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Gospel reflection for Sept. 13, 2026, 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
As Jesus extolled the virtue of fraternal correction and the need to exercise mercy in the lives of his disciples, certain questions arose among them. Certainly, St. Peter had time to reflect on what Jesus taught about fraternal correction and he posed the question: “How often must I forgive?” Thinking himself generous, and in accord with the Mosaic Law, he offered times, only to learn from Jesus that seventy-seven times should be the standard. This must have been shocking to him, and it sounds overwhelming to us. When the standard is seven times it is easy to keep score, and even to offer a warning that someone is on their sixth time, but seventy-seven is a small yet unsurmountable number. Our mercy, like God’s mercy, should be unbounded.
One of the challenges of developing a social structure is the quantification of law. Therefore, when the Mosaic Laws emerged in the history of the ancient Israelites and were modified by the Scribes and Scholars of the Law over the subsequent generations, very specific minutiae of legal application developed as well.
We see a shift in understanding the Law appear in the teaching of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezakiel, who were contemporaries during the period of the Babylonian incursion into the Promised Land. Later on, as the Jewish people remained in the diaspora, the Laws became their identifying marker, and took on a life of their own.
Law, just for its own sake, can become tyrannical and burdensome.
In his teaching Jesus has a very curious relationship with the Law. While on the one hand he announced that he had come not to abolish the Law, but to strengthen it, he also was often accused of being careless in his observance and enforcement of those very laws. Jesus healed on the Sabbath, he walked with the disciples as they picked grain on the Sabbath, and he failed to correct the disciples as they failed to observe proper purification practices.
Peter’s question makes sense in its context. Peter’s question makes sense to us today. How often are we to exercise mercy and forgiveness in light of the offenses against us by those whom we call our brothers and sisters?
Each of us experiences personal offenses virtually every day of our lives. We are irritated by strangers in public settings, frustrated by our coworker’s insensitivity, apparent ineptitude, or laziness, but especially, we are hurt by those whom we love, those closest to us.
“There is only so much I can take” is an expression we use and hear with much frequency. It reflects the depth of our frustration and the extent of our pain. Many times, we bite our tongue, take a deep breath, or just sigh in resignation. We do not need to use words to demonstrate our level of emotional discomfort, but it is always obvious, even when we think it is not.
Burying those frustrations and hurts is not the same forgiveness.
Forgiveness demands that we step outside of ourselves and our comfort zones into the life of the other. We need to look back at ourselves from the eyes of the other person and see how it is that we might be at the same time a source of pain, frustration or anger within them. Difficult relationships are seldom ever one-sided, even when we feel ourselves to be the sole victim. In those moments, we need to take ownership of our own failures, so that forgiveness becomes not a one-sided encounter, but a dialogue of love and forgiveness.
Yet, there are indeed those experiences in life when we have been dealt a tragic calamity or suffered an offense of great proportions well-beyond our control.
While we are called to forgive and exercise mercy there, that is outside of the scope of what Jesus is addressing in this conversation with Peter.
Here, we are looking at our need to show mercy and loving compassion to those within our circle of family and friends. That can be difficult. Sometimes we hear that we forgive but do not forget, but that, too, places a condition on forgiveness.
We believe that when we receive sacramental absolution that our sins are not just forgiven but blotted out. It is as though none of that ever happened. God, who is omniscient and omnipresent, puts our sins out of his mind. We are called to do the same. Mercy has no limits.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.