📅 13 September 2026  |  👤 Fr. Savio Saldanha SJ

Brothers and sisters, most of us think we have already forgiven the person who hurt us most. Then something small happens — a remark, a name mentioned at dinner, a chance meeting on the road — and we find the old debt is still open. We had filed it under "forgiven." God had filed it under "still owed."

That's exactly where Peter is standing when he asks Jesus his question. "How many times must I forgive my brother — seven times?" He thinks he's being generous. Seven was more than his own tradition required of him. Jesus answers, "not seven times, but seventy-seven," which is his way of telling Peter: stop counting. The moment you're counting, you've already missed what I'm asking of you.

So he tells a story. A servant owes his king ten thousand talents — a debt built to be impossible, more than a lifetime of wages could ever repay. He falls at the king's feet, and the king doesn't restructure the debt or give him time. He cancels the whole thing, on the spot. That servant walks straight out of the room and finds a man who owes him a hundred denarii, a small and recoverable sum, and has him thrown into prison until he pays.

We usually stop at "how cruel." But look again at what actually happened to the servant. He didn't lose the memory of a large number. He lost the memory of what it felt like to be that far in debt and be released from it in a single moment. That is what Jesus is asking us to examine in ourselves this week — not whether we remember being forgiven, but whether we still feel the weight of what we were forgiven.

In the First Reading, Sirach tells us why that memory fades so easily. "Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight." He doesn't say our anger is unreasonable. Most grievances have a real wound underneath them. He says we hold on to it — the way you hold something close, not the way you set something down. And then he asks the question that should unsettle us: can we really expect healing from the Lord while we're nursing a wound we've refused to let anyone touch, including him?

The psalm answers by telling us plainly what God is like, in case we've been quietly measuring him by our own habits: slow to anger, rich in kindness, not dealing with us as our sins deserve. And Paul, in the second reading, reminds us that this was never a private matter to begin with — "whether we live or die, we are the Lord's." The grudge you're carrying against your brother, your sister, your neighbour, is not a transaction between the two of you that you're free to settle or not settle as you please. It belongs to the one to whom you both belong.

You know what this looks like where you live. A dispute over a bad harvest, over a strip of land, over money owed — it rarely stays between the two people who started it. It moves through the whole household, then the whole street or the whole village. It decides who sits together at a wedding, whose children play with whose, who gets spoken to and who is quietly avoided for years by people who weren't even alive when the original debt was made. The unforgiving servant isn't a character from two thousand years ago. Most of us have met him. Some of us have been him.

The gospel doesn't ask you to pretend you weren't hurt, or that the debt owed to you was smaller than it was. It asks you to go back, honestly, to the moment you were forgiven something you could never have repaid yourself, and to let that memory be stronger than the memory of what was done to you.

So before you come forward for communion today, bring one name to mind — the one person whose debt you are still keeping open. Ask God, plainly, for the grace to want to close it. Not to feel ready. Just to want it. The wanting is where he can begin.