Sunday the 13th of September 2026 - The Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sirach 27:30-28:7/ Ps 103(102)/ Romans 14:7-9/ Matthew 18:21-35
We have all seen news stories of unspeakable things being done to others. What we see less of are those occasions when horrific things have happened but victims or the loved ones of victims choose to forgive the perpetrators. The driver for this forgiveness is often their Christian faith, their belief in God and the message Jesus gives us to forgive others as God forgives us. In a world that is quick to condemn, demands punishment for wrong doing, that destroys people for the one wrong they might have done even many years earlier, that finds it almost impossible to forgive, we need the love, compassion, and forgiveness that God personifies and offers to us more than we know. Offering forgiveness to those who wrong us is not just to be nice, it is because Jesus forgave us for the sins we commit that nailed Him to the cross. We cannot receive that mercy from God if we deny it to others. This is what we pray when we say the words of the Our Father, and it is what Jesus teaches us in the Gospel today. Forgiveness is not a feeling that comes easily, it is a decision we make rooted in the mercy we have received ourselves.
The words we say almost without thinking, words so familiar that they can slip past, every time we pray the Our Father make our reception of God's forgiveness conditional on us forgiving others. We say, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." These are the words Jesus gave us when his disciples asked him how to pray. We say them at every Mass, but do we truly grasp what we are saying? In those few words we ask God to forgive our wrongdoing, but we make it conditional. Not conditional on God, but on us, on our actions. We ask God to forgive us in the same way that we forgive others. That should give us pause to reflect when we stop to think about it. Forgiveness can be one of the hardest things we will ever be asked to do. We must forgive those who have wronged us, sometimes in ways that are deeply painful, even unspeakable, so that we ourselves may receive the mercy we so desperately need. This is not some fanciful human rule, it is a truth given to us directly by Jesus. We cannot ignore it, and we must try, with God's grace, to live by it.
The first reading from Sirach puts it bluntly that anger and wrath are abominations that the sinful hold fast to. We can find ourselves clinging to resentments as if they were treasures, when in reality they poison us. Sirach asked if we nourished anger against others while expecting mercy from God. If we refuse mercy to others how can we ask for mercy from God for ourselves? The Psalm for today gives us an answer with the beautiful portrait of what God is. God is kind and merciful, slow to become angry and rich in compassion. God does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our faults. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so is his mercy toward us. As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our wrongdoing from us. That is the God we serve, a God whose mercy has no limit.
In the gospel passage Peter asked Jesus how often he must forgive someone. Peter must have thought that forgiving as many as seven times was pretty generous and would have been taken aback by Jesus saying he must forgive seventy-seven times. Jesus was not giving us a number to count towards, He was telling us that forgiveness must be infinite, without limit, just as God's forgiveness to us is infinite. Jesus went on to tell the parable of the ungrateful servant. A servant who owed his master an enormous amount, far too much to ever repay. He begs for patience, and the master, moved with compassion, wrote off the whole debt. But that fortunate servant then seized a fellow servant who owed him a trifling amount and had him thrown into prison. He had received boundless mercy, but refused to show even a fraction of it in response. We might recoil at his cruelty, but do we do the same? When we refuse to forgive, we make void the prayer we make in the Our Father. We ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. If we forgive nothing, we are asking to be forgiven nothing.
None of us deserves the mercy God offers. It comes to us with no conditions, no strings attached, freely given. We are created in the image and likeness of God, but we are fallen. To be a Christian is to strive to become again what we were made to be. Love, compassion, and forgiveness are at the heart of who God is, and they must become the driving force of our lives. In every family, parish, club, and community, there will be arguments and disagreements. That is human nature, but a community only thrives when it works through those wounds with love, compassion, and forgiveness. This is not weakness, it is the strongest and most Godlike thing we can do. Saint Paul reminds us that we do not live for ourselves, we belong to the Lord, we are His. Because we belong to God, our lives must reflect his mercy.
At mass we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, the Sacrifice by which our own immeasurable debt is cancelled on the Cross. How can we receive that mercy on our lips and refuse it in our hearts? Let us come forward ready to let go of the grudges and resentments we might carry. Let us truly mean and live the words we so often say, Father forgive us, as we forgive others.
God Bless Brendan