Peter asks Jesus a very ordinary question: “How often do I have to forgive?”
In other words: where is the limit?
How many times before I can finally say, “Enough. I have done my bit”?
Peter suggests seven times. He probably thinks he is being generous.
Jesus answers: not seven, but seventy-seven times.
He is not giving Peter a bigger number to keep in a notebook.
He is telling him to stop counting.
And then Jesus tells this extraordinary story.
A servant owes his king a debt so large that he could never repay it.
He falls on his knees: “Give me time.”
But time is not really the problem.
If someone owes ten pounds, time may help.
If someone owes more than he could earn in several lifetimes, another six months will not make much difference.
The servant cannot get himself out of this.
And then the king does something astonishing.
He cancels the debt. Not half of it. Not a payment plan. Everything.
Imagine the man walking into that room knowing his life is ruined, and walking out owing nothing.
He has been given back his future.
And then he meets another servant who owes him much less.
The second man falls down and says: “Give me time.”
Those words ought to stop him in his tracks.
He has just said them himself. Only moments ago, he was the one on his knees.
He knows exactly what it feels like to need mercy.
But he grabs the man, demands payment and has him thrown into prison.
And that is the terrible thing about him.
It is not simply that he is bad-tempered.
It is that he has received mercy without allowing mercy to change him.
That is why the parable is uncomfortable.
Because before we think about the people who owe us something, Jesus asks us to remember what we owe God.
Every one of us stands before Him as someone who needs mercy.
We were created for friendship with God, but sin has wounded that friendship.
Through original sin we inherit a wounded human nature.
And then there are our own sins.
The things we knew were wrong and did anyway.
The sins we excuse because we have got used to them.
We cannot simply tidy all that up ourselves.
We cannot forgive our own sins.
We need a Saviour.
And we have one.
Jesus Christ does for us what the king does for the servant, only infinitely more.
He takes our sins to the Cross. He dies. He rises again.
The he gives us gifts. In Baptism, original sin is washed away and we receive sanctifying grace, the life of God within us.
And when we sin after Baptism, Christ gives us Confession.
The person who entered burdened can leave reconciled to God.
That is the mercy we have received.
You walk in with the debt.
You walk out forgiven.
And then the Gospel asks us a very simple question:
What happens next?
Does the mercy we receive stop with us?
Or does it begin to change the way we treat other people?
We can be very strange about this.
We want God to remember that we are weak.
But when someone hurts us, we can develop an excellent memory.
We want God to say, “Begin again.”
But we can decide that somebody else must always be the person who failed ten years ago.
We can ask God to close our account while keeping everyone else’s open.
That is the unforgiving servant.
He wants mercy for himself and strict justice for everybody else.
Sirach says today: “Remember your end, and cease from enmity.”
That is blunt, but very wise.
Remember your end.
One day we shall die.
One day the person we are angry with will die.
And both of us will stand before God.
An argument which fills the whole room today may look rather smaller when seen against eternity.
That does not mean serious wrongs do not matter.
Forgiveness is not pretending.
It is not saying evil was acceptable.
It is not always returning to a relationship which is unsafe.
And it certainly does not mean that the hurt disappears overnight.
But forgiveness means that I refuse to let hatred take over my soul.
Sometimes we carry a person around in our head for years.
We replay the conversation.
We think of what we should have said.
We prepare the speech for the next time we see them.
Meanwhile they may be at home having their tea and not thinking about us at all.
Resentment can become its own prison. Nursing resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person becomes ill.
Christ wants us free from all this.
Sometimes forgiveness begins not with a feeling, but with a prayer:
“Lord, I still hurt. I do not want revenge.
Help me to desire this person’s conversion. Help me to desire their salvation.
Help me to leave them in Your hands.”
That may be all we can manage at first. But it is a beginning.
Saint Paul says: “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
We belong to Christ.
And on this Education Sunday, that is surely one of the greatest things we want our children to learn.
Not simply how to pass an examination or prepare for a job, important though those things are.
We want them to know whose they are. That they belong to Christ.
That when they sin, they can come back to Him.
That because they have received mercy, they too are called to show mercy.
And that their life has an eternal purpose: they were made for God.
That is why Catholic education must always look beyond success in this world. It is helping to form a person for Heaven.
But of course, we cannot ask our children to learn what we ourselves refuse to live.
If we belong to Christ, then the wounded parts of our lives belong to Him as well.
The old grievance. The person we would rather not think about.
The hurt we have carried for years.
We cannot say, “Lord, You can have everything except this. I am keeping this resentment for myself.”
At every Mass we pray:
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Those words are dangerous if we mean them.
Because we are asking God’s mercy to enter not only our sins, but our relationships.
So perhaps tonight there is one person we need to place before the Lord.
Not because what they did was nothing.
But because Christ has been merciful to us.
And mercy received is meant to become mercy given.
The servant in the Gospel walked away forgiven.
His tragedy was that he still lived as though he had never known mercy.
May that never be true of us.
St. Mary's, St. John Bosco and St. Edward's 