Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. Reading from the Holy Gospel according to
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Matthew Glory to you, O Lord.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Peter approached Jesus and asked him, 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 77 times.
That is why the kingdom of Heaven may be likened to a king who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting, a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way to pay it back, his master ordered him to be sold along with his wife, his children, and all his property in payment of the debt.
At that, the servant fell down. Jidi Mohammadjan said, be patient with me and I will pay you back in full.
Moved with compassion, the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding, pay back what you owe.
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him, be patient with me and I will pay you back.
But he refused.
Instead, he had the fellow servant put in prison until he paid back the debt.
Now, when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were deeply disturbed and went to their master and reported the whole affair.
His master summoned him and said to him, you wicked servant, I forgave your entire debt because you begged me to.
So you should you not have had pity on your fellow servant as I had pity on you.
Then, in anger, his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my Heavenly Father do to you unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Have you ever been part of any group, no matter how small? It could just be you and one other person, where at least for a brief period of time, you thought you were the expert in the room, that you were so much smarter than the other person or the other people in the group?
And if you have, have you also been profoundly humbled by realizing that you weren't?
Well, if that's True for you, St. Peter is your patron saint because he consistently thinks he's the smartest person in the room.
And there are times that he was, and there are times that he was profoundly Not.
And over the last three weeks, we've seen that happen. We've seen him giving perfect answers. We've seen him giving really wrong answers.
And here we have him trying to be the teacher's pet.
Lord, how many times must I forgive? As many as seven times.
Now, when Peter said this, he thought he was being generous to a fault.
He thought, I'm going to impress Jesus by how much I've learned from him.
And Jesus said, eh, eh, you're not even close.
The amount of times you need to forgive is beyond what you can even understand. When he says 77, he basically says an infinite number of times.
And then he sets up the scenario for us of what our reality actually is.
That God is the one that is ultimately perfectly merciful in our lives, and that each one of us are forever dependent upon the truth of the presence of that mercy.
And that, in turn, we have to recognize that those things have been given to us freely and that we have to share them back with each other equally freely.
So at the heart of mercy is, in reality, stewardship.
Because what stewardship is, is recognizing that nothing that we have is truly our own, including our very lives, and that we cannot hoard anything, including the gifts of mercy and love and compassion just for ourselves.
We can't absorb what God gives us and not share it back with the world.
But what we also find is that when we are willing to share those gifts back to the world, they're multiplied times infinity.
That they make God's presence known and active in the world with us being a part of his ministry simply by sharing what we've been given.
And we also find out that it is impossible to outgive God.
The more we're willing to share those things we've been given, the more God pours things into our lives and into our hearts.
And the only time God's love and mercy can seem finite is when we think we can hoard it all for ourselves when we become stingy. The lessons of this gospel Saint Peter learned pretty quickly, and hopefully so do we.
