful things.”

The key, of course, is to “let go.” But letting go of past hurts, grudges and resentment is so difficult to do precisely because the hurt was so real.  So, I think I need to clarify what I mean by “letting go.”  Letting go of a past hurt (in other words, forgiveness) is not condoning the wrong that was done.  In fact, it fully acknowledges the very real hurt that was done and calls it what it is: evil.  But then it says, “I am not going to allow this to rule me.  I am not going to seek retaliation.  I am not going to let this person or situation continue to hurt me by playing it over and over again in my mind.  I am not going to allow this to turn me into an angry, bitter person, the kind of person who will turn around and hurt others.” 

It should also be said that forgiveness is not apathy or stoicism, in which we refuse to let anything get under our skin.  There is, after all, a good kind of anger.  It’s that little “buzzer” in our conscience that goes off to tell us that something is not right.  When we are wronged or when we see our neighbor wronged, we want that buzzer to be in working order, we just don’t want any “false alarms.”

There’s one other little fruit I would like to pick from this reading from Sirach before turning to the Gospel:  “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.”  There is a connection, in other words, between our willingness to forgive and our being forgiven.  We might think of this as a New Testament concept, as we will see in a moment, but really its roots are very much in the Old Testament, as we find here.  Let’s face it, we’re very comfortable with half of this bargain.  Who doesn’t like to be forgiven?  It’s that other part, again, that is so hard.  And yet we pray every day for this grace in the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  It’s not easy, but it is necessary.

So, let’s turn now to the Gospel.  Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?”  Do you hear what’s going on here, what’s underneath this question?  It is the spirit of “minimalism,” and I don’t mean material minimalism, but spiritual minimalism, in which we want to know what is the bare minimum we have to do to be good with God and with our neighbor.  It reminds me of other questions I have heard over the years of my priesthood: “Father, how often do I really have to go to Mass?  How often do I have to go to confession?  How far can I ‘go’ with my boyfriend/girlfriend?  Father, what’s the absolute latest I can arrive at Mass and the earliest I can leave and have it still ‘count’ for my Sunday obligation?”  I could go on.  Now, I suppose I could give more or less “technical” answers to these questions, but it misses the point.  If we aim for the minimum, we will soon resign ourselves to the minimum, and it won’t be long before we’re not even doing that.

And so, in response to Peter’s question, Jesus says, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”  And, of course, Jesus doesn’t mean here literally only seventy-seven times.  Though, I can imagine Peter starting to count them off on his fingers, “I forgive, I forgive, I forgive, I forgive….”  No, Jesus means as often as you need to.  As often as that “inner Gollum” goes lunging for the “precious” again; as often as we pick up that old hurt or hold on once more to that grudge, Jesus is telling us to set it down, let it go, forgive.  Again, this doesn’t mean we ignore the hurt, or simply wish it way, or pretend it didn’t happen, but we make a conscious act of the will to give it to God and we refuse to let it rule us.

We end, then, with this great parable of the king settling accounts with his servants.  One particular servant who owed a great debt and “had no way of paying it back” seems to be genuine he cries out to the king: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.”  But he soon forgets the mercy that was shown him when one of his own debtors pleads with him using these very words.  We see in this parable, in a more negative way, that same correlation between forgiving and being forgiven we heard about in the Book of Sirach.  In fact, it really says in reverse exactly what we heard there.  In Sirach we heard, “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then…your own sins will be forgiven.” Here the message is, “Now that you have been forgiven, you must in turn forgive your neighbor.”  It is as though Jesus is picking up on and continuing the pattern from Sirach: forgive and you will be forgiven; and once you have been forgiven you must again forgive.  It creates, in other words, a cycle of mercy, rather than a cycle of injustice.

As we look at the world around us, there are many ways in which we might hope and pray that this be lived out, but I would suggest we start a home, with ourselves.  Whether it is to forgive or be forgiven, let’s restart that cycle of mercy.  We do this in a beautiful way right here, in our celebration of the Eucharist, which is truly the Sacrament of God’s mercy.  Here we are reminded, as the popular Christian saying goes, “We owed a debt we could not pay, so Jesus paid a debt he did not owe.”  Here we witness and receive God’s generous and merciful love, and then are sent forth as missionaries of this same merciful love into a hurting and broken world.  Over time, lived consistently, I believe this will change the world.