Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sunday, September 17, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
God teaches me the skill of forgiveness
Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight. The vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance, for he remembers their sins in detail.
The Bible says the same thing in so many ways. If there is any way at all to see God as wrathful, it would be his wrath who remember each other’s sins. Seeing those sins is God’s job, and he knows exactly how to do it, a way personal to each of us, with understanding, love and forgiveness at the end of every road back to him.
Could anyone refuse mercy to another like himself, can he seek pardon for his own sins? If anyone who is but flesh cherishes wrath, who will forgive his sins?
This is the way of grudge and vengeance. This way leads right into the way we die.
Remember your last days; set enmity aside; remember death and decay, and cease from sin!
I think of the parable of the talents. The one who buries his single talent remembered the wrath of his master, but forgets his master’s generosity and love. His fear of the Lord leads him to observe those around him suspiciously rather than generously. He will not release his own “talent,” his own resources, his own mercy. He sees the sins of those around him but is afraid to face up to his own. And God is not pleased. This burying man looks to a god he has created, not the God who made him.
Because the Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion. Bless the lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
God’s business is pardon, not condemnation. “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn sinners, but to save them.”
He pardons all your iniquities.
When we see, or think we see, the sins of others, we are no longer looking up toward God. Then, caught in our nasty vision, we find we cannot, that we are constitutionally unable to, do what God does with those sins.
The Lord pardons all our iniquities, he heals all your ills. He redeems your life from destruction, crowns you with kindness and compassion.
Some of us are OK at pouring kindness and compassion over the feet of others. Others of us pour that nectar over our own feet. A very few of us, with practice, do both. And of course we cannot NOT love each other. It’s just that God is so very very good at it, and we are mostly learning at a snail’s pace.
So, as the Bible says in one place after another, we turn our faces up.
None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For 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. This is why Christ died and came to life, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
Likewise, none of us is good at this, able to make it happen on our own. Forgiveness is a skill we get good at only if we practice.
Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”
(Sirach 27-28, Psalm 103, Romans 14, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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