Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time – 13th September 2026
Dear brothers and sisters,
Today’s Gospel begins with a very human question. Peter comes to Jesus and asks: “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Peter probably thinks he is being very generous. But Jesus answers: “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.” In other words: Peter, stop counting. Because when love begins to count, little by little, it stops being love. And perhaps this is where today’s Gospel becomes difficult for us. It is easy to speak about forgiveness when the wound is small. But what happens when someone has hurt us deeply? When we have been betrayed? When someone has lied to us? When we offered trust and received disappointment? When the person who wounded us is someone we truly loved? Then forgiveness is no longer simply a beautiful word. It becomes a cross.
Jesus does not say that what happened to us does not matter. He does not ask us to pretend that something wrong was acceptable. Forgiveness does not mean allowing someone to continue hurting us.
Jesus asks something different: Do not allow the evil that someone has done to you to change your heart into something it was never meant to be. Sometimes we carry wounds for years. The person who hurt us may no longer even think about what happened. But we remember the words. We relive the moment. We carry the anger. And without realising it, someone who hurt us years ago is still controlling our peace today. Forgiveness says: “What you did hurt me, but I will not allow it to hurt the rest of my life.” In this sense, forgiveness is also an act of freedom.
Jesus then tells the story of a servant whose master forgives him an enormous debt, a debt he could never possibly repay. But this same servant then meets someone who owes him much less and refuses to show the mercy he himself has just received. This is the tragedy of the parable. He received mercy, but he did not learn to become merciful. He was forgiven, but forgiveness never reached his heart.