24th Sunday Year A - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2020

What a parable! And what an ending! So we need to be careful as we reflect on it. Most parables were stories told to make one point [though often the early Church, and we preachers, too, were tempted to find parallels for all the details in the story]. The context of the story was Jesus’ comment to Peter about the challenge to forgive “seventy-seven times”, that is, without limit. The story as we have it was full of hyperboles: an impossibly large debt, having the king change in a flash from being totally untypically generous to imposing an utterly barbaric punishment of endless torture. The stakes were high! But if we stick to the understanding of the whole story having only the one main point, what was that one point that Jesus wanted to get across to the disciples? I think it was, “I cancelled all that debt of yours… Were you not bound, then, to have compassion on your fellow servant just as I had compassion on you?”

Trying to understand forgiveness is like trying to understand love. We never come to the end of discovering what it really entails.

But Jesus, who came to set us free, saw forgiveness as an inbuilt condition for, or constituent of, our freedom and our experience of salvation. It is our choice: forgiveness and freedom in integrity, or revenge and endless dissatisfaction and heart-rending anger. Jesus faced the choice himself — at his agony in the garden. He was tempted; he struggled; and opted for the way of forgiveness and love.

The theme of the king handing the unforgiving servant over to the torturers need not distract us. It is there for dramatic effect, whether attributable to Jesus or added later by the early Christian community. It belongs with such images as fire, or exterior darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, or smouldering fires of Gehenna, that need be nothing more than common motifs referring to the all-to-prevalent disorder of this world — the wars, terrorism, hostility, violence, sexual abuse, economic inequity, exclusion, etc. — resulting from the reluctance of nations, communities and individuals to follow Jesus’ way of love and forgiveness. Horrific threats and sanctions are not God’s way to lead people to the wholeness and freedom of forgiving.

Rather, may the true point of the parable fill our awareness to the point of saturation, “I cancelled all that debt of yours … Are you not bound, then, to have compassion on your fellow creatures just as I have compassion on you?” My sense is that, until we come to terms with God’s constant and tender loving forgiveness of ourselves and of everyone, we simply lack both the motivation and the capacity genuinely to forgive.

God wants to move us from avoidance or even denial, and from a reluctant sense of obligation and burden, to the freedom that comes with truth and love — even though while wounds are raw, that freedom and inner strength to forgive “not seven but seventy-seven times” may be a long process.