Sunday, September 17, 2017
The mother ran into the bedroom when she heard her seven-year-old son scream. In there she found his two-year-old sister pulling his hair. She gently released the little girl’s grip and said comfortingly to the boy, "There, there. She didn’t mean it. She doesn’t know that hurts." He nodded his acknowledgement, and she left the room. As she started down the hall the little girl screamed. Rushing back in, she asked, "What happened?" The little boy replied, "She knows now."
The first reading today is from Sirach who real name was Joshua ben Sira, much of his writing concern’s how the people of his time were to be brought up. Basically it is a how to parent book. This is also sometimes referred to as the Book of Ecclesiastics; it is also a Book that is not accepted by all the Protestant religions. Sirach’s reading today prepares us for the Gospel reading. It is almost a reminder of the Lord’s Prayer; he is telling us that we cannot ask for God’s forgiveness for our trespasses, unless we are willing to forgive our trespassers. If we are to live with Christ we have to forget vengeance, we might feel self satisfaction after giving payback for something that was done to us, but what good does it do. It puts us further from God, how can we expect mercy from God if we cannot show mercy towards others.
Peter seems to have a hard time forgiving, the Pharisees of that time taught the people that God could forgive up to four times but they the people were able to forgive others three times. So Peter when he asked Jesus if he should forgive seven times, was he having trouble forgiving someone? But Jesus surprised him when he told him to forgive seventy seven times, some bible readings describe this as seven times seventy which if you do the math is four hundred and ninety which is the same number of times that forgive is in the Bible. One thing to remember is that seven in the Jewish culture was perfection and seventy seven is total perfection. In other words Jesus is trying to tell Peter that there should never be a limit on the number of times that we should forgive someone. How many times do we go to confession and confess the same sin? How many times are we forgiven for the same sin? If God can do it for us shouldn’t we be able to forgive others. C.S. Lewis once wrote: "To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
If you go to the Bible and read the parable that Jesus told of the king who forgave the debtor, the footnotes tell us that the king forgave the debtor his debt of ten thousand talents. A talent in our time would be valued between one thousand to thirty thousand dollars, meaning the king forgave him the sum of ten million to three hundred million dollars. Yet when the forgiven debtor saw another person who owed him a small sum which again the Bible in its footnotes tells us he owed him one hundred denarius, one denarius was equal to one day’s wages or by our standards so that would be about fifteen dollars. A very small amount compared to the amount he was forgiven by the king.
Forgiveness does not mean we should forget the wrong done to us, Joseph did not forget what his brothers did to him when they threw him into the well and sold him into slavery, yet he did forgive them with a little comedy included. God works in mysterious ways. Moses asked God to forgive the Israelites many times on their journey across the desert even after the many times they insulted God. Again how many times do we go into the confessional and tell the same sins week after week? Yet God forgives us every time we ask, he has told us that he would forget our sins when we have confessed them, yet we as Christians have a hard time forgetting them, but that is our cross to bear. Nobody ever said it was easy to be a Christian. I know that some of us do not want to get rid of the anger we hold toward someone because if we carry the anger then the story we tell of what they did to anger us in the first place, gets better. Holding on to that anger actually harms us, doctors tell us that when we carry anger we are more susceptible to heart disease, it does not harm the person we are angry at.
Our forgiveness can keep on flowing. A man asked his wife to forgive him for something he had done, and reminded her that Jesus wanted her to forgive him 490 times. She laughed and said, “Buddy, you’re already over 500 -- but I’ll forgive you anyway!” And it’s in our everyday relationships that forgiveness needs to keep on flowing. If you forgive your spouse once a day, you get to 490 in 1 year, 4 months, and 5 days. It’s going to take way more than 490 acts of forgiveness to keep that marriage running.
Forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do in your life, trying to live our lives carrying this boulder on our shoulder is hard, it will even affect how you treat others, being afraid to get to close to another person because you know that some time down the road they are going to do something to offend you. But God is asking you to put that aside and forgive so that you can have a better life not carrying a grudge and hate.
Do you have someone in your life that you should have forgiven? Do you have someone who would like to be forgiven so that their life is closer to Jesus?