Homily on Mt 18:21- 35

There was a child in a second grade religion class where they were studying the Bible. One day the teacher came to the class and asked them all to draw a picture of some story or event that they remembered from their studies. The kids all started drawing and after enough time had passed the teacher went around the room looking at their work. One young girl proudly showed the teacher the picture she had created, which showed an older man with a long white beard and long hair sitting in the driver's seat of a big car. In the back seat there were two people, a man and a woman.

The teacher looked and looked at the picture and couldn't for the life of her figure out what Bible story or event the little girl had in mind. So she said to the student: "Lovely drawing. But I can't quite see what Bible story you have in mind. What is it?"

"Why that's easy," the little girl said. "That's a picture of God driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden."

This story of Adam and Eve and the garden reminds us that we are all sinners, all imperfect, flawed beings, all in need of forgiveness. And today's first reading from the book of Sirach, and our Gospel reading from Matthew's Gospel, both speak extensively about that topic of forgiveness, especially divine forgiveness.

I think it is easy when we read these passages to think that we're talking about some sort of quid pro quo here, some divine economy in which if we forgive others, God will forgive us. And of course that way of thinking raises all sorts of questions: what if we only forgive some offenses, or only some of the time, or only small offenses and not big ones? What will God do then? Just forgive some of our sins? Which ones? When can we stop forgiving and what happens if we do, if we've built up a big balance sheet of forgiving by that time?

All of these sorts of questions are behind Peter's question of how many times one must forgive one's brother. As many as seven times, Peter asks, thinking he's being charitable because some rabbis said you could stop forgiving after only three times. Jesus, of course, says 77 times, which basically means you never stop forgiving, regardless of the number of times your brother wrongs you. Basically Jesus is telling us that this isn't some sort of numbers game, some counting of individual acts of forgiveness. He is talking about change at a fundamental level, of being people who are "for givers," who forgive not to earn something, particularly not to "earn" God's forgiveness (which we can't anyway), but who forgive because that is who we are, because we recognize our own need for forgiveness, and because our self-awareness drives us to forgive others as well.

And if we aren't "forgivers," people whose habit it is to forgive because we understand who we are and our own need to be forgiven-- we won't receive forgiveness, regardless of how many times we claim to forgive, because God won't forgive us unless we ask for and accept forgiveness. And people who don't see that they've done anything wrong, who don't think they need forgiveness, will never seek it-- and God won't force it upon them.

Perhaps we might see some of this going on in today's Gospel if we look a bit more deeply into the text. Let's look at the servant the Jesus calls out first. Our translation says that this servant owed the king "a huge amount of money." A bit hard to get a sense of what that means. What the Greek actually says is that the servant owed "a myriad of talents." A talent isn't an ability-- like playing the guitar. A talent was a unit of weight, in this case silver, and a talent's worth of silver was worth about 6,000 days' wages, or 6,000 denarii. So a talent was worth about 20 years of work. Or, to put it in terms of our money, if you make $100/day, a talent is the equivalent of $600,000.

Now the servant owed "a myriad of talents." A myriad was the highest number in the Greek system. The most direct translation is that a myriad was 100,000, although the colloquial use of myriad was like our term "bajillion" of "bazillion." The biggest number possible.

But to make things concrete let's use 100,000. So this servant owed $600,000 times 100,000, or a total of $60 billion.

And what is the servant's response when he is asked to pay the $60 billion? He says give me some time and I will pay you in full-- in full, all $60 billion.

Impossible, of course, and the king knows it and takes pity on the man. But what I find interesting is that someone who owes so much expresses no sorrow or contrition or apology for ending up with this big debt that he can't possible pay. He never asks for forgiveness. There is no sense that he thinks he's done anything wrong. In fact, whatever he's been doing to rack up this debt, he wants to keep doing more of it-- just give me more time and I'll pay in full, he says.

We don't know how he accumulated this massive debt, but let me suggest that he reacts the way he does because in his head he's got lots of excuses for how things went so wrong, and lots of people to blame. The Jerusalem stock market crashed, and he built those beach-front condos on the Sea of Galilee at just the wrong time, and his investment adviser cheated him, and so on and so on. He's got blame and anger and a sense that others have done him an injustice which, as our reading from Sirach says, he hugs tight. He hasn't done anything wrong, he thinks. He's just a victim.

His reaction is pretty common, I think. When something goes wrong isn't our first instinct so often to say it wasn't my fault and to find someone to blame?

And if it isn't my fault, why would I ask for forgiveness? There's nothing to forgive.

Perhaps that's why he beats up the second servant, who owes "a much smaller amount." Again our translation doesn't help. In the Greek the amount owed is exactly 100 denarii-- 100 days wages-- $10,000, compares to the $60 billion the first servant owes.

But the first servant beats up the second, rather than forgiving an amount so small as to be a rounding error in the first one's debt, because the first servant figures his problems are caused, at least in part, by all those folks who owed him money but didn't pay. He wouldn't be in this fix, were it not for them. It is their fault, not mine, he says.

And so that anger, that resentment, that unwillingness to understand our real situation and instead blame others-- that gets in the way of our forgiving. Not only that, but by nursing anger and blame and bitterness, we mask our own need for forgiveness-- so we don't ask, and we aren't forgiven.

So we might look at that-- look at those places in our lives where we blame others when, if we were honest, it isn't their fault and our better reaction would be forgiveness. And we might ask for God's grace that we be gracious with the faults of others, aware of our own faults, and always, always ask for God's forgiveness.