Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Peter asks how many times he has to forgive, and the number he offers is seven. Jesus answers with seventy-seven, which is his way of saying that the counting itself was the problem. You have likely known people who kept an exact count for decades. You may have kept one yourself at some point. A ledger like that does not lighten with age. It gets heavier, and it takes up room that a long life has less and less of to spare.

Sirach names it with unusual bluntness in the first reading. Wrath and anger are hateful things, he says, and yet the sinner hugs them tight. Sirach picked the right verb for it. A grudge does not merely happen to a person. It gets held, deliberately, sometimes for years, because it can feel like the last thing owed to us in a situation where nothing else was. Then he asks: could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?

The servant in the parable is forgiven a debt he could never have repaid, and he leaves that room and immediately starts collecting. He never let the forgiveness change him. He received it as a reprieve rather than as a gift, and a reprieve leaves a man exactly who he was. At this point in life you have received more mercy than you could itemize - from God, and from people who chose to stop counting where you were concerned. Some of them are gone now and can no longer be thanked.

Paul gives the reading that belongs to this stage of life especially. None of us lives for oneself, and none of us dies for oneself. Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. Whatever you are still owed, and whatever you still owe, all of it belongs to the one who is Lord of both the living and the dead. The psalm puts a picture to it you can take to bed with you: as far as the east is from the west, so far has he put our transgressions from us.