by Fr. Tommy Lane
There are a lot of numbers in today’s Gospel. Peter asks how often he must forgive someone. Seven times? Maybe Peter thought forgiving seven times could be regarded as reaching the limit to forgive because seven was a special number in Judaism, often said to be regarded as the perfect number. Jesus responded to Peter that he must forgive not seven times but seventy-seven times. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Greek and his Greek could also be translated that Peter must forgive seventy times seven times, 490 times. (Both are possible translations of Matthew’s Greek which is why you see different English translations of the Bible giving two different numbers in Jesus’ answer to Peter: to forgive seventy-seven times or to forgive seventy times seven times.) Whatever way one takes it, the meaning is the same: Jesus is asking that we forgive without limit; Jesus is asking us not to put limits on our forgiveness.
Following Peter’s question, Jesus teaches a parable on forgiveness. There are two more numbers in the parable. A king was owed a huge amount by one of his servants, ten thousand talents in Matthew’s Greek. It is a gigantic number for that time. We have big numbers now—millions, billions, trillions, and even bigger numbers that we don’t hear of usually—but ten thousand talents was a colossal number at that time. The king in the parable was owed a huge amount and forgave it. The king in the parable is God forgiving us ten thousand talents, and the way God forgave us was through the death of Jesus, Jesus offering his body and blood in sacrifice for us. Jesus’ body and blood is the ten thousand talents to pay the price for our salvation. As Jesus passed the chalice during the Last Supper, he said it was the blood of the (new) covenant shed for the forgiveness of sins (Matt 26:28). It is the ultimate demonstration of God’s love for us. As John wrote in his Gospel, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (John 3:16).
By contrast when someone hurts us, we are asked to forgive one hundred denarii, which is one hundred days’ wages. It is not small but only the tiniest fraction of the enormous number that God forgave us through Jesus’ death for us. God has paid the biggest price to forgive us, his Son Jesus, and when we are hurt by a fraction of the amount that humanity has hurt God, we are also to forgive without limit. In one sense, we could say there are two numbers in the Gospel today without limit: God forgives us without limit by paying the biggest price for us and we are to forgive each other without limit even though hurt only a fraction of the way we have hurt God.
Forgiving is easier said than done, one might say. Forgiving is not easy if the hurt is big or serious or deliberately malicious. On other occasions Jesus gave advice to help us forgive: “I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matt 5:44) Praying for those who have hurt us helps us to forgive them. By praying for them, I mean praying for their wellbeing, praying God’s blessing on them. Praying in that way for those who have hurt us helps to heal the hurt in us. When Jesus said to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, he was in fact giving us a means to overcome the hurt they caused us and a way to be able to forgive them. Forgiving is an act of love—the greatest act of love—so when we forgive we are loving our enemies and forgiving brings us interior peace and calm. So loving and praying for our enemies is good for us and, we hope, good for them also.
While it is challenging for us to forgive those who have hurt us, the really great thing about the parable today is that it tells us God’s forgiveness of us is limitless. God’s forgiveness of us cost the body and blood of Jesus. So even though we may sometimes struggle to forgive others, God is always waiting to forgive us. So have no fear in approaching Jesus for his mercy. He is always waiting to give you his mercy and especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, Confession. There, Jesus is waiting to pour out on you his mercy and forgiveness, to make you a new person with a new beginning.
© Fr. Tommy Lane 2023
This homily was delivered in a parish in Ireland.
More Homilies for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Year A
Jesus is our model in forgiving others 2011
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