24th Sunday of Ordinary Time, A September 17, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
There’s no clever twist here. Jesus’ point is pretty straightforward: forgive other people or you will not be forgiven. And if we aren’t forgiven, we go to Hell. Jesus uses the number seventy-seven as a symbolic number that means “as many times as it takes.” Forgiving people is hard and it’s harder the more they hurt you. But Jesus doesn’t offer exceptions. Forgive or you will not be forgiven.
To understand why, we have to get our first principles right, the foundation of what we’re talking about. What is sin? Seriously, if someone asks you “what is sin?” how would you answer it? Doing something wrong, breaking a rule, hurting someone, and offense against God… these are all decent answers. The Catechism describes sin as “an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience” or as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.” Reason, truth, the Eternal Law. Are these an arbitrary and random rules? No.
These things refer to the fundamental nature of reality… the ways things are and are meant to work. Sin doesn’t just make God angry because we aren’t listening. Sin violates reality itself. Sin hurts us and the world around us. It takes something good and beautiful and twists it. Because we are fallen and easily deceived, it is not always obvious to us just how things should be and how serious our sins are.
Jesus’s parable puts sin in terms that might be easier to understand: debt. If someone hands you a $10 bill and you light it on fire, you don’t just “offend” the money or the person who gave it to you, you fundamentally reject what it is. This is true even if you didn’t know it was a $10 bill when you burned it. But here’s the thing, even though that money was yours, it wasn’t entirely yours. It’s value depends on its connection to a larger whole. A $10 bill can be exchanged for a sandwich only if society agrees to that value. When you destroy that money, you can no longer get that sandwich. But you also have made it so that no one else can get that $10 either.
Another example that’s less convoluted: If you borrow a car from a friend and then wreck the car, you can no longer drive somewhere. Your friend also loses the ability to drive. You didn’t just “upset” or “offend” her, you cost her something real. You owe her a new car. Your sin cost you both something real and it needs to be paid back.
This is what St. Paul is reminding us of in the second reading. “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself… whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” The hair on your head, the lungs in your chest, the brainwaves in your head, your very existence – these aren’t arbitrary and random pieces of information. They are real. They work a certain way. Put water in your lungs, acid on your hair, or electricity in your brain, and it’s not just offensive, it’s destructive. More importantly, all of those things aren’t just yours. Like the car or the $10 bill your friend gave you, their value is connected to others.
When you think, speak, or act in a way that is contrary to reality, to the ways things are supposed to work – even if you don’t understand why and even when it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you – sin always, always, always hurts other people as well as yourself. Everything we have and are is given to us by God and is connected to others. He also gives us freedom to use these things and there are many ways to use them correctly. When we use them wrongly in even the tiniest way, however, it matters to us, to God, and to others.
And like the car, when you take these things – life, stuff, human nature – and you damage it, you owe something to God who gave it to you and to the other people who are affected by it. This is why Jesus compares sin to debt. It’s why he uses such a ridiculous number. Our translation says the servant owes the king “a huge amount.” More literally, that is 10,000 talents. Translated to today’s currency, that’s like 4 or 5 billion dollars. The point is that we owe God so much – everything – that we can never repay it if we misuse or destroy what he gave us. But like the king in the story, he forgives us this debt if we ask.
But the servant goes to someone who owes him a mere $10,000 and violently attacks him over the debt. This is so dumb it would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. The king is rightly appalled. What is 10,000 compared to 4 billion? So, the king has no qualms about handing this selfish hypocrite over to the “torturers” until he pays back the 4 billion. Because of the absurd numbers involved and the reference to torture as a punishment, Jesus probably means we go to Hell where the suffering we endure is the result of choosing to hold on to the broken and twisted version of ourselves we’ve created through sin.
It’s possible Jesus means purgatory because he mentions paying it back. Still, that would mean 60 million days, well over 150,000 years of torture to pay back that kind of debt. If that’s the case, it’s called torture because the process of correcting our sins, like setting a broken bone or intense physical therapy, can feel like torture to us.
Either way, this certainly makes letting go of $10,000 not seem so bad, doesn’t it? $10,000 is a lot of money and some sins are really bad, but there is nothing we can do to each other that ever comes close to what we owe God already. So yes, forgive everything, every time.
It’ll help to make two important distinctions. First is that forgiving is not the same as forgetting. “Forgive and forget” is not Church teaching. Maybe you forget, maybe you don’t. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that you let go of the spiritual debt someone owes you. Use this thought experiment: Imagine you and the other person are standing before God and God asks you, “do you want this person to go to Hell because of what they did to you?” If your answer is anything other than “no,” you haven’t forgiven them.
The other distinction to remember: forgiving is not the same thing as reconciling. To forgive is simply to let go of their spiritual debt to you. To reconcile is to restore trust and affection with them. If someone is still dangerous or untrustworthy, if they aren’t sorry and don’t want to change, you don’t have to reconcile with them. You should not reconcile in that case, but you do still have to forgive.
This is what makes confession so amazing a gift. Every time we go to confession, we aren’t just forgiven, we are also reconciled to God and the Church. So make use of that sacrament! If you struggle to forgive someone, then go to confession more! Go and receive the forgiveness of your much greater debt to God, go be reconciled to his infinite love and you’ll begin to receive the grace to let go of that much smaller to debt, to take the much smaller step of forgiving others even if reconciling with them isn’t an option. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain, so what are you waiting for?