Mass readings for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Sirach 27.30-28.7 Psalm 103.1-4, 9-12 Romans 14.7-9 Matthew 18.21-35
You might remember last week’s gospel concerning the problem of sin; more specifically, what do we do when we are sinned against. Jesus prescribed a protocol, as it were, for working through this problem and being reconciled. First, trying to quietly settle the matter between you and the offender; then with a third-party present, then with the Church as a mediator; then finally when all this is exhausted, Jesus counselled that you treat the offending person as though they were outside the community of faith, but that this didn’t mean ostracizing that person, shunning, or cancelling the offender. Rather, one was to adopt a perspective like that of Jesus, wherein one desires the restoration of community and communion with that person. One’s prayer then is for the person to acknowledge his or her sin, to seek God’s absolution, and then reconciliation with you.
What some may have noticed, or rather noted by its absence, was the lack of any discussion of forgiveness.
Well, we get to it today as our gospel is a continuation of last week’s story. Yes, the teaching was incomplete, last week was part A, this week part B, and we put together the call for concern for the sinner, with today’s call to forgiveness of the sinner.
This is a timely lesson from our Lord, and it has been read in every Catholic Church throughout Canada and the world today; and among some of the Protestant churches who follow the common lectionary. I hope the lesson is being taken to heart because absent forgiveness Western Civilization will not continue, but will descend into bitter resentment, recrimination, become a house divided and then fall.
To be clear, this isn’t about abandoning justice, but it is about tempering our pursuit of it with mercy, and doing so in humility, because while we may be able to point to the sins of others, we need to acknowledge our own sins. We recall Jesus telling us to take the log out of our own eye before we start after the specks in the eyes of others. And while we may think of ourselves as more sinned against than sinning, we need to remember Jesus’ prohibition against judgment – “judge not lest ye be judged” is often thought of in terms of how we think about others, how we might look down on others having judged them; but we need to avoid judging ourselves and then acquitting ourselves. Who are we to know if the sins we have committed were truly minor, and so, can be rationalized away as not seriously concerning? We don’t know the subtle effects of our sins just because we can see the ill effects of the sins of others. We don’t have God’s total knowledge of all things, all circumstances in which sin occurs, and so we can’t know if our offense against God will have that “butterfly effect” that scientific speculation so enjoys contemplating – the flap of the butterfly’s wings that sets off a chain of causality ending in a hurricane.
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian ethos; it’s in the Lord’s Prayer which is to supposed to be our daily prayer. Everyday we ask for forgiveness, and specifically enjoin God to only forgive us to the degree we forgive others. So, Jesus is saying that is essential to our salvation. And if it’s integral to individual redemption, think on how as a community it is foundational. The Church is called to model this; but also, to encourage everyone, Christian or otherwise, to emulate Christ in his forgiveness of sinners and his clemency for the guilty.
Consider the parable Jesus tells, and how much strife is brought about in the king’s household as the forgiven slave goes around threatening his fellow slaves. Fear grips that little community, and leads to an appeal to the king, who I’m sure would rather be focussing on other matters than squabbles on the backstairs of his palace.
We shouldn’t forget that strictly speaking, the forgiven slave who then goes around the palace demanding his repayment to him is well within his rights. So, even as we can point to the law and claim the harshest punishments for our enemies are deserved, as this parable shows, we must remember how we will be held fully liable for the greater offense against the infinite majesty of God in our failure to follow Christ in this.
We need to learn to control our tendency to lash out against those who hurt us. The desire to practice forgiveness can be easily be overwhelmed by strong feelings that we have been either threatened or insulted. Our first reading acknowledges how “anger and wrath… are abominations, yet a sinner holds on to them.”
That’s why the saints who counsel forgiveness acknowledge how hard it is. Our own St. Augustine tells us how forgiveness is a great sacrifice, how it exceeds all the other personal sacrifices we make toward the pardoning of our own sins. He tells us, “There are many kinds of alms, the giving of which helps us to obtain pardon for our sins; but none is greater than that by which we forgive from our heart a sin that someone has committed against us.”
We’re seeing today a great hardening of hearts as western countries see their national communities divide into factions seeing the others as the greater offenders, each regarding themselves as not only more sinned against, but perhaps indulging in the false conceit that they are uniquely the innocent victims.
We must be careful that this does not translate into prosecutions and punishments that correlate with the advantage the powerful gain by their forgiveness of vandals and rioters in one instance, and in other instances no quarter given to those who have embarrassed them. Such cynically selective forgiveness by worldly power leads to division, conflict and chaos as trust in our institutions is undermined.
Some of you know I am a student of history, likely more so than one of theology, or more accurately, I do my theological reflection in the light of history more than through the abstractions of philosophical method. I found myself thinking on the person of Abraham Lincoln, the United States’ great president who led his nation through its most bloody conflict, its civil war. As the end of that approached, the policy of Lincoln was one of forgiveness – and that did not sit easily with many of his supporters. And yet, he understood the complexities of the politics that drive people to one side or another in that kind of conflict; how he himself had to find allies among those he despised and to lament the loss of colleagues he might have worked with who for reasons we haven’t time to go into, chose the Confederate cause. He knew that kind of complexity reached right down to the common soldier. So, at the war’s end, he did not have the defeated armies of the South interned. Rather, he asked them to leave their weapons behind and to simply go home. According to the law, they could have all been imprisoned, and many hung. Lincoln argued rightly that such would not serve the purpose of national healing and the restoration of the community.
There are further examples I can offer from the history of Christian civilization; but I fear too many assume that such magnanimity is just natural to us. We only need to read about the campaigns of pre-Christian conquerors like the Roman Julius Caesar to know how the massacre of enemies was gloried in, celebrated by the population of the winning side.
Forgiveness is what makes this particular society we enjoy possible only to the extent we practice it, practice it to our ultimate perfection in Christ.
And while my examples are drawn from the sad history of human warfare, I trust we know that forgiveness is something that pertains to all human conflict, armed or not.
It is by forgiveness that we are freed from the tragic cycle of history, of humanity’s fallen state of suspicion, enmity, fear and hate – indeed, we die to it and begin to live to the Lord.
While I would never advise people to live their lives in naïve assumption that as we forgive, others will forgive us; because not everyone either knows or loves Christ, we are nonetheless by forgiveness living apart from humanity’s grim destiny because through forgiveness we participate in divine eternal life.
Jesus told Peter his forgiveness must be offered seventy-seven times, and I imagine that even if Peter was literal about it, Jesus figured he’d lose count, and that loss would be to his benefit. And so, it will be to ours; in this way loving without counting the cost, yet by forgiveness storing up treasure in heaven unto eternal life.
Amen.