The wonderful thing about the lectionary in these last few weeks is that we’re able to see the unfolding of Jesus’ teaching to the apostles on their own authority. We heard St. Peter’s confession—his faith as the rock of the apostolic Church against which the powers of hell cannot prevail. Peter is given the keys to the kingdom of heaven. But then we see him fail spectacularly in his rejection of Christ’s passion. That profound authority then is tied definitively to the cross. Later on we see the power to bind and loose asserted once again on the larger band of apostles.
The apostolic ministry as a whole is inseparable from the kingdom of heaven to which Jesus invites us because what is bound on earth is bound in heaven. We cannot, in other words, skip over the Church and her hierarchy—messy as it may be—for the sake of some idealized pure spirituality.
Today we hear Peter, who is clearly continuing to wrestle with this idea that he is or will be empowered to forgive sins, ask Jesus, “How many times should I forgive?” It’s a reasonable question. You’re saying that what I bind on earth is bound in heaven; you’re saying that I have your own authority to interpret the divine law. So . . . some guidelines, please?
The Lord’s response is weighted with scriptural meaning. Well, so is Peter’s initial answer to himself, in a way: seven is, in Jewish thinking, a sign of perfection. Seven days of creation. The Sabbath. Divine rest. The fullness of the good. So in saying “seven times,” Peter isn’t being stingy; he’s wondering whether the Lord’s forgiveness should extend in a total, complete way.
So Jesus could have said, yes, seven times, and we might rightly interpret that as still being pretty generous. But he goes way beyond that. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.” There’s a discrepancy in some of the modern translations; some choose “seventy-seven” and some choose “seventy times seven.” Arguably, if the language itself is unclear, the scriptural context suggests “seventy times seven,” because that number occurs in some Old Testament passages and shows up in contemporary Judaism in reference to an eschatological Jubilee Year, which involves the forgiveness of sins after a symbolic 490 years. So “seventy times seven” times represents an excessive, overflowing forgiveness, something far beyond ordinary human categories.
In fact, the parable of the generous master gives us a similarly lopsided picture. The servant’s debt, ten thousand talents, is an impossibly large sum. John Bergsma calculates it at roughly $8.6 billion in today’s economy. In comparison, the smaller debts owed to the forgiven servant equal roughly $8,000—no small amount for most people, but completely out of proportion to the larger amount.
The gifts that God has given us—in forgiving us our sins, in restoring our damaged divine image, in lavishing us with the gifts of his grace—are incalculable. Therefore, mercy and generosity to our own debtors is a necessary corollary to our being forgiven. To refuse this mercy and generosity in our own lives is to refuse the gifts of God.
Let me suggest just a couple of ways that this economy of forgiveness plays out in the life of the Church.
First, in relation to Peter’s initial question, and the apostolic authority over forgiveness, the Church’s practice of the sacrament of penance reflects the divine mandate to generosity. This is something that was often disputed in the early Church. There were those of a more “rigorist” position who insisted that certain sins were beyond the pale—for example, those who denied Christ in the face of persecution but then wanted to come back into fellowship. Over the course of those early centuries, Church councils repeatedly choose mercy—no doubt in consideration of this Gospel passage. Yes, apostasy is serious. But God’s forgiveness is beyond anything that we can hope to quantify. Therefore, the Church grants forgiveness even in these extreme cases. She dares not presume to be more stingy than her Lord and Master.
Simply, I think the way that confession has evolved in the West—with the norm of secrecy and anonymity, symbolized most clearly by the screen of the traditional confessional—suggests something of the practical ways that we insist on this mercy. I might hear the same confession week after week of the same sins. On a human level, I might be tempted to say, “Come on, pull yourself together! You get three last chances, and then you’re out of luck.” But the nature of the seal, and even of the practical mechanics of hearing confessions, wards off that temptation. I might recognize the voice, or the content, or I might not. Holy Church insists that when I sit in the confessional, I offer not my forgiveness, but the forgiveness of God, which is so, so much more than I could even dream of.
Perhaps you, like me, have had occasion to like certain confessors, and to admire their personal charisma and wisdom. So you might find it off-putting to encounter a more mechanical, dry confessor who simply hears your sins, assigns a simple penance, and moves on. But I think this is a useful reminder of what is the whole point: that we are not saved by interesting personalities, or even by good pastoral advice; we are saved by the overwhelming and inconceivable generosity of God.
Sometimes, for that very reason, I will, for an unusually serious sin, assign an unusually light penance. Not always, mind you. But sometimes I think people need to be shocked into the realization that they really are forgiven, and that this forgiveness is not something they can earn or deserve in any normal sense. Penance, in the sacrament, isn’t a true satisfaction, but a small participation in God’s redeeming work on our behalf; it is our “yes” to allow that grace to renew us.
The second way, no doubt among many, that I see this playing out, is simply with our generosity in apostolic ministry. “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself,” St. Paul tells us in Romans. This is so because, as we see in the parable, we owe such a debt of gratitude to the one who made us and who redeems us that we cannot possibly imagine, in any sane way of thinking, that anything we have is really and truly our own. I’ve often made reference this summer to learning to be a pastor, and here it is again: this place that I’m in charge of isn’t mine; I am, at best, a “steward” of the mysteries and temporal goods. The bishop decrees that I “possess” the parish—certainly a striking turn of phrase given in canon law!—but that possession is completely for another: Christ himself. Like Peter’s possession of the whole Church. Like the apostle’s possession of their individual churches. Like, in a certain way, our own possession of our souls and bodies.
We have so much to be grateful for, yet so many Catholics treat the Church and the parish as some kind of natural right, as if the pope, or the bishop, or whoever, owes them a building and Mass and priests. That’s not completely wrong, as it happens, because there’s a real onus of responsibility on the hierarchy to provide for the faithful. But the idea that this has to mean something like “There will be a beautiful church within walking distance to my house that provides Mass times perfectly convenient to me, and this must be provided for me at no cost to myself whatever” is a perfect example of modern impious presumption and maybe even greed.
There was a time, at least in certain parts of this country, where people had such desires, but they understood that it was their responsibility to fulfill them. And so they built the great parish churches that stood for a generation and then, in so many cases, fell into disrepair, or were closed, or repurposed, or destroyed. Yet so many Catholics—forgive me if this seems blunt—think that the Church will be fine if they throw into the plate a bill that represents maybe a tenth of a percent of their income for that week. Or, if we can put it more in terms of time, they give to divine worship, and the life of the parish, the bare minimum required. So we can hardly wonder if institutions continue to shrivel, if children continue to lose the faith, and these Catholics who are in many cases so very proud of being Catholic end up actually with a lot of pride and very little actual Catholicism.
Christ’s message to the apostles is clear: be lavish with my gifts of grace, because after all, they are not yours, but mine. If receiving these lavish gifts fails to change us and make us, even in some small way, into images of that divine generosity, we should consider whether we have really ever received them at all, or whether we have put ourselves in the dangerous situation of the ungrateful servant who finds that his debt has been forgiven, but that he now lives in a prison of his own design.