A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Peter, please notice how almost invariably it is Peter who is the spokesman of the disciples. So Peter came up to Jesus and asked him, Lord, when my brother wrongs me, how often must I forgive him? Seven times? No, Jesus replied.
Not seven times. I say, 70 times seven times. That is why the reign of God may be said to be like a king who decided to settle accounts with his officials. When he began his auditing, one was brought in who owed him a huge amount. As the man had no way at all of paying it, his master ordered him to be sold along with his wife, his children, and all his property in payment of the debt.
At that, the official prostrated himself in homage and said, my lord, be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full. Moved with pity, the master, let the official go wrote off the debt. But when that very same official went out, he met a fellow servant who owed him a mere fraction of what he himself had owed. The official seized and throttled the man saying, pay back what you owe. His fellow servant dropped to his deeds and began to plead with him.
Just give me time, and I will pay you back in full. But the official would hear none of it. Instead, he had the debtor cast into jail until he paid back every cent of what he owed. Now when the man's fellow servant saw what had happened, they were badly shaken and went to their master to report the whole thing. The man's master sent for him and said, you worthless wretch.
I canceled your entire debt when you pleaded with me. Should you not have dealt mercifully with your fellow servant as mercifully as I dealt with you? Then in anger, the master handed the official over to the torturers until he paid back all that he owed. My heavenly father will treat you in exactly the same way unless each one of you forgives his brother from his heart. When Jesus had finished this discourse, he left Galilee and came into the district of Judea but across the Jordan.
And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. This excerpt from our lord's life and these are his own words and remember, it was Christ who chose this parable. It was our lord who selected this material, which we have just read as Saint Matthew wrote it and as we have it in this translation. This excerpt scandalizes some people.
Just as that parable of our Blessed Lord about the master, the vineyard, and the way he hired men to go into the vineyard to work, and how at the end of the day, believe it or not, the owner gave the same amount of wages to the man who had worked a full day from sunup to sunset. He gave the same amount to the man who had worked only a fraction of that. That's scandalous. Any union man will see red when he reads that. Now, you hear a great deal today about liberation theology, how Christ was a great revolutionary, that he came to change the world.
He came to change the world alright. He said that. But the kind of change that he initiated seems slightly different from the way it is interpreted today. Because today, some of these so called advanced and liberal progressive thinkers, many of them within the church and in ecclesiastical positions, they maintain that really what Christ was doing was to do what Marx tried to do, which to convert this world into a better place, a more comfortable place, have it almost approximate paradise. Now, if there's one thing that in my reading of the New Testament, not just the four letter and not just the four narratives of the good news of Jesus Christ, but also the epistles.
Take them all together. And where do you find in any of them, any effort, explicit effort to change this world into a better kind of world in this world? Where do you find it? Well, you may say, well, look how Christ treated the poor, how he treated the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, the ill, the diseased. How many did he treat?
How many? He didn't change, he didn't remove any diseases from the world. He didn't remove in the slightest poverty from the world. Christ never uttered a word against poverty. He praises it.
He didn't open any hospitals, or institute a nursing corps, or open medical school. He didn't establish a college. He didn't institute an educational system. He did none of those things. He didn't establish a police system, or a sanitary department to Jerusalem.
He didn't do anything like that. He didn't try to make people more sanitary and hygienic. Not in the least. Now what is most scandalized is this. I mean, scandalizing to some people, that on several occasions, and here today we have one of them, is where Christ appeals to what apparently was a current practice of how creditors treated their debtors.
They not only could sell the debtor, they I mean, they could not only throw him into prison, but they could torture him. They not only could throw him into prison and torture him, they could sell him into slavery. They could not only throw him into prison, torture him, and sell him into slavery, but sell his whole family into slavery. And Christ appeals to that as a current acceptable practice. And I say acceptable because he does not doesn't say utter a single word of criticism of it.
He seems to implicitly accept it. And he says, look, this is the ordinary way debtors are treated. But here you have a creditor who would had a generous heart, and he forgave his debtor. But in all of this, Christ doesn't offer one single word against slavery, against against how you treat debtors, against the social system of of interest, or of of money that is owed in some way of a loan that is owed. He makes no criticism of the social system whatsoever, and he never did.
He never did. Now I know well enough that when you take a principle of this magnitude of how often we should forgive our neighbor, then you say, well, let us apply that to a to a to a view of the state. Well, you can come up with all kinds of things, and we're still working at it. But my point is this, that the that from what we know the teaching of Jesus Christ, either by the writings or by the tradition, there is not the suggestion that he was a social reformer in any sense of the word except that so far, as he said, this kingdom is not mine. My kingdom is not of this world, and I've come to get you for my kingdom.
Not to make you better citizens of the city city of man, but to make it possible for you to be a worthy citizen of the city of God. Saint Augustine, fourth century. And I I just laid it no. Nothing I have said is against people trying to improve their situation. I'm not opposed to living a sanitary hygienic life.
Not at all. But as Chesterton said someplace, and you know it's crazy the way you remember things, but he has a and of course, the words he uses make always, make it so dramatic. But he draws a picture. He must have been walking around Packer Street in Baltimore. Of course, I don't think he but that this is the scene.
It's one of our people where you had these brick houses with the white marble steps. And I think it was Saturday morning where every housewife was out there with her pail and a and a a canister of Dutch cleanser scrubbing away on those white marble steps. And of course, they looked like the dickens. They were they were all splashed over with water. Their hair was all running around their heads.
Their clothes were disheveled. They looked like the dickens. And as justice puts out, they may be saints. I don't think I wanted would have wanted to eat many meals sitting next to Peter Klabber. He and Baez had a mutual understanding they kept apart.
Scarcely ever changed his clothes. Now you see, we're not called upon to live like that. But the point is this, you can be a poor person, you can be dirty, you can be filthy, I mean, with clay and with grease. You your fingernails can be terribly misshapen and and black, and you can be a saint. You can be a saint.
And what Christ came to do was to call each one of us to be a saint. In the name of the father, son, the holy spirit. Amen.