Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

September 23, 2023

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will show us how he is calling each and all of us to help him take in the harvest of his kingdom, the harvest of men, women, boys and girls. He does so by means of a parable in which a foreman goes out to summon laborers for his vineyard at dawn, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon and an hour before shutting time.

* Then the owner of the vineyard gives them all the same full-day’s pay.

* The frame for what God wishes to teach us is summed up by the Prophet Isaiah, who will speak to us in the first reading. Through him, God tells us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.” Each of us can see the validity of this truth by the typical reaction we have to Jesus’ parable. Without the prodding of any labor union, we’re prone to agree with the beef of those who worked a grueling 12-hour day but who didn’t receive a penny more than those who worked only one hour. Human beings in general are envious of those who seemed to have it easier. To have our thoughts become more like God’s thoughts and our ways resemble His ways, however, we first must understand the context of the parable, get to the root of why on various levels it offends us, and then examine what it’s teaching us about God, ourselves, and the kingdom, the Church, the society he wants us to enter and help him build.

* Let’s first understand the parable. When we compare the men who worked twelve hours and those who worked for one, we think that the latter group had it better, especially since they all received the same pay. But this manifests our jaundiced view of human work, in which we don’t regard it often as a blessing but rather a necessary evil. Work is a part of our vocation, given to us before the Fall, as a means God gives us to live in his image and grow. As we do honest work, we not only make something, but we make ourselves, we build our character, through the qualities we bring to our work. Moreover, if we understand the way work happened in the ancient world, we see that work really was a blessing. Men used to go to the marketplace in the morning hoping to be hired as day workers. They did all they could to be chosen, arriving with all their tools, running up to meet those who were hiring, selling themselves as hard workers, much as men in our country did during the Great Depression. The men and their families were living on the semi-starvation line. Those hired at five in the afternoon would easily have traded in 11 hours of labor in the fields for the eleven hours of anxiety waiting in the square.

* These considerations bring us to the first application of the parable. Jesus was using this story to preach to the Jews about salvation. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had already been God’s chosen people since the age of Abraham, about 1800 years before, inspired by the promise of the covenant. All of a sudden, a carpenter from Nazareth, who was working all types of miraculous signs to back up the authority of his potent preaching, was saying that others — Gentiles, even converted prostitutes and tax collectors — were going to get the same “life’s wage,” the full pay of salvation, that the Jews were. Even though they too could be saved,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

September 22, 2023

1 Tim 6:2-12, Ps 49, Lk 8:1-3

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus’ peripatetic preaching, journeying with the Twelve apostles from one town to another preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. This was a snapshot of his ordinary life, what occupied most of his days. He was announcing the kingdom and inviting people to enter. In the midst of all of their sufferings, hardships and up-until-then unfilled hopes, he was proclaiming the good news. He was helping them to see that Sacred Scripture was being fulfilled in their hearing, inviting them to strive to enter through the narrow gate, encouraging them to buy the treasure buried in a field and selling everything they have for the precious pearl of the kingdom.

* But St. Luke adds another detail, a very important one. He said that some women were accompanying Jesus and the apostles, women who had received Jesus’ healing power — they “had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities” — and wanted to spend their life, with faith and constancy, assisting him to heal others and raise them up. Three get named — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ epitropos or money-man Chuza, and Susanna — but he also says “and many others,” who “provided for them out of their resources.” They were the ones who, to some degree, made possible Jesus’ and the apostles’ preaching, so that Jesus everyday wouldn’t have to multiply loaves and fish, so that they wouldn’t have to appall the hypersensensitive Scribes and the Pharisees by plucking heads of grain while walking through the fields. Like the widow with her two lepta placed in the Temple treasury, these women were giving all they had not just to make possible but to assist the preaching of the Gospel. They were the ones who were providing drink to lubricate Jesus’ and the apostles’ vocal cords. They were the ones who were making sure that they would have the necessary bread within their bodies to be able to preach that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. This was not a group of bored do-gooders who figured that these wandering 13 men would be lost without their feminine genius and maternal practicality. Having received much from the mercy of Jesus — as we would have heard yesterday, if we didn’t have the proper Gospel for the feast of St. Matthew — they loved much, and they wanted to give Jesus and his mission all the love, the time and the material goods they could. They’re a model for all of us in making the choice to serve God rather than mammon and to use whatever resources we have for the building up of the kingdom. They show us true poverty in spirit, treasuring God’s kingdom.

* This is in sharp contrast to what St. Paul warns St. Timothy about in the first reading: the false prophets, theological sophists, who use “religion to be a means of gain.” They were trying to fulfill their three-fold concupiscence off of religion: getting famous, becoming rich, and learning how to control people. The same temptation remains today of faking faith to profit in some material way. St. Paul says, in a shocking synthesis, that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Acquisitiveness, the worship of the ancient golden calf, is a spiritual cancer that metastasizes into all parts of life and leads, St. Paul describes, to conceit, arguments, verbal disputes, envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,and mutual friction. So much harm comes when we’re trying to gain mo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Leonine Forum NYC Chapter

IESE Business School

September 21, 2023

 

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To download a copy of the PDF of the slides of this lecture, please click below: 

LF 2023 Christian Anthropology Man in the Modern World

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, ManhattanFeast of St. Matthew, ApostleSeptember 21, 2023Eph 4:1-7.11-13, Ps 19, Mt 9:9-13

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

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The following points were attempted in this homily:

In the calling of St. Matthew and in every vocation except that of the Blessed Virgin, Jesus acts on his words, “I desire mercy” and “I have come to call … sinners.” Matthew’s vocation is a powerful manifestation of this desire for mercy. Christ indeed came to call — to repent, believe and follow him — not the healthy but the morally sick, not the righteous but sinners. Matthew, the formerly despised tax collector and traitor to his fellow Jews, would forever be a walking advertisement of how great the Lord’s forgiveness really is. And he matured very fast in this school of mercy: St. Matthew immediately began to bring his friends to receive that same gift from Jesus. He is an example of the good soil who received the gift of the Lord’s mercy and immediately started bearing fruit. He put into practice from the beginning the lesson he would eventually write down from Jesus’ Parable of the Two Debtors: he who had been forgiven 10,000 talents would bring everyone else to receive the same. The Pharisees, on the other hand, had hardened soil. As Jesus’ response to them in the Parables of the Lost Coin, Lost Sheep and Lost Sons shows (Lk 15:1-32), they were resistant to the need for mercy in their own lives and weren’t happy when that mercy reached even those they were certain were sinners. Jesus was seeking to help them understand with his words today that they cannot respond to God’s call except through mercy.

The Lord has come to call sinners, as he shows today in the life of  St. Matthew, or St. Peter (whose first words to the Lord were “Depart from me for I am a sinful man”) or St. Paul (who used to hunt down and execute Christians). St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians are ever valid. “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” (1 Cor 1:27-29). God has called us to be Christians because he comes to call sinners and the sick, the foolish, weak, lowly, despised, nothing-counters! But then at the same time he exalts the humble by associating us with his holiness as he calls us to be saints!

* When St. Paul in today’s first reading — as well as the Office of Readings — urges us to live in a manner worthy of the calling we have received and to come to full maturity in Christ, he did so within the context of our having been called as sinners to follow Jesus on the road to holiness and to bring others onto that same way. He describes several attributes that must come from our having been called as sinners. We need to be humble, because we remember our origins and never forget that we owe everything to God’s mercy; gentle, because we are sinners reaching out to other sinners, never preaching down; patient, because we know how hard it is sometimes to change a bad habit and develop a good one; bearing with one another through love, since the other is loved, too, by God in his mercy and desires us to be merciful; striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace, since we know that the devil’s chief work is to try to sabotage Christ’s work of reconciling all things to the Father and helping us be one like the persons of the Trinity are one. St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of SS. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and Companions

50th Anniversary of the Death of Theresa Roberge Landry, my grandmother

September 20, 2023

1 Tim 3:14-16, Ps 111, Lk 7:31-36

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.20.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus compares the people of the generation to whom he was preaching as “children who sit in the marketplace.” He says they call out to each other, “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge for you, but you did not weep.” Jesus was essentially correcting them about two aspects of the childish immaturity that was preventing their becoming disciples. The first is that they were seated. They were not willing to get up and follow him along the way of discipleship; they were not willing to change. The second is that that they wanted to be the ones playing the tune to which others would dance. If they were playing a joyful tune on the flute, they wanted people to dance; if they were playing something sad, they wanted people weeping. They were not willing to align themselves to the ever new song, the lyrics (Word of God) and melody (tone) that Jesus was playing rather than domesticate him by getting him to conform his message to their music.

* Jesus compared the generation to a group of spoiled, fickle children, because they had hardened their hearts totally to the message of God, trying to control and judge even God rather than obey and love him. He said that when John the Baptist came to him, rather than focus on his message of conversion, they criticized him for “neither eating food nor drinking wine”; they attacked and mocked him because he fasted, ate wild honey and consumed locusts; they “classified and conquered” him and refused to convert at his message. When Jesus came with a totally different approach, “eating and drinking” because he was the Bridegroom and he wanted to teach them how to feast in God’s presence rather than fast (we would fast when the Bridegroom would be taken away), they criticized Jesus for not fasting and for not abstaining, calling him a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Again, they avoided his message by judging the messenger, coming at him from a position of superiority rather than docility. The upshot is that no matter whom God sent to them, they weren’t prepared to accept him; they’d find something to criticize, something to give them the excuse to remain seated, something that would keep them in control of the playlist.

* Jesus today is forcefully calling us and the people of our generation to be something far different from “children sitting in the marketplace.” He calls us to be spiritually childlike, a son or daughter who lovingly trusts God, believes what he says is true, recognizes what he or she doesn’t know, and seeks to become like a chip off the old (divine) block. When Jesus says at the end of today’s episode,  “Wisdom is vindicated by all her children,” he is communicating that he wants us to be his vindication, by our living according to his wisdom as sons in the Son, eating and drinking, fasting and abstaining, dancing and making music, and doing everything in union with him and at his lead.

* The truth is that there are many in our own generation who behave before God like the spoiled children Jesus mentions in his image. We judge God, we judge his Church, we judge those whom he sends us by our own criteria. We make our preferences the most important thing of all.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Our Lady of La Salette

September 19, 2023

1 Tim 3:1-13, Ps 101, Lk 7:11-17

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, two processions meet. The first is a funeral cortege involving a large crowd of residents of the city, transporting to the cemetery the body of a young man whose life was cut down in the springtime of life. The mourning was intense, as it always is whenever someone with so much life ahead of him suddenly dies. And what could be more poignant than a mother’s weeping over the death of her only child? But in this case the darkness was even worse. The woman was a widow. In Jewish culture and throughout the Middle East, it was a man’s duty to provide for a woman. When a husband died, it was the duty of the eldest son to care for a mother. Without a man to provide for her, and no social welfare system, she was now going to be reduced to a beggar, a scrounger before her fellow residents, a mendicant among her extended family of origin, someone destitute, abandoned and helpless.

* But as this death march was heading out through the gates of the city to the burial ground that was also located outside of the city walls (for reasons of space as well as public health), they met a very different procession. Jesus of Nazareth was heading in, surrounded by his disciples and a large crowd of followers. When Jesus saw the woman, his heart was moved with pity (or as I like to say, based on the Greek, his innards were bursting with mercy). There are two other times in the Gospels when Jesus raised people from the dead: when he resuscitated his friend Lazarus after he had been in the tomb for four days and when he told the deceased daughter of Jairus the synagogue official, “Talitha kum,” “Little girl, rise up!” In both circumstances, prior to their deaths, there had been a request for Jesus’ assistance: Martha and Mary had written Jesus that Lazarus was dying and asked for him to come and Jairus had petitioned Jesus to come urgently to heal his daughter lest she die. Jesus worked both of those miracles in response to faith. In this case, however, the woman didn’t do anything. We don’t know whether she had faith or not. Her son was dead on a bier and most of her had died with him. Jesus, however, moved with life-changing compassion, made the first move, and in the process brought faith to her and to all those in Nain.

* Jesus began by doing a couple of things that were totally unconventional and, on the surface of it, cruel. He told the grieving mother, “Do not weep.” I wouldn’t suggest anyone try to say that at a wake to mourning family members! But it got worse. Jesus then stepped forward, touched the bier and got all the pall-bearers to stop. This gesture would be like someone’s walking out into the center of the road and halting a hearse on the way to the cemetery. And after those startling words and shocking action, Jesus said and did something that no one had requested, that no one had dreamed possible. “Young man,” he forthrightly commanded, “I tell you, arise!” The boy sat up, began to speak and was restored to his mother. None of the mourners could fathom it. It was the last thing that anyone thought could or would occur as they were accompanying a corpse to a cemetery. But the death march had collided with Jesus’ liturgical procession of life, and life triumphed over death. The mourners accompanying a mother in misery met the Messiah full of mercy. The people of Nain responded, St. Luke tells us,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Joseph Cupertino

September 17, 2023

1 Tim 2:1-8, Ps 28, Lk 7:1-10

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.18.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* Today St. Paul tells us emphatically God’s will is for “everyone to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” God’s direct will is that 100 out of 100 be saved, that all his prodigal children return home, that each receive his love and gratuitous offer of salvation and align their lives with it. That doesn’t eliminate the responsibility of human freedom to accept that gift of salvation and live in accordance with it. God’s permissive will allows us to choose communion or definitive self-alienation, but God does provide the means of salvation, somehow, to everyone. That’s the context to understand St. Paul’s words that “supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone, for kings and for all in authority.” He was writing this letter from a prison cell in Rome during the time of the emperor Nero, who would massacre Christians for sport. He was saying that we need to pray even for leaders like Nero who persecute the Church, just as St. Stephen prayed for Saul himself, just as the faithful in Milan prayed for Ambrose, just as we pray for the conversion of so many political leaders who trample human dignity, who oppose the gift of life, love or the family, and for their salvation and growth in wisdom and doing good. God wills not just Jews, not just Christians, but all to be saved, to come to the knowledge of Christ the Truth incarnate, and we cooperate in that will by our prayers, petitions, supplications and thanksgivings, in every place “lifting up holy hands, without anger or argument.”

* We see the beauty of God’s saving will shown in today’s Gospel, when a pagan centurion is praised by Jesus for having greater faith than he had found in Israel. We see that faith on display in the way that the centurion asks for a miracle for his dying slave. He came to faith in Jesus in a particular way through the exercise of authority. Jesus had already demonstrated in Capernaum his authority over demons, storms, illnesses and the crowds. The centurion faithfully grasped that with that power came the ability to say “come” and “go” and “do this” over diseases, even from a distance. The centurion himself had used his authority to do good to others, like building a synagogue for the Jews. It helped him to grasp how Jesus could and might use his power and authority, to command even unseen spiritual realities, and to do good even to the slave of a pagan. Even though the Jewish leaders said to Jesus, “he deserves” this to be done for him as a quid pro quo for his generosity, the centurion was humble and knew that he deserved nothing, that everything would be a grace, that he wasn’t fit even to welcome Jesus into his home. And Jesus was amazed at the faith he had. Even though he hadn’t received the same formation as the Jews in the Psalms, in the miracles of the Exodus, in the liberation from Babylon, in the litany of wonders God had worked, he had total trust in Jesus’ power and goodness. Since we need to be saved by grace through faith, this shows us the type of faith that can happen, thanks to God’s grace, in those raised with natural virtues. Jesus wants all to be saved, for all to have great faith. Today we pray for those like the Centurion who do not yet fully follow Jesus in the way, that they may respond to the seeds of faith God has implanted and amaze Jesus and us all.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

September 17, 2023

Sir 27:30-28:7, Ps 103, Rom 14:7-9, Mt 18:21-35

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.17.23_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* One of the most important insights left to us by Saint Augustine in his famous tome The City of God is that the contrast between the city of God and the city of Man, between a holy life and worldliness, happens as a result of two contrasting loves. The citizens of the city of God are characterized by a “love of God even to the contempt of self,” whereas the citizens of the city of man are marked by a “love of self even to the contempt of God” (CG 14:28). One love eventually comes to dominate against the other, something Jesus himself would describe in the Gospels when he said we cannot serve both God and mammon. And so one of the biggest questions that needs to be asked by every person, especially every young person, is whether we will seek to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and relativize all other loves to that divine love, or whether we will seek to love ourselves to the extent that we will seek to make ourselves a god in which we will come to look at God’s existence as an intrusion. Will we seek to love God, to want his name hallowed, his kingdom to come, his will to be done, or will we strive to have everyone instead love us, praise our name, build our kingdom and do things our way?

* That’s the drama behind St. Paul’s words to the Romans in today’s second reading. In the midst of an arrogant culture that was seeking to have all aspects of life bow down toward Caesar and the Roman empire, the apostle reminded the first Christians of the Christian difference. Rather than living for ourselves or for the regime, he emphasized, “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” We don’t belong to ourselves, he says; we belong to God. And he adds, “This is why Christ died and came to life.” Christ came to set us free, to lift up our hearts to him, to help us live in the world but not of the world. Christian baptism is a change of ownership: we no longer belong to ourselves, but belong to God. We freely and trustingly hand over the title of our life to God and live for him who took on nature to live and die for us so that we might live with him forever.

* This central truth of St. Paul is key for us to grasp, because we’re living at a time in which we are trained by our culture and the effects of original sin toward self-centeredness and selfishness, that seeks to form us in the values of the city of man rather than as citizens of the eternal Jerusalem. When we’re infants, we crave attention and think the satisfaction of our desires is the most important things in the world. We’ll cry, howl, throw pacifiers and food, and engage in all types of other behaviors until our mom, dad, siblings and other caretakers attend to our wants and needs. We’ll pronounce everything “mine,” and take what our brothers, sisters or friends are playing with, as if we have a right to anything we want. When we grow into childhood and adolescence, the temptation to live in an egocentric and entitled universe remains. We expect our parents to defend us no matter what against teachers who give us a low grade or coaches that keep us on the bench. We become picky, rather than grateful, for the food set before us, dominated by our likes and dislikes as if we were all high-maintenance celebrity divas,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

September 17, 2023

Sir 27:30-28:7, Ps 103, Rom 14:7-9, Mt 18:21-35

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.17.23_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* One of the biggest challenges in human life, not to mention the Christian life, is to avoid the lure of self-centeredness and selfishness. When we’re infants, we crave attention and think the satisfaction of our desires is the most important things in the world. We’ll cry, howl, throw pacifiers and food, and engage in all types of other behaviors until our mom or dad attends to our wants and needs. We’ll pronounce everything “mine,” and take what our brothers, sisters or friends are playing with, as if we have a right to anything we want. When we grow into childhood and adolescence, the temptation is strong to remain in an egocentric and entitled universe, thinking that everything should revolve around our desires and fears. And our culture increasingly abets this tendency as parents reflexively take their children’s side against every teachers, as consumerism convinces us that the customer is always right, as we lionize the lifestyle of high-maintenance celebrity divas, as we insist others use whatever preferred pronouns we declare, as our culture trumpets a theme song that says, “my life, my body, my choice, my death,” and exalts what we believe are our rights over every responsibility.

* In today’s second reading, to help us achieve human and Christian maturity, St. Paul tells the first generation of Christians in Rome and all of us a basic fact that is meant to translate into a way of life. Against the temptation to think or behave as if we are or should be the center of the solar system, he puts before us a moral Copernican revolution: “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” We don’t belong to ourselves, he says; we belong to God. And he adds, “This is why Christ died and came to life.” The whole purpose of Jesus’ incarnation, passion, death and resurrection is to save us from sin, which as St. Augustine wrote in his City of God is the “love of self even to the contempt of God” (14:28). Jesus wants, rather, to help us follow him along the path of what Augustine termed the “love of God even to the contempt of self,” through doing what he mentioned last week, denying ourselves, picking up our cross and following him, losing our life so as to save it. St. Paul makes the point that, as Christians, we don’t belong to ourselves, but belong to God. Christian consecration in baptism is a change of ownership, in which we freely and trustingly hand over the title of our life to God. In response to a mentality that says, my life, my choice, my will, my name, we proclaim, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, thy name be hallowed.” And we do so not out of servile submission, but out of loving gratitude, recognizing that life isn’t a contest of wills between God and us, but a recognition that God loves us and wants us to be genuinely like him, to love like he loves, to be holy as he is holy, and, with his help, perfect as he is perfect. And so as mature Christians and human beings, we’re summoned to live not for ourselves or even die for ourselves, but to live and die for and as the Lord’s.

* The evil one obviously wants to frustrate this divine work and to help us remain obsessed with love of self to the contempt of God. And the most effective way he tries to do this is through lack of forgiveness. When someone wrongs us,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

September 16, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.16.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which Jesus will talk to us about his mercy toward us and how that is meant to transform us to love others with the same merciful love with which he has loved us first.

* Peter asks Jesus, “If my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him?” One of the most difficult aspects of living the Catholic faith is the teaching about loving even our enemies and forgiving those who repeatedly wrong us, hate us and persecute us. When people hurt us, we think it’s magnanimous and generous sometimes to give them a second chance. If we forgive them yet again, we think it’s an act of heroism, and sometimes it is. If we forgive them a third time, we think we’re ready for canonization. But Jesus’ standards for us are higher. He wants us to become as merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful — and each of our autobiographies shows clearly that God has given us way more than one or two spiritual mulligans.  The Rabbis taught, based on a misinterpretation of a passage from the Prophet Amos, that we needed to forgive three times, to give someone a fourth chance. Peter, after asking Jesus how often he must forgive and while he was waiting for his response, multiplied Amos’ figure by two and added one and said, “As many as 7 times?” This would be an almost astronomical standard, giving someone an eighth chance, before writing someone off as incorrigible. Jesus replied, however, “No, Seventy Sevens.” Whether that means 70×7 (490) or 70+7 (77) times really doesn’t matter, because seven is a number already with a sense of infinity. It means to forgive without limit. He says Peter must forgive every time a brother or sister wrongs him. And what Jesus says to Peter, he also says to us. We, too, must never refuse forgiveness to anyone who has wronged us — even and especially those who have really wounded us deeply. We must forgive fathers and mothers who have hurt us when we were younger, brothers and sisters who have betrayed us, friends who have deceived us, priests or nuns who have scandalized us, assailants who have attacked us, and terrorists who have mercilessly killed those closest to us.

* Jesus makes this point clear by means of the parable he gives us, which I’ve always found among his most powerful. He describes two debtors. The first is brought into the King for owing what our translation says is a “huge amount.” The actual term used by St. Matthew is “10,000 talents.” A talent was equivalent to 6,000 denarii and a denarius was a full day’s wage. That means that the man owed 60,000,000 days’ worth of work, something that would take him 164,271 years to pay off. His request, after he had fallen prostrate on the ground and begged for time to pay it back, was totally absurd. He would need to live to be about 165,000 years old! To monetize his debt in today’s terms in order to better understand it, if he were making $100 a day (or $12.50 an hour), he would have owed $6 billion. But the text tells us that when the King saw the man on the ground begging absurdly for time, his “heart was moved with pity” and he forgave the entire debt. He didn’t even make him pay what he could. He forgave it all. We’re supposed to see in this what God does for us.