24th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Wrath and anger, these also are abominations. A sinner will possess them.
He who takes vengeance will find vengeance from the Lord, And he will surely make his sins firm. Forgive your neighbor the hurt that he has done, And then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbor anger against another And expect healing from the Lord? Upon a man like himself he has no mercy, And does he make supplication for his own sins? He himself, being flesh, nourishes wrath. Who will make atonement for his sins? Remember your last end, and stop enmity. Remember corruption and death, and be true to the commandments. Remember the commandments, and don't be angry with your neighbor. Remember the covenant of the Highest, and overlook ignorance.
Praise the Lord, my soul! All that is within me, praise his holy name! Praise the Lord, my soul, And don't forget all his benefits,
Who forgives all your sins, Who heals all your diseases, Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with loving kindness and tender mercies,
He will not always accuse; Neither will he stay angry forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, Nor repaid us for our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth, So great is his loving kindness toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, So far has he removed our transgressions from us.
For none of us lives to himself, and none dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord. Or if we die, we die to the Lord. If therefore we live or die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died, rose, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times?"
Jesus said to him, "I don't tell you until seven times, but, until seventy times seven. Therefore the Kingdom of Heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. When he had begun to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. But because he couldn't pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, with his wife, his children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and knelt before him, saying, 'Lord, have patience with me, and I will repay you all!' The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him and forgave him the debt.
"But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred denarii, and he grabbed him and took him by the throat, saying, 'Pay me what you owe!'
"So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, 'Have patience with me, and I will repay you!' He would not, but went and cast him into prison until he should pay back that which was due. So when his fellow servants saw what was done, they were exceedingly sorry, and came and told their lord all that was done. Then his lord called him in and said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn't you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?' His lord was angry, and delivered him to the tormentors until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don't each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds."
There's a math problem buried in this Gospel, and it's not really about numbers. When Peter offers seven times as a generous upper limit for forgiveness, Jesus responds with seventy times seven — not as a new ceiling, but as a way of saying: stop counting. The moment we start keeping score, we've already missed the point.
Sirach puts it plainly: we cannot hold wrath against a neighbor and then turn around expecting God's healing for ourselves. Notice how the text doesn't soften this. It's almost blunt — *he himself, being flesh, nourishes wrath.* There's something uncomfortably honest in that phrase. We feed our grievances. We return to them. We rehearse the offense in our minds until it feels righteous.
The parable cuts through that self-deception with remarkable force. The servant forgiven an unpayable debt — ten thousand talents would be something like billions in today's terms, a lifetime of lifetimes of wages — immediately turns and throttles a man who owes him what amounts to a few weeks' pay. The absurdity is the point. And yet, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a difficult marriage, or a strained friendship, or a workplace where someone has genuinely wronged us, that servant is not hard to recognize.
Paul reminds us in Romans that we belong entirely to the Lord — in life, in death, in everything between. What emerges from that belonging is a kind of freedom. We don't have to carry the weight of every wound, because we are not the final accountant of anyone's debts.
The movement here is from holding on to letting go — not as weakness, but as an act of trust that justice ultimately rests in hands larger than ours.
Consider: Is there someone whose debt we've been mentally tallying? What would it feel like to simply stop counting? And what might be keeping us from believing that we ourselves have already been forgiven far more than we realize?