Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Peter thinks he is being generous today. He comes to Jesus with a number already chosen - as many as seven times? - and he almost certainly expects to be told that seven is more than enough. Jesus gives him a number that stops the counting altogether. Not seven times, but seventy-seven. Once you are counting that high, you have stopped keeping a ledger.

Then comes the parable. The first servant owes his master ten thousand talents. One talent was roughly fifteen years of a laborer's wages, so this is a debt no person could repay in a hundred lifetimes. He begs for patience and promises to pay it all back, which is not a promise he can keep. The master forgives the entire thing anyway. Then that same servant walks out the door, finds a man who owes him about a hundred days' wages, and takes him by the throat.

The second debt is real, though. A hundred denarii was genuine money, and the man genuinely owed it. Jesus never says the debt was imaginary or that letting it go would cost nothing. He puts a question in the master's mouth instead: should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?

Every household keeps small ledgers. Who apologized last time and who did not. Who always leaves the dishes. What someone said at a family gathering four years ago that no one has quite let go of. None of those are invented. They are all real, the way a hundred denarii was real. Sirach saw the same thing centuries earlier and put it plainly: could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? And the psalm answers with the measurement God actually uses - as far as the east is from the west, so far has he put our transgressions from us. Your family has already been given that much room. Give each other the same.

• For our family, that we would put down the small ledgers we keep against one another, we pray to the Lord.
• For the grace to remember how much has been forgiven us before we count what we are owed, we pray to the Lord.
• For every household where an old wound has hardened into silence, that someone would speak first, we pray to the Lord.
• As Our Lady's Thirty Days draws to its close this week, for mothers carrying sorrows their children cannot see, we pray to the Lord.

Before Sunday dinner today, have each person name one thing someone still owes them - an apology, a debt, a wrong never settled. Nobody has to forgive it at the table. Naming it out loud is the work for today.

The practice for today is older than almost anything else your family keeps. The Didache, a Christian handbook written within a generation of the apostles, instructed congregations that anyone who had a quarrel with a brother should not join the Lord's Day assembly until they had first made peace. Reconciliation came before the sacrifice, not after it. That instruction stood behind the sign of peace at Mass long before it was a handshake, and it is the same thing Jesus asks for at the end of today's parable: forgiveness from the heart, not from the mouth.

Bring it to your table tonight. After each person has named a debt, pray the Our Father together slowly and stop at the line about forgiving those who trespass against us. Tell your children that this is the only petition in the whole prayer where we ask God to treat us the way we treat other people. Then ask them whether they mean it when they pray it.

With older children, give them the actual numbers from the parable - ten thousand talents against a hundred denarii, roughly six hundred thousand to one - and ask them why they think Jesus made the gap that absurd instead of merely large.