24th Sunday Year A

See Commentary on Matthew 18:21-35


Homily 1 - 2011

Today’s parable is a classic parable.  It raises so many questions, so many “yes, buts”, that it leaves unanswered: about forgiveness, about God.  Is God really the infinitely violent, vindictive one – exempt from Jesus’ target of the 77-times – who angrily hands sinners over to the torturers (or their eternal equivalent)?  Parables are meant to get us thinking.  They don’t give clear answers or impose moral messages.  They are not a holy version of Aesop’s fables.  The way that each of us tries to make sense of today’s parable will reflect our own level of maturity – but, hopefully, whatever that level, what we make of it won’t totally satisfy us but will leave us restless, and invite us to look yet more deeply, more openly.

Forgiveness is not only difficult.  It can be disturbing, confusing and threatening.  Yet the image that concludes today’s parable: handed over to the torturers is not a bad description, even if highly poetical, of how it feels when we choose not to forgive but to harbour our resentments and allow our bitterness to torture us.  It’s not a bad description either of life in a world where people generally do not forgive – life in our world as we know it (and have got too used to): locally, nationally, and, especially, internationally [as the ongoing events since 9/11 too clearly illustrate].

Jesus emphasised forgiveness.  Interestingly, he rarely, if ever, explicitly insisted on the need to say sorry.  (Can you think of any time when he did?)  Yet, though he emphasised the need for us to forgive (if we ever wish to experience true inner peace) – he didn’t start with our forgiving.  Something else is necessary first.  Indeed, the Gospel showed Jesus beginning his whole mission with the message: The Kingdom of heaven is close at hand …  and it’s Good News … but only if you believe it.

He insisted that the initiative is God’s.  That’s where it all starts.  God has come near; and the God who has come near is the God who causes his sun to rise on bad as well as good, his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike – a God who is, apparently, in no way influenced by what we are like: bad or good, honest or dishonest… but who simply loves us all – without conditions; because God can’t help it! That’s the way God is.

The problem is that we won’t believe it – and the more upright we are, the more reluctant we are to believe it.  (Work that one out.)  We need to get in touch with God’s love – which is the same as we need to get in touch with God’s forgiveness and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by it.  That is where it all starts – God’s unconditional love for us is where the possibility, the energy and the desire for us in turn to love and to forgive come from.  Until we depth God’s love and forgiveness for us, and are caught up in the sheer wonder of it, I don’t think we can love or forgive others truly.  We just don’t have the wherewithal.

Hurts can go deep.  To be hurt, betrayed, or abused [emotionally, physically or sexually], particularly by someone loved, or trusted, or even just respected, can wound a person’s deepest inner core.  Particularly if they were abused when they were young, before they ever had a strong sense of their identity and radical worth, that deepest inner core can even dry up.  That is why pedophilia is so frighteningly destructive.  To expect people to forgive is grossly unfair.  God’s love can set them free – free enough.  It can be truly healing, truly creative.  But God’s love can also be elusive: God hasn’t got skin (as a little boy once lamented!).  The most that others can do is to try to embody, to enflesh God’s love through their own love, their profound respect, and patience… and total absence of expectations.

We are all “works in progress”.  Sometimes we can be wounded healers.  Sometimes God’s creative power can work through us.  That, for me, is Good News.


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.


Homily 3 - 2023

There is no  doubt what the topic of today’s Gospel passage is about — forgiveness. More even than that — unlimited forgiveness. It is absolutely clear also that Jesus wished that his message be taken extremely seriously. However, it seems that the early Church, in its perhaps immature, though eager, taking Jesus’ lesson on board, got some things mixed up. The super-generous king of the first part of the story finished up falling far short of Jesus’ insistence on forgiving the metaphorical “seventy-seven” times sinner, finally resorting even to torturing the utterly insolvent debtor. However, the point of the story is clear enough.

Why the absolute insistence on forgiveness on Jesus’ part? 

Forgiveness is simply the shape that love takes in a context of hurt, especially deep hurt. They are the same thing. Forgiveness is love, and love is the experience of salvation, and salvation is nothing less than the experience of life, life to the full. Jesus was himself so convinced of its necessity [and beauty, might I add] that he freely forgave everyone complicit in his murder, as he struggled even to breathe while dying his tortured death on the cross. 

But when we talk about forgiveness, we need to be careful. For a start, its meaning is often misunderstood. Feelings of hostility, of anger and resentment, even quite deep feelings, are usually inevitable. Their hurts can leave deep scars. Their psychological effects can be quite traumatic, so deep that they simply cannot be forgotten, nor, in many cases, should they be.

I hope that we have all become wiser because of the relentless publicity given of recent years to child sexual abuse and the danger of seeking to keep it covered up. Sadly, it seems that many of us in the Church have still a lot to learn or at least to choose to admit in this regard. Lately, more women are finding the courage to make public their experience of past abuse.

Forgiveness does not deal with feelings. Beyond feelings, and in the midst of feelings, forgiveness is a decision. It governs how we decide to act in response to the guilty one. It falls short of reconciliation, though it can lead on to it. It is based on recognition of the radical, deep, ultimately God-given, human dignity that we disciples of Jesus believe God gives to everyone — that is not necessarily obvious, often even to the guilty one. Forgiveness is a deliberate decision, based on an act of faith. Even for the willing, to act on it can require frequent practice over time. 

I believe that forgiveness can be impossible at times for some. It involves a free choice to love; and to even want and to be capable of loving seems to be rooted in people’s early experience. Over the years I have come across some people whose early childhood has been truly horrific, and who have had no personal experience of ever having been loved. I wonder if they will ever be able to love.

Yet, having said all this, for most of us, loving is possible. 

Personally, I was blessed to have been loved wonderfully as a young child; and that early experience has opened me up in my own halting way to want to love others. I think I know what Jesus was driving at.

In one of his Letters, St Paul listed off a series of attitudes, that the Church has afterwards come to call the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit”. I think they could also be called, among other things, and perhaps with an opportunity  for a better choice of English words, the “fruits of forgiving”. I shall list them off slowly: love, joy, peace, patience, graciousness, goodness, trust, humility and self-discipline. Each one rewards gentle reflection. To personally experience each, singly or in combination, is beautiful.