Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 13, 2020 – Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

When I was studying communications media at Loyola University in New Orleans, one of our assignments was to produce a fifteen minute movie using one of Jesus’ parables as our subject matter. We had to shoot it in Super 8. For those of you who are not of a certain age, Super 8 was home movie film that had no soundtrack. So we chose the parable that you just heard as our subject matter. And what we did was to turn it into a modern-day parable. The storyline was that the movie began with a priest being pulled over by a cop because he was speeding. And the priest begs, and wheedles and cajoles the cop into not giving him a ticket. And they ride off as best buddies. The priest arrives home at his rectory, and finds that some parishioner has had the audacity to park in the “clergy only” parking space behind the rectory. And just as he is having a fit, the offender comes out to get his car, and the priest really lands into him in a violent way. That was what you might call “Theology Lite,” but today’s story has a much more powerful punch than you might imagine.

It all goes back, the genesis of what Jesus says in the parable, goes all the way back, if you’ll pardon the pun, to the Book of Genesis. Chapter 4. All of us know the story of Cain killing Abel. We don’t pay much attention to what happens afterwards. God condemns Cain to be a wanderer across the face of the earth, and Cain says to God, “That punishment is much too harsh because I will be a victim of everyone who wants to take my life.” And God says, “Oh, no. I put my mark on you, and anyone who touches Cain will feel my wrath seven times over.” And you flash forward to Cain’s great-great-great-grandson, whose name is Lamech. Lamech calls his wives in one day and tells them, “If anyone wounds me, I will seek vengeance seventy-seven times. If even a little boy bruises me, I will seek vengeance seventy-seven times. Imagine what his wives thought about that; I’m sure they were impressed. But that’s where Jesus got the numbers in today’s story. The seven and the seventy-seven.

Now you have to understand, there were no other stories for the Hebrew people except the stories in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus. They didn’t know anything about Aesop’s Fables or the story of Ulysses, or anything else like that. And so, from the time they were little children, these were the campfire stories that were told to them, so that the idea that vengeance should be a proper response to hurt, to the seventy-seventh time, was part of their roots, part of their ethnicity. So the people hearing Jesus say to Peter that he had to forgive not merely seven times, but seventy-seven times, would have been a terrible shock, would have gone against everything that they were taught, that was engrained in them for generation after generation after generation. As a matter of fact, it’s possible that the parable itself was meant as a way to soften the blow of what he had just said.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been talking about why St. Matthew chose certain stories to put in his gospel. We talked about some of the cultural underpinning of his community. That they were a Jewish Christian community that were deeply offended that they had to worship alongside gentiles. They were disturbed and hurt and broken-hearted because other Jews didn’t follow them into the way of Jesus. They were reluctant to go on mission because the Roman jurisprudence system was beginning to focus on them as being disloyal to the emperor.

But there’s also a much deeper issue here. It’s called apostasy. It first happened during the first Roman persecutions. Certain Christians, when hauled off by the authorities, managed to save their own skin by turning in other Christians. And this caused a rift in the community that was very deep and very hurtful. When the persecution would be over, and most persecutions only lasted a couple of months and then it was over, these people would want to come back to the church, to Eucharist. And you know what the reaction of most of the faithful was – “Over my dead body!” But the Christian leadership said, “You know, Jesus taught about forgiveness. We have to address the issue of whether or not we’re going to forgive these people. That’s where the modern sacrament of confession actually began.

At the time when Matthew was writing, most people were baptized into Christ, all their sins were forgiven, and it was assumed that they would never sin again, because the ancient church did not look upon things like white lies and using dirty words as anything that would keep them from Eucharist or keep them from the Lord’s Supper. So, they had to decide whether or not to forgive these people. And that was the way in which the sacrament of Reconciliation began.

We are faced today with a couple of really strong divisive questions in our society. One of them has to do with inequality in the way in which we treat one another according to the color of our skin. This keeps coming up again and again and again. And our response to these issues almost always is eventually to pass legislation. Legislation can only stop people from doing what you don’t want them to do. It cannot make them do inside their hearts what they should be doing as human beings. That’s why the first line from our first reading is so impactful. “Hatred and vengeance are evil things, but the sinner hugs them tight.” The image is like wrapping something around you. I want to tell you a story about a time when I wrapped myself in hatred. 

When I was in college, my Latin professor, as it turned out, was an alumnus of the same high school that I went to. And so I thought I was in like Flint. But, unfortunately, he was a mean spirited old guy, always picking on his students, probably because he didn’t want to be a Latin teacher. He probably wanted to be a simple parish priest and was plucked out of the parish in order to teach in a high school and a college. I know what it’s like to teach adolescents, even young adults. But he seemed to single me out for particular persecution. And I built up a resentment that turned into hatred. I couldn’t wait to get out of college to be away from him. Well, as it turned out, in my first assignment, his brother, and his brother’s wife and children, lived in my parish. And his brother was exactly the opposite of him – he was jovial and welcoming and all that sort of thing. So I was eventually invited once or twice to a Sunday afternoon barbecue at his brother’s house. And who should show up but my nemesis. And although we were civil to one another, I wasn’t particularly cordial. Well years went by, twenty years or more, both this priest and his brother were dead now, and I managed to bump into someone who was in the same social circle as the brother of the priest. We got to talking about our days together in that parish. And he said that, yes, he had met my priest a number of times, and that he never failed to bring me up in conversation, and speak about me in the most glowing terms. That I was one of his favorite students and a credit to the priesthood. And I was so ashamed. I was just beside myself with embarrassment that I had held this grudge for so, so long, I had so misjudged this person.

We cannot control, individually, the flow and drift of what happens in public, but in this case, almost as in no other case, we need to begin to work on our own attitudes and stop holding our hatreds so tight. What is it we sing in one of our favorite hymns here in the parish? “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”