Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A) on September 13, 2020 at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Sirach 27:30 – 28:7; Psalm 103; Romans 14:7-9; and Matthew 18:21-35.

Today, Sirach speaks of how we are tempted to hang on to our anger. Our gospel passage is a forceful command to forgive one another unceasingly.

But before we begin, we must note: for anyone caught in an abusive situation, you must get to safety first! The process of forgiveness can only begin once you are out of harm’s way. 

To me, the key words in our readings today are kindness, mercy, forgiveness, healing, and, most of all, compassion. To show compassion for someone is to suffer with them – to recognize someone else’s hurt and then empathize with them. In order for us to extend compassion to others, let us ask the Holy Spirit to make us more aware of the mercy that God has extended to each one of us.

Twelve years ago, a silly prank turned deadly. 21-year-old Eli Westlake was walking home with friends in Sydney, Australia, when he flippantly threw cheeseballs at a car driving by. Unknown to Eli, the driver had four different illegal substances in her bloodstream. She flew into a rage and ran him down with her car, killing him.

How does one forgive such a heinous act? Is it humanly possible? The Greek words translated in our gospel passage as the “huge amount” that the first servant owed to the king is actually ten thousand talents. A talent was roughly the equivalent of 15 years’ wages for a manual laborer. Ten thousand was the largest number in the Greco-Roman world. So ten thousand talents isn’t just a “huge amount” – it’s a ridiculous, incomprehensibly large amount. So, when the first servant promises to pay the king back, both he and the king know that that is not possible.

Eli Westlake’s father, Nigel Westlake, is a musical composer for Australian movies. In his grief, he created a foundation to empower youth and indigenous communities. The foundation’s inaugural fundraising concert, held on the 1-year anniversary of Eli’s death, featured the Israeli-Australian pop singer Lior. For his encore, Lior sang an a cappella version of a portion of the great Jewish prayer of atonement, the Avinu Malkeinu: Avinu Malkeinu chanenu v’aneinu ki ein [ayn] banu ma’asim. Aseh imanu tzedakah vachesed ve’hoshienu. Lior translates it into English roughly as “Our Father, Our King! Instill me with a greater sense of compassion that I may be liberated.”¹ And in that moment of the concert, something was liberated within the grieving Westlake. He describes it as “a sense of awakening…. An urge to be part of something bigger than myself.”

Westlake, who said he had been “locked in a state of pathological grief” over the senseless and violent death of his 21-year-old son, indeed became part of something much bigger. In collaboration with Lior and the Sydney Symphony, Westlake composed the remarkably moving song cycle called COMPASSION, a collection of proverbs from both the Jewish and Muslim faiths accompanied by a full orchestra.²

Compassion. The word means “to suffer with.” By Lior’s sharing in Westlake’s grief, the two men were moved to create something magnificent and beautiful, bringing solace to tens of thousands of people. 

Now, only God can forgive with infinite mercy, as demonstrated in our gospel of the king forgiving the servant with the unfathomably large debt. None of us can earn God’s forgiveness of the sins we have committed… but God forgives us, anyway. 

Even though we are limited beings, can we strive to forgive our brothers and sisters as God forgives us? The hurt we do to one another is described in the parable as the “much smaller amount” that the second servant owes to the first servant. The Greek phrase is literally “100 days’ wages,” roughly 1/3 of a year’s salary. That’s not an amount to sneeze at, especially when so many of us, and so many of our friends and neighbors, have lost their jobs this year. But compared to the amount that the first servant owed to the king, it is miniscule. 

Whenever we pray the Our Father, we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Just as Christians ask God for mercy and forgiveness, so do our Jewish brothers and sisters. Their high holy days begin at sunset this Friday with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. The day of atonement, Yom Kippur, follows 9 days later. And it is only in this week and a half that the ultimate Jewish prayer of asking for mercy and forgiveness, the Avinu Malkeinu, is sung. As Maiya Chard-Yaron, the Executive Director of Texas Hillel, explains, the part of the Avinu Malkeinu that Lior and Westlake set in their orchestral masterpiece is the climax of the prayer. She says that this text is [quote] “really the culmination… the two lines where the whole congregation sings with great vigor.” A Jewish cantor tells me that the final Hebrew word, hoshienu, means ‘large-scale saving or redemption’… sort of like a king forgiving an incomprehensibly large debt!

So how many times must we forgive? The original Greek can be translated as either “seventy-seven times” or “seventy times seven.” But if we’re counting the number of times we’ve forgiven someone—whether it’s 77 times or 490 times – we’re clearly not asking God to instill us with a greater sense of compassion.

We must realize that we are all sinners who have been forgiven by God. If we cannot believe that God compassionately forgives us, can we truly, compassionately forgive others?

Our Father, Our King! Instill us with a greater sense of compassion that we may be liberated. Avinu Malkeinu chanenu v’aneinu ki ein banu ma’asim. Aseh imanu tzedakah vachesed ve’hoshienu. 

Final movement of COMPASSION: VII. “Avina Malkeinu,” performed by Lior and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Nigel Westlake, September 2013:

* The title of this homily, “Compassion: the Measure of a Human Being” is inspired by the refrain of the song, “The Safety of Distance” from Lior’s album, Corner of an Endless Road. Lior performed this song as his encore with the Austin Symphony Orchestra in November 2019.”

Notes: