From our Pastor’s Desk

Dear Family:

Imagine walking into a bank and asking for a loan of one hundred and sixty thousand years' wages. Not one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. One hundred and sixty thousand years of labor. That is the debt in today's Gospel. Ten thousand talents. Scholars tell us a single talent was worth about twenty years of a laborer's wages, and Jesus multiplies it by ten thousand, the largest number in the Greek language attached to the largest unit of currency. It is deliberately absurd. It is a number no human being could ever repay. Jesus wants us to feel the weight of it.

And then this servant, who has just been released from an unpayable mountain of debt, walks out the door, grabs a fellow servant by the throat, and demands a hundred denarii. A hundred days' wages. Now notice, friends, that is not nothing. Three months of pay is a real debt.

Jesus is not saying that the wounds we suffer from one another are trivial. He knows the betrayal was real, the words did cut, the wound is genuine. But he is asking us to hold two ledgers side by side. In one hand, what my brother owes me. In the other, what I owe God. And the whole parable turns on this: the moment we stop looking at the second ledger, the first one becomes unbearable.

Peter thought he was being generous. “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” The rabbis of his day taught three. Peter more than doubles it and waits for the gold star. And Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.” Some translations say seventy times seven. Either way the meaning is the same: stop counting. The moment you are keeping score, you are no longer forgiving.

Why is Jesus so uncompromising here? Sirach tells us in the first reading, in words so blunt they are almost startling: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” Hugs them tight. Have you ever noticed how we cherish a grudge? How we rehearse the argument in the shower, three years later, and win it every time? Sirach sees straight through us. He knows resentment does not feel like a burden at first. It feels like justice. It feels like dignity. It feels like the one piece of power we still have over someone who hurt us.

And then Sirach delivers the line that should stop every one of us cold: “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.” Dear family, that is written two centuries before Christ, and it is already the Our Father in seed form. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it with great tenderness. It says, “It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory” (CCC 2843). Hear that carefully, because it lifts an enormous burden. Forgiveness is not amnesia. It is not pretending the wound never happened. It is not saying, “it was fine.” It was not fine. Forgiveness is the decision, made in the presence of the Holy Spirit, to stop demanding payment.

And notice something in the parable that is easy to miss. The master does not merely reduce the debt or restructure the payments. He forgives the loan. He absorbs the loss himself. That is what forgiveness always costs: somebody eats the debt. And on Calvary, brothers and sisters, God ate the debt himself. The cross is where the unpayable ledger was settled, not by us, but by Him.

Which brings us to Saint Paul in the second reading. “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.” Paul was writing to a divided community, people judging each other over food and holy days, keeping accounts of one another's faults. And his answer is not a rule. It is a fact: “you are not your own.” You belong to Christ. And so does the person you cannot forgive. That person is not simply “the one who wronged me.” That person is a soul Christ died for. Once you see that, the throat you were reaching for becomes a brother.

Now let me be pastoral here, because this Gospel can be misheard. Some of you are carrying real wounds. Abuse. Abandonment. A betrayal in a marriage. A family member who never once said sorry. And you may have tried to forgive and found the anger still rising in your chest, and you concluded you are a failure. You are not. Forgiveness is usually not a single moment. It is a direction. It is a decision renewed, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly, over years. To forgive is not to say, “you may hurt me again,” and it does not always mean restored intimacy where there is danger. It means: I release you from my judgment and hand you to God's. I stop being your jailer, because in the end, the person locked in that cell is me.

Pope Francis said that mercy is not a word we say but a gift we receive first, and only then can we hand it on. That is the whole architecture of this parable. The servant failed not because he lacked willpower but because he never let the master's mercy touch his heart. He accepted the pardon with his ears and walked out with his ledger still in his pocket.

When we come to Mass we do exactly what this Gospel describes. We stand together and pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Then we turn to one another and offer a sign of peace. And then we approach the altar, where the Most Sacred Body and Blood are offered, in the words of the Mass itself, “for the forgiveness of sins.” You cannot receive His Body and Blood and hold a grudge without contradiction. The Eucharist is the master's mercy placed on your tongue. Let it get further than your ears this time. Let it reach your heart.

So here is your work this week. One name. Not everyone who has ever hurt you, just one name. Bring it to the altar when you come forward for Communion, and say silently: “Lord, I cannot feel forgiveness for this person. But I choose it. Take my ledger. It is yours now.” And if the anger returns tomorrow, do it again. And the day after. Seventy-seven times if necessary. That is not failure, brothers and sisters. That is exactly what Jesus told Peter to do.

We have been forgiven a debt of a hundred and sixty thousand years. Surely we can let go of three months. Never forget that we are One Body, One Spirit, One Family!

Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Katharine Drexel, Saint Michael the Archangel, St. José Gregorio Hernández, Pope Saint Pius X, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Charbel, pray for us.

Yours in Christ!
Fr. Omar