Posted on September 16, 2026 View all Gospel Reflection
“The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.” (Responsorial Psalm)
I could say that this week again we hear about the authority given to St. Peter and also the Apostles where Jesus said: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18: 18)
This Sunday, the focus is on how that authority is administered. When St. Peter came up to Jesus and asked him “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” (Matthew 18:21) St. Peter is actually trying to impress Jesus with his generosity. Seven is a biblical number and is meant to convey completeness. It recalls the seventh day when God completed the creation, as well as the seven churches that form the completeness of the body of Christ.
But Jesus turns his generosity and makes it look like he is being stingy. Jesus says you should forgive seventy-seven times or it can also be translated as seventy time seven. This response of Jesus is not a mathematical measure of how many times and that we should keep track of the number of times we forgive until they “run out of pardons.” Rather it is a sweeping flood of forgiveness that is bestowed upon us through the generosity of our Lord.
In the parable of the king, his servant and then the servant and his coworker, Jesus draws out a stark contrast of how we often behave compared to how God treats us. I read that the amount that the servant owed his king was around 10,000 talents. One talent in today’s currency is about $864,000. So accordingly, the amount he owed was about $8.6 billion. Just a single talent was thirty-four years of wages for an entry-level worker. So, to repay the full amount was virtually impossible. Yet the king had mercy and forgave the whole debt. Immediately following, this same servant had a coworker who owed him about a hundred denarii (or about 100 days work). This is much more realistic to be able to be repaid. But instead of forgiving his coworker that debt, he holds him accountable and extracts it from him.
We are called to be agents of love and forgiveness. By holding fast and remembering the great generosity that the Lord has extended to us, we should do likewise. Jesus reminds us of this when he taught us in the Our Father “to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is also what we heard in the first reading where the prophet Sirach says “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.”
To forgive is not to erase the consequences of sin. We often confuse the two things. If someone hits us, we can be reconciled and realize that there was a misunderstanding, but the pain of the injury still lasts for a period of time. The pain is real. Remembering the pain does not mean we have not forgiven, rather it reminds us to thank the Lord for his forgiveness to us. For if this limited injury causes us to feel pain and offense even after we realize it was a misunderstanding, how much injury do we cause God when we offend Him who has done nothing to cause us injury? The coworker in the parable owed about $8,000 which is certainly a significant amount of money. But how does that compare with the $8.6 billion offense against our God?
Let us truly ask the Lord for the grace to be able to forgive from the heart and so be able to receive the forgiveness from God and be thankful for his abounding mercy and forgiveness towards us.
