"I FORGAVE YOUR ENTIRE DEBT."

Homily for Sept. 17th, 2017: 24^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Mt. 18:21-35.

AIM: To show that God=s gifts, in particular forgiveness, can be retained only if we share them with others.

 

 Abbot Jerome Kodell of New Subiaco Abbey in western Arkansas, describes  an ugly scene at the funeral of a widow. Two of her adult children refused to attend because their siblings were also present. What a terrible picture of family bitterness and unhappiness. The cause?  Inability to forgive past wrongs and injuries, even at the grave of the common mother.

ALord, if my brother sins against me,@ Peter Jesus asks in our gospel reading, Ahow often must I forgive? As many as seven times?@  Peter assumes that the duty of forgiveness has limits.

AI say to you,@ Jesus replies at once, Anot seven times; but seventy times seven times.@ Jesus was saying that for his followers the duty of forgiveness is unlimited. There is never a time when the Christian disciple can say: >I have forgiven enough. Now is the time not for mercy but for justice.= Peter asked about the quantity of forgiveness. As so often, Jesus does not answer the question.  Instead he tells a story about the quality of forgiveness, and the reason for it. We=ve heard the story countless times. For Jesus= hearers it was new. Let=s see if we can put ourselves in their place.

The story=s opening is ominous. A king, for Jesus= hearers, was a man with the power of life and death over his subjects. The people with whom he intends to settle accounts are important officials responsible for collecting the king=s taxes.  AOne was brought before him,@ the story says. The use of the passive suggests that official is hauled before the ruler by the royal guards. 

The amount of the man=s debt would have caused Jesus= hearers to gasp in disbelief. The Ahuge amount@ in our translation conceals the figure given by Matthew: Aten thousand talents.@ A talent was the largest sum of money then in use C something like a million dollars today. The king they knew best, Herod the Great, is estimated to have had a total annual income of only nine hundred talents. To have incurred a debt more than ten times that already huge amount meant that the official has been embezzling on an enormous scale.

A debt of that magnitude is unpayable C as the story says: AHe had no way of paying it.@ The king=s command, that not only the official but his wife and children as well, should be sold into slavery, shows that this was a tyrannical Gentile monarch. According to Jewish law only a robber unable to restore what he had stolen could be enslaved. Other family members were immune from such punishment. 

Up to this point of the story the sympathy of Jesus= hearers would have been with the corrupt official. Though his embezzlement of such a huge sum was dishonest, the king=s cruelty was worse. The man=s plea, ABe patient with me, and I will pay you back in full,@ C reinforced by his body language: falling down before the king in homage C bears no relation to reality and is merely an expression of the official=s desperation. Once a sum of money so vast was gone, a lifetime would have been insufficient to repay it. 

Now comes a surprise: AMoved with compassion, the master let the servant go and forgave him the loan.@ A king who was prepared to enslave an entire family for the debt of one member is not the kind of man from whom one would expect mercy, let alone mercy on this scale. So it is nonetheless. The carefully crafted story will have further surprises still.

No sooner delivered from his desperate plight, the official, formerly passive (Abrought in@), becomes active: AHe found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount.@ Again Matthew states the amount Aa hundred denarii.@ A denarius was a day=s wage C the amount promised by the vineyard owner in another parable to those hired early in the day (cf. Mt 20:2). The contrast with the debt owed by the first official, and now forgiven, and that owed the latter by his colleague is immense. 

The second official=s reaction to the demand that he pay his debt mirrors that of the first. Body language (kneeling) and plea (ABe patient with me, and I will pay you back@) are identical. The sole difference is that the second official=s debt could easily be paid, given reasonable time. How shocking for those hearing the story for the first time to learn of the first official=s harsh response. Seizing his colleague by the throat and throttling him, he insists that the man be imprisoned until the debt is paid. The first official has completely forfeited the sympathy he enjoyed at the story=s outset.

In the story=s conclusion the colleagues of the two debtors do what Jesus= hearers wish they might do in the same situation. They report the injustice to the king. Summoning the first official again, the king reminds him of the unmerited mercy he has received and, in an act of grim irony, grants the man what, in his original desperation, he had requested: time. Now, however, the time will be spent not in repayment but in prison, under torture. 

It is a story of contrasts. The contrast between the king=s mercy and his servant=s cruelty is obvious. Less clear is the contrast between mercy and justice.  The story moves back and forth between the two. The king=s original summons and the command that the corrupt official, with his whole family, be sold into slavery are an insistence on justice at any price. The official reacts to his sentence on the same level. Instead of appealing for mercy, he pleads, however unrealistically, that if he is given time justice will be done: ABe patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.@ 

The hearers of the story are surprised when the king, portrayed up to this point as cruel, abandons his insistence on justice and shows mercy, granting his corrupt official not what he had asked (time to pay the debt) but more than he had asked (forgiveness of the debt). Justice required that, in return, this official grant his colleague=s plea for time to pay the relatively small amount which he owed. The corrupt official=s refusal of this plea violates both justice and mercy C the more so since the plea, in this case, was reasonable and realistic. This double failure brings on him swift and terrible retribution. 

Behind the king in the story stands God. The corrupt official=s hopeless plight parallels our own. From birth we owe God everything. He has given us the gift of life, using our parents as his instruments. He has also given us the unique set of gifts and talents with which each of us is endowed. Only a life of perfect obedience to God could discharge this debt. By disobedience, however, we have incurred further debts. Like the first official in the story, our situation is hopeless. Our debt to God is unpayable. Out of compassion, God sent his Son to pay on our behalf a debt we could never discharge ourselves. God has done for us, in short, what the king did for his corrupt official. As Paul writes: AHe pardoned all our sins. He canceled the bond that stood against us with all its claims, snatching it up and nailing it to the cross@ (Col. 2:13f).

 This free gift of forgiveness is not a reward for anything we do. It is simply an expression of God=s overflowing love for us as his children C sinful yet still his own, created in his image. This forgiveness is given to us, like all God=s gifts, under one strict condition: that what we have freely received, we freely share with others.  The story=s lesson is simple: if we are not forgiving toward others, as God is already forgiving toward us, we risk discovering one day that the forgiveness God has extended to us has been canceled. Jesus is telling us, in short, that our treatment of others, here and now C and especially of those who have wronged us C is already determining where, how, and with whom we shall spend eternity.