Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive him?
As many as seven times?
Peter must have had a sense that forgiveness was important to Jesus. He just heard the framework Jesus provided for how someone should reach out to a brother who had sinned against him, how a staged intervention could sometimes be appropriate, and how at times it was even necessary to involve the Church. All of this seemed to stem from the importance of preserving unity since Jesus said, "I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (see Matthew 18:19-20).
Peter seemed to have taken that lesson somewhat to heart. No doubt forgiving seven times seemed extravagant or even extreme. Perhaps he suggested that number since the book of Proverbs said that even "the righteous falls seven times and rises again" (see Proverbs 24:16). But the limit proposed by Peter was still the result of a limited and merely human perspective.
Jesus answered, "I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
Before we can assess what we ought to do for others in terms of forgiveness we must first reckon how we ourselves stand before God. When we forget this we are inclined to ration out forgiveness as though we ourselves are doing something impressive and praiseworthy to forgive even once. Forgetting about God allows us to imagine that we do not stand in existential need and causes us to act like petty lesser gods ourselves, dolling out forgiveness as a favor which we happen to choose to bestow. Thus we feel free to not forgive and to hold the debts of others against them. After all, if we were always in the black in this spiritual economy we might easily be led to judge these others debtors as defective in a way that we are not.
When he began the accounting,
a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold
We do not stand in a place of spiritual independence as we sometimes imagine. We too are debtors. And the debt we owe to God is much greater than anything anyone else could ever owe to us. Even before we consider our the sins we have committed during our lives we already stand in debt to God for the entirety of our being and our life in the world. Even a perfect life could never have paid for this unmerited favor. And none of us have been perfect, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (see Romans 3:23).
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
Fortunately our master is generous and full of compassion. He stands in need of nothing and so has no need to squeeze us for every last penny. His plan was never to make us pay, but rather to teach us to rely on him, and to turn to him when we fail. Yet sometimes we respond to this vast compassion of God with fear instead of gratitude and faith. Rather allowing his mercy to free us from the need to be independent we double down on taking measures to protect our fragile egos. We do not interpret the existence of the master as a blessing because of his compassion but only see in him the future risk of potential condemnation. This is not the sort of fear that is the beginning of wisdom for it is a fear that vastly mischaracterizes the master.
His master summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant!
I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant,
as I had pity on you?'
The master was not going to change his mind and insist that, after all, the debt did really need to be repaid. All he desired was that the mercy he showed to us would redound to others as well. We must not let our complacency or our fear prevent us from becoming agents of the mercy of God as he desires. If we don't willing open our hands in this way he will help to to overcome our resistance, but his backup plan will be less pleasant.
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
The call to forgive is not a call to feel a certain way about others. Our feelings our beyond our direct control. Instead we must make the appropriate acts of will in the hope that our feelings will catch up. It is clear that the call to actively forgive does not mean that we must also have no boundaries or foolishly allow ourselves to be injured again and again. But it at least means that we learn to pray for those who have hurt us, to will their good apart from us if we cannot at once be reunited.
The path to forgiveness may seem as difficult to traverse as the Jordan overflowing its banks during the season of the harvest. This difficulty should not make us give up and turn back. Instead we should look to the assistance of our own new ark of the covenant, the Blessed Virgin Mary, to part the waters by the way in which she brings the presence of Jesus himself to bear on the challenges we face. Mary, queen of heaven, pray for us.
No sooner had these priestly bearers of the ark
waded into the waters at the edge of the Jordan,
which overflows all its banks
during the entire season of the harvest,
than the waters flowing from upstream halted
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