Tear Out the Page: There Is No Ledger in Heaven

Moved with compassion, the master of that servant
forgave him the whole debt.

I remember 9-11, twenty-five years ago.
I was in the rectory at St. Lawrence Parish,
my first assignment,
just newly ordained one year,
watching in shock on live television
as that second plane crashed into the tower,
and then watching the two towers burning.
It is seared into my memory.
Then the following hours of confusion and anger,
as people started to fall out of the building,
and then eventually watching both buildings collapse.

I remember every moment of it.
It is as if it happened yesterday.
I remember in particular the next day,
those hours after, the sky was silent.
It was eerie.
There were no commercial airplanes flying anywhere for days.
Only an odd fighter jet would fly by.

There was a deep sense of eeriness,
and of shock and anger.
In the days that followed,
I remember how the anger rose up in the nation
and demanded revenge.

I remember that Sunday,
because I could not go along with it.
I spoke out against the revenge.
Not against the anger, against the revenge.
I paid a price for it.
People did not want to hear that.

They turned that anger and that revenge toward me.
I did not speak about it as a pious platitude.
I spoke out of experience,
because I grew up in Ireland,
in what we call the Troubles.
Over three and a half thousand people were killed
in terrorist events on both sides,
and all sides kept on calling for revenge.
I know where the road of revenge takes us.
I know it takes us nowhere,
and it takes us there very fast.

You see, it was out of that experience
that I knew we could not seek revenge,
because it takes us nowhere.
It poisons our heart.
It is like a weed planted in the heart.
No matter how much you pull it out at the surface,
its roots are deep within your heart,
and you cannot get to it.

Memory is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.
We can remember things,
and we can relive them in a positive way.
You might remember the book I mentioned,
the one we used at the men’s group some time ago,
called Die With Zero.

Perkins, the author, has this premise:
that we invest in experiences that give us memory,
good memories,
because like an investment,
they continue to pay dividends
long after the event itself.
When we have this great experience,
we remember it,
and that pays dividends of goodness
over and over again.

What the book does not say, but I say,
is that the reverse is true too.
When we invest in resentment
and unforgiveness and grudges,
they also pay dividends,
but those dividends are toxic for the soul,
and they keep paying.

The challenge for us is that we all have hurts.
There is nobody here
who has not been wounded by somebody,
or indeed, if we are really honest,
that we have not wounded somebody.
We make mistakes, and we hurt each other.
Sometimes it is on smaller stuff,
and sometimes it is on bigger stuff.

I know many of you are dealing with very difficult situations.
Some of you are dealing with trouble in your marriage.
Some are dealing with trouble in your family,
and you just cannot get past
what that sibling or that parent said twenty years ago,
and you just cannot seem to let it go.
Or you lost your job,
and they did not even talk to you.
They sent an email.
How devastating it was to get that.

All of us are dealing with the bigger issues of the world,
of these countries at war with one another,
whether it be in Iran,
or whether it be in Palestine and Israel,
or whether it be in Ukraine,
or whether it be just local to us,
why is it that the AI companies refuse to pause
instead of endangering all humanity?
This anger rises up,
and there is a tendency to invest in resentment,
to invest in grudges,
to invest in unforgiveness.
But please hear me,
it is going to be toxic for your soul.

It will do no good.
It is a road to nowhere.
I promise you,
I know from firsthand experience
what it does to the soul.

So, what are we to do?
Today’s gospel tells us exactly.
Peter goes to Jesus and he says,
how many times must I forgive somebody?
Now, Peter is trying to be self-righteous.
The Jewish rabbis would have said three times.
He goes and says seven times,
which is the whole number.

Jesus answers.
You would not have heard this,
but you need to understand the Jewish Scriptures.
Jesus does not say seven times.
He says seventy-seven times.
That comes from all the way back to the book of Genesis.
In Genesis, a man called Lamech sings a song:
if Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech is avenged seventy-seven times.
Jesus flips this,
just the way I am flipping Perkins’ book.
He says not seven times,
but seventy-seven times.
In other words, every time.

Then he tells this parable, the story of this king.
Again, you would not know this,
because you are not the Jewish audience
that originally heard it.
Jesus says, there is this king,
and he pulls out the ledger,
and he is doing an accounting.
What today’s translations says is a huge amount.
The original would be ten thousand talents.
That would be the equivalent of the entire income
in the state of California, or even more.
That was not an exaggeration.
That was a joke.
Nobody is laughing, I get that.
But the joke is that it was an absurd amount.

What does he do?
He is moved with compassion.
I have said this before:
but this means his gut gets twisted.
The same way when your child gets hurt,
and you feel that twisting in your gut,
there is nothing you can do,
but you are holding it.
That is what he is saying.
The king’s guts are twisted.
He feels compassion.

Notice what the debtor does.
He tries to negotiate.
Give me more time, and I will pay you back.
But what does the king do?
He does not reduce the debt.
He does not negotiate it.
He pulls out the page and throws it away,
completely wipes it out.

This is where the absurdity goes on.
After having your debt completely wiped out,
he turns around and he takes this much smaller debt,
and he throttles this other servant.
Of course, the idea is for us to hear
that the Lord has forgiven us.
Therefore, we need to forgive others.
And we have to hear that.

He died on the cross for that very reason.
That is the whole purpose of this:
that he became one of us
so that we could know firsthand
that he knew and understood the human condition.
Then he gave it all up
so that we could understand
how much God loves us.

So, we are called to forgive every time.
Now look, I am not naive.
I understand how hard that is.
It is so hard to forgive those larger moments,
especially when they continue to twist and hurt us.
Forgiveness is not condoning that.
It is not saying that is okay.
It is to look past it.

We get the example of how to handle this in the first reading.
Sirach tells us exactly what to do.
He tells us the methodology.
He says it three times: remember.
Remember first that you are going to die.
Your life is limited,
and the other person is going to die too.
The second thing is to remember the commandments.
In other words, you are a sinner.
You too have sinned.
Then the third thing is remember the Lord’s covenant,
and that the Lord will never, ever do otherwise.

The good news is, my friends,
that there is no ledger in heaven
where the Lord has your name down
and he is not counting every one of your sins.
He is tearing out the page of the ledger for us.
We need to feel that
and we need to understand that tearing up of that page
has already happened for every one of us.

We need to accept that,
but then we need to pass it on to others.
We need to be as reckless
with the generosity of our forgiveness
as Jesus is,
as God is with us.

The challenge for us this week
is to think of that one,
that one revenge or unforgiveness or grudge
that you have held on to.
The one that you thought about
when I was telling the first story,
because we all have one in our heads.
Hold on to that and say,
it is time for me to pull out the page.
Not to negotiate,
not to reduce,
but to tear the page out
and throw it away
and say, that is forgiven.

I understand that is very hard.
We all have weeds in our garden.
I get that, me included.
But when we discover we have it,
we must pull the sheet out of the ledger.
That is our work today.

If it is too hard to do today,
then let us do what Jesus did on the cross.
He said, Father, forgive them,
they know not what they do.
Ask the Lord to forgive them for you.
At least then you are in the right direction.
At least then you are replacing.

Notice what the book of Sirach does.
He does not say condone these offenses.
He is saying replace this memory with another memory.
Remember who we are:
a child of God, loved and forgiven.
Remember that we live and we die.
Remember that there are commandments,
that we too sin.
And remember that the Lord is always faithful.
He will always forgive us.

That is our work today.
I know it is hard work,
and that is why we come to the table
to receive the strength to do it.
But hear what the Lord says
in today’s scripture again.

Moved with compassion, the master of that servant
forgave him the whole debt.