September 13, 2026; Matthew 18:21-35; 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
My homily is not for everyone here tonight. If you are a person who always gets along peacefully with everyone, if you have never been in an argument where violence and angry words were exchanged, if you’ve never been hurt by someone close to you or ignored by someone you love, then feel free to daydream until we get to the Creed. But if you are someone who has been wounded by the words and deeds of a friend or foe, if you can still feel a hurt festering in your soul, then perhaps what I say tonight might be helpful. Tonight I am not only going to remind you that Jesus has commanded that we forgive those who have hurt us (we all know that) I want to explore with you why Jesus gave us this command.
Peter sets the stage for us in today’s gospel. He comes to Jesus and asks, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” Seven times seems generous. Peter is certainly willing to forgive. He just wants to know when he can stop. He wants Jesus to give him a number by which he can limit his forgiveness. Jesus refuses to give a number. “Not seven,” he says, “but seventy-seven times.” Jesus is telling Peter that if he is counting, he does not understand the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness is refusing to count how many ways we have been hurt, how many reasons we were right, how many instances we tried to patch things up. Forgiveness is to stop counting. It is simply letting the hurt go.
But we do not want to let the hurt go. When someone offends us, we want satisfaction. We want the person to apologize, to say that they were wrong. Until they do, we will not let go of what happened. We hold our hurt close. As Sirach says it in today’s First Reading, “we hug our anger tight.” And when we do this, our hurt controls us. It demands that we keep revisiting the case against the one who has offended us. It forces us to rehearse the evidence over and over, to keep counting all the ways in which our anger is justified. And our anger may indeed be justified. But that is not the point. The point is as long as we keep counting the ways we have been hurt and the ways that the other person is wrong, we are a slave, a slave to the hurt we have endured. The only way to become free is to let the hurt go, to stop counting and start living. When we forgive someone, it is a refusal to let the wrong that has been done to us control us. That is why Jesus commands it, not because the other person deserves to be forgiven, but because to forgive is the only way that we can set ourselves free.
So if we find ourselves with a hurt that is still festering within us, we have to decide. Will we keep counting or start living? Will we feed our pain or forgive? Will we hold our anger tight or let it go?