Homily

Peter asks the Lord how many times he should forgive his brother who has sinned against him. Peter suggests what would be a just measure: seven times. We, however, do not know how to forgive even once. Peter chooses to forgive, but only up to a certain point. He wants to place a limit in order to accept the sacrifice of forgiving more easily. For us and for our sense of justice, forgiveness is incomprehensible. It is simply unjust. Who could ever deserve forgiveness? Jesus puts no conditions on it: one forgives and that’s it. Yet, why should we condone another’s debt against us? If I forgive today, the other person will again sin against me and others! What guarantee do I have? The moment someone has done us wrong, we feel we have the right to judge the other person, as though we were implacable defenders of justice. Forgiving someone shows weakness; we appear incapable of being able to react against it or to take note of it. We think forgiveness makes us appear vulnerable so that the other can take advantage of us. At times, forgiveness can look like complicity with evil or worse, indifference towards the victims of the offense and betraying the pain they feel. We end up sacrificing even deep friendships and connections so as not to lose our own cause. “He sins and I have to forgive him? Why?” There is always something unjust about forgiveness. It is like love. Yet what changes the hearts of men and women and frees them from evil? Love—wise, intelligent, strong, passionate, personal, non-superficial, —or justice? Forgiveness does not cancel the past nor does it pretend to do so in the present. Jesus does not close his eyes to our sins like a man distracted or a man so condescending as not to notice anything. Jesus recognizes evil, refutes it and teaches us not to accept it in our lives, even in little things. This is why he forgives, even from the Cross. Forgiveness prevents us from being enmeshed in the logic of evil, with its resentments and endless chains of insatiable justice. Forgiveness is to condone the debt, only out of pity and not out of calculation. Forgiveness is walking another mile with someone who pushes us to walk one, to discover the motive of the other’s need, to respond to the other’s request for love, to find the key to the other person’s heart and to bend the other’s malevolence and obstinacy through tenderness. “Love your enemies.” Instead of a future full of animosity, guilt and sin, forgiveness gives back a different future both to those who grant and those who receive it. In order to explain his response to Peter who was probably speechless, Jesus talked about a king who had servants who needed to report to him. One comes to the king with a catastrophically high debt of ten thousand talents. The number is symbolic (more than 10 billion dollars in today’s money) and signifies the kind of unlimited trust of the king who entrusted so much money in his servants. It also evidenced the great risk and irresponsibility on the part of the servant who knew that such a debt could never be repaid. It was also completely unrealistic of the servant to ask to receive more time in order to pay the “entire” debt back. The servant that Jesus describes is not the exception but the norm. All of us dissipate goods that are not ours. Most of what we have is the fruit of grace and of talents bestowed upon us and not the fruit of our own merits or our own abilities. Like that servant, we are all debtors and have accumulated an enormous debt towards our master. How? Either by believing ourselves to be owners of that which in fact has only been entrusted to us, or by having an adolescent-like and inconsiderate fascination for riches which ultimately give value to nothing. It is as though we are drunk of abundance that leads us to consume things like drugs; thus we become slaves of the present and of self-satisfaction. We could continue mentioning our mean shrewdness, our endless adjustments, our recurrent postponing and our running after ourselves. Jesus comes to remind us that we are all debtors who have accumulated an enormous, immeasurable debt which can only be cleared by the grace, magnanimity and compassion of the master. If this awareness grows deeply and personally within us--which happened to another “debtor” of the Gospel, the Prodigal Son who “came to his sense,” then we can transmit mercy to others, and combat evil and violence in the world by spreading good. If, however, like the servant described by Jesus, we rapidly revert to the mentality that allows us to accumulate huge debts, then we look both with harshness and implacable demands on all those who ask us something. We, who are quick to defend ourselves know how easy it is to be exigent, fussy and inflexible when people make requests of us. That servant immediately forgot the mercy he had received. He was not grateful. He thought only of what was owed to him; he was proud. A swindler such as he, grows angry with other people. He cannot forgive. He does not do what he asks to be done to him. He is exigent and inflexible with the servants who owed him a fraction of what he himself owed. He follows a justice that ends up being cruel. We never trust in other people, but we want them to trust in us. We want to be trusted and we feel capable of doing the impossible, but we think the opposite for other people. With them we become intransigent, severe critics. Jesus teaches us to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The servant who chose justice without love for others was judged that way himself. Let us forgive from the heart! Like Jesus, let us be liberated from the chains of resentment! “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits— who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Ps. 103). For God’s justice is love. Let us be loved and let us learn to be merciful. In so doing, we will receive blessings and will liberate the world from evil.