24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (September 13, 2026)

Jesus’ Community Discourse concludes today in Matthew 18 with the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, one of the most dramatic of all his parables. 

The story begins with a question from Peter: “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?”

Peter probably thinks he is being extraordinarily generous. But Jesus takes Peter’s generosity and stretches it beyond calculation: not seven times, but seventy-seven times — or, as some translations render it, seventy times seven.

In other words: Stop counting!

Jesus then tells the story of a servant who owes his king an enormous debt that he could never possibly repay. The king has compassion and forgives the debt completely. But almost immediately, that same servant encounters someone who owes him a much smaller amount. Instead of extending the mercy he himself has just received, he demands payment.

When the king hears what happened, he is furious:
“You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?”

There is the heart of the parable: As I had pity on you.

Forgiveness begins not with what someone else owes us, but with remembering what we ourselves have received. This teaching echoes one of the most familiar lines in the Lord’s Prayer:

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

We pray those words so easily that we can forget how challenging they really are. Every time we pray the Our Father, we acknowledge that we are people who need mercy — and that the mercy we receive is meant to flow through us toward others. 

Sirach makes the same point in today’s First Reading. And Saint Paul takes us even deeper in his Letter to the Romans:

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.

None of us lives for oneself.

That may be one of the keys to understanding forgiveness. My life is not mine alone. My hurts are real, but they do not have to define me. My resentments do not have to become permanent possessions that I carry through life. I belong to Christ — and so does the person I find difficult to forgive.

Forgiveness does not mean pretending that nothing happened. It does not excuse injustice or erase the need for accountability. Nor does forgiveness necessarily restore a broken relationship to what it once was.

But forgiveness does mean refusing to allow another person’s offense to have the final word in my heart. 

All of us know the awkwardness of unresolved hurts among friends or family. Something happened years ago. Nobody talks about it anymore. Everyone knows it is there, but it has become the proverbial elephant in the room — an enormous block of ice that no one quite knows how to thaw.

Someone has to go first. Could that someone be me?

Could I make the phone call? Begin the conversation? Let go of the scorekeeping? Offer the first word of mercy?

Jesus does not tell Peter to forgive seventy-seven times because forgiveness is easy. He tells him because forgiveness is the way God has chosen to deal with us.

We are forgiven people.
And forgiven people are called to become forgiving people.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.