September 17, 2023
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) on September 17, 2023 at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. As this was the kick-off Mass for our 2023-24 Family Religious Education Program, we used the Children’s Lectionary at Mass. The homily is based on the readings of the day: Sirach 27:30 -28:7; Psalm 103; Romans 14:7-9; and Matthew 18:21-35.
Our readings today acknowledge the fact that every one of us gets angry from time to time. Perhaps you get mad at your teachers at school or at your classmates, but I’m guessing the people you get mad at most often are your parents or your brothers and sisters.
It’s not a sin to feel angry. It’s a feeling that God gave us the ability to feel. The challenge for us as Christians is choose healthy and holy ways to channel our anger. There are many bad ways to channel our anger. Both our 1st reading from Sirach and our gospel from Matthew tell us how sinful it is to stay angry, to hold a grudge.
So everyone, think if there is someone that you’re currently angry with. [Pause.] Let us ask God to show us how to forgive them as God forgives us.
At the beginning of Mass, I asked you to think if there’s someone you’re angry with. If so, think of that person again. [Pause.]
Growing up, I spent a lot of time being mad at my sister. She is two-and-a-half years older than me. When we were kids, she knew so much more than me. She was extremely talented — and she still is! — and I wanted to be like her. She was always allowed to do things that I was too young to do. There were times when I wished she had less things to do, so that she could spend more time playing with me.
It can be hard to forgive someone. Sirach understood that. So did Jesus. Even St. Peter understood it. He thought that he was being very holy when he asked if he needed to forgive someone seven times if they had wronged him.
There are a lot of other numbers in this gospel passage. And what’s interesting is that the people who translated this passage for us from the original Greek decided that your parents weren’t that good at math. The version of this passage we usually use at Mass has eliminated a lot of the numbers, but this children’s version does a better job explaining the numbers than the version for adults.
Jesus responds that forgiving 7 times is not enough. In the version I read, Jesus says that we have to forgive seventy-seven times. But the order of the words in the Greek isn’t clear. It can be translated as either seventy-seven times or seventy times seven, which would be 490 times! I think the point Jesus is making is that if we’re keeping track of how many times we’ve forgiven someone, we probably aren’t forgiving them at all. That’s like when your parents tell you to say that you’re sorry to someone, but you don’t feel sorry at all!
But we have more math and more Greek translation to do. In the story that Jesus tells we have the two official. The second one owes 100 silver coins in this translation. In the adult’s version, it says “a much smaller” amount than what the first official owes. The original Greek was actually a 1/3 of a year’s wages. How much money would that be today? Well, in Massachusetts, the minimum wage is $15 dollars an hour, and let’s figure the official worked at least 8 hours a day, and I’m guessing they worked more than 5 days a week back then, so let’s figure that in a third of a year, they worked at least 100 days. That would be $12,000 dollars. Now, your parents will assure that that is significant amount of money, especially to owe to someone. We’re having debates in this country right now if we should forgive the debts of people who owe that much in college loans. But it is an amount that someone could reasonably pay off with several years of hard work and scrimping by.
The amount the first official owes to the king is 50 million silver coins, or, in the version in your parents’ translation, is “a huge amount.” The actual Greek is “10,000 talents.” Now, in the Greco-Roman world, 10,000 was the biggest number that they had a name for, and a talent was the equivalent of 15 year’s wages. That’s a huge amount! It was more than all taxes collected by the Romans throughout all of Judea. Let’s do the math: 10,000 times 15 years, times 15 dollars an hour, times 8 hours day, times 300 days a year, equals… 5.4 billion dollars! If anyone in this room owed someone 5.4 billion dollars, they would probably never be able to repay it. When that first official tells the king he will pay back what he owes, the king knows that he is not able to do it, but he forgives him anyway. And yet, this official who has been forgiven so much, can’t find any pity for the official who owes him the $12,000.
I told you earlier about how I was often angry with my sister. But I now realize that she probably had just as many reasons to be angry with me. I’m sure there were many times when I misbehaved and my parents didn’t get upset, but if my sister did the same thing, she’d get in trouble because she was “supposed to know better.” No matter how much time she spent with me, I probably never said thank you, and I probably whined when she didn’t want to play. I sure hope all these years later that she’s forgiven me at least as much as I have forgiven her!
But how about how we relate to God? We have all done things that are wrong in the eyes of God, but Jesus tells us that God loves us so much that he can forgive all our sins. And since God hasn’t sinned against us, it can be the equivalent of us owing God $5.4 billion and knowing that we can’t pay it back to God. But God forgives us anyway.
Today’s gospel passage really helps me put into perspective that one line in the Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Perhaps today, when we pray it together, we can think both about how we are called to forgive, and to think about how much God has forgiven us!