A homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 13, 2026
Sirach 27:30—28:7, Romans 14:7-9, Matthew 18:21-35
Please also see my reflections on 25 years after 9/11/2001
Today’s Scripture passages prove there are no coincidences with God. If ever the three-year cycle of readings just happened to mesh perfectly with world or national events, this is it.
Today, we hear of unity as children of God, and of the power of and necessity for forgiveness.
Forgiveness…
Forgiveness, as we remember the rage-producing, mind-numbing fatal attacks on thousands of innocent and unsuspecting people a quarter-century ago.
Forgiveness by the dozens, Jesus says.
Forgiveness in hyperbolic amounts, he proclaims.
Forgiveness, when our first instinct is to wrap our red fingers and white knuckles around somebody’s throat.
Forgiveness, when we want to scream and sob and run and collapse all at once.
Forgiveness, when we have no idea how we’re going to make it through the next hour, let alone the rest of our lives.
Forgive?
Not.
Gonna.
Do.
It.
We’re too angry to forgive.
We’re too saddened, too devastated to forgive.
We’re too shocked, too paralyzed to forgive.
We’re too puzzled, too mystified to forgive.
We’re not even sure whom to blame. Not really. And if we don’t know who hurt us, how can we forgive them?
So, yeah, let’s stay angry and hurt.
Let’s lash out at anyone and everyone, maybe for no good reason. Probably for no reason at all. If we feel bad, everybody should feel bad. And if they don’t, we can arrange a bring-down.
You go, adrenaline!
Yeah, you stress hormones! Turn our faces red and jack up our blood pressure and make our bodies twitch and tremble and give us strokes and heart attacks!
Ignore Jesus, ignore the prophets and Apostles and evangelists, ignore how much weight we can shake off when we forgive someone. Turn off our minds and hearts and go feral.
Forgive?
Way too hard.
Which, of course, is why Jesus commands us to forgive.
Forgiveness is a human expression of God’s love within us, and anything as perfect as sharing divine charity is difficult for us imperfect beings.
To forgive requires us to accumulate a vast number of materials and tools and then assemble a bridge between the offended person — one of us — and the offender(s).
We need patience, empathy, self-knowledge, faith, and hope for a better day. We need to investigate and understand the offender(s), and we must be prepared to set aside our need to know why we were hurt if it becomes clear that we’ll never know.
When we forgive, we get on with our lives. Jesus the Great Physician knew this, knows this. His insights and his words, revealing the Mind of God, are true and ever-relevant. They’re spiritual. They’re logical and psychological. They’re an apple a day.
No, our lives are not the same after we’ve been hurt, whether by an attack on our nation or by a rude comment said just loud enough for us to hear it.
And we’ll always be wary afterward. We’ll look left, right, left, right, and left one more time before crossing a street, regardless of the walk light. We’ll worry about far greater dangers we hadn’t imagined before.
But by forgiving, we reconnect ourselves to our human family, the 6-billion-person family God gave us, and we extinguish the fiery anger, fear, and hatred that is guaranteed to kill us slowly and painfully.
By forgiving, we open ourselves to the light and joy of God’s grace.
Forgiving is hard.
Not forgiving is 70 times harder.
