IN today’s Gospel a servant would not show mercy to another human being, even though he received mercy from his Master. The Master finds out about it and takes everything away from the servant. How do we feel about this? Glee? Happiness? The evil one got what is coming to him? How do we account if we were that servant? hmmmm
Think about your heart
In today’s readings it is far too easy to get locked into the Gospel parable. We almost take joy in the final disposition of the servant who had received mercy but failed at giving it. We can almost think Booyah… He got his comeuppance.
While the story is fodder for many a movies and many books… We have to remember there is someone who lost their life that day. How many times have we been put into this very same position? When have we slammed the door shut on someone looking for help. A Co-worker ask for a bit of time to talk about a problem… Perhaps a son or daughter, niece, nephew, grandson or grandparent.
Here is one of my stories
Yeah I know… I have done it too. Far too often we are approached by someone looking for help and we blow them off. I was down in Memphis years ago, having recently reverted back to Catholicism. Now Like any city, there were many homeless as I was walking back to my hotel room. I had my Catholic Cross hanging out for all to see… I was evangelizing you see… Showing off Jesus proudly. And I passed one gentlemen and heard… Can you help… I passed on by… and he called back And you call yourself a Christian…
Owww that hurt… and darn it if that didn’t just bug me…. talk about a verbal conviction. How many times had Jesus forgiven me for all my violations and I couldn’t give a few dollars to each of those men on the street? Maybe 20 or so… I know what you’re thinking you would have been mobbed or hurt… maybe… but the point is… even if I gave each of them 5 dollars… it would have still been less than what I was paying for the room I was staying in.
That is a lot of 7’s
So you can see the pride and the ignorance in me along with some arrogance. So I guess I have another 7 times 77 -1 times left for Jesus to forgive me. Yanno when we look through a Gospel passage like this there is so much to divert our attention away from the main paint. Jesus saying how important forgiveness is. I hope that homeless man forgives me… I do owe him a lot. Jesus point is not that we forgive someone 539 times and then we stop… We heard a different story just last week on how to go through the process of correction, which by its very nature includes forgiveness.
Notice Jesus uses the term 7 time 77 times. Well that is many 7’s being used. 7 is the number which represents perfection. In Hebrew the number 7 is Shea-vah it is no coincidence that Sabbath has a similar sound as it again is that powerful 7th day perfection motif. So Jesus is not limiting the number of times we should forgive… He is actually saying forgive and continue to forgive for as many days as I have given and will give you. Oh yeah… and mean it too!
It is not all about us
That sounds like my dad as well as my Father. We proclaim to be a prolife community we have to look deeply into our hearts. Proclaiming being pro-life means there is much forgiveneness in our lives. People do things that are wrong. I have heard that this is called sin and the great majority of it is done without any thinking or malice we might say the wrong thing and someone is hurt. We look at someone they perceive this in a wrong way… and they are hurt.
Do we keep this feeling of hurt in our hearts? Artificially keeping it there to fester and burn a hole right into us? That seems to be the natural way we do things. But Jesus continues to tell us throughout all of the Gospels that forgiveness is not just one of many options… it is the only option that will result in life. He goes through this who parable to show us God forgives us for oh so many things. We know that we get into an emotional and spiritual funk when we don’t forgive… it hurts us and we need to release this feeling so that we do not sink deeper and deeper into sin and hate.
Remember the Lord’s prayer
We should follow His command to forgive. He showed us the ultimate example of his love in Jesus being on the cross and dying… and He shows the immense love he has for us through the Resurrection of Jesus.
He doesn’t stop there… He brings it all the way back through to allowing us to be with him throughout our entire lives. Jesus is there with us at Baptism, Confession, Communal service in Marriage or Holy Orders, anointing, confirmation and of course quite literally in Communion.
One thing though may block us from having Communion with Jesus and that is the hardness of heart. The stony heart that calls not to love and God… but to another place and a horrible fate.
Be Good Play Nice Think God !
Here are the Readings for this week https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091320.cfm