A reading from the holy gospel according to Matthew. 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 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 before his creditor and said, my lord, be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full. Moved with pity, his master let the official go and wrote off the debt.
He forgave it. But when at that same when that same official went out, he met a fellow servant who owed him a mere fraction of what he himself had owed his master. He seized the man and throttled him. Pay back what you owe, he demanded. His fellow servant dropped to his knees and began to plead with him.
Just give me time, and I will pay you back in full. But he wouldn't hear a word of that. Instead, he had the man put in jail, the debtor's jail, until he paid back what he owed. Well, when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were badly shaken and went to their master to report the whole thing. His master sent for this official and said to him, you worthless wretch.
I canceled your entire debt when you pleaded with me. Should you not have dealt mercifully with your fellow servant as I dealt with you? And then in anger, the master handed him over to the torturers until he paid back in full everything 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 to the district of Judea across the Jordan notice.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Spirit. Amen. This particular excerpt from Saint Matthew reporting the words of our lord is familiar for what it says.
For For me, it has so many questions arising from what it doesn't say, from its assumptions, from its silences, from what I would dare say are lost opportunities for Christ to set the record straight if he wanted to do it. If he wanted to do it. I repeat, if he wanted to do it, here was a golden opportunity. Now you just reflect on this. I'm not going to discuss this business of forgiveness.
You either have that message or you don't have it. What Christ is saying, there is no limit to how you should forgive those who have hurt you. Now notice what I what Christ is talking about. He's not talking about fiction. He's not talking about imagined hurt and injury.
He's talking about people who have hurt us. Or we see in the lord's prayer, those who have sinned against us, meaning they've done it with knowledge, with freedom, and with will as we interpret that today and have done for a good many years. And Christ is saying there is no limit to the way you should forgive those who have sinned against you, those who have hurt you, those who have maligned and injured you. Sufficient for that. It's easy to talk about it.
And notice Christ talks about forgiving and forgetting. Somebody said, I planted or I buried the ax between my friend and me. Somebody says, yes. But she planted it in a well marked grave, easily recovered. I wanna come back to what Christ doesn't say here.
Notice what he appeals to to as an illustration of forgiveness. Notice this. This is the tacit assumption of how you treat your debtors, people who owe you money. You demand your rights according to this parable. And when he doesn't pay, you sell him into slavery.
You sell his wife into slavery. You sell his kids into slavery. You take over everything he owns. So notice the assumption there and admission it tacit admission of slavery. Not a word of Christ against it.
Not a word. Not a word here against whether this is a decent way of treating people who owe you money. Not a word against it. He assumes this is just the the regular bread and the bread and and wine and olive oil of the day. And notice again, in the second part, the debtor is even put into prison and tortured.
Christ Christ manages it without any any criticism, without any condemnation, without any praise, or but he just simply assumes it like the like the Washington Post being delivered every morning at your door, thanks to a faithful newsboy. What about that? What about it? This is see, this is a thing these great liberals don't like about Christ, including those within the household. Christ never raised his voice against slavery.
He never raised his voice against practically anything in the social order. He just let it go in silence. Now whether he proved or not, I don't know. I wasn't there. I didn't have a chance to ask him.
But on many occasions, on some occasions at least, when he had every opportunity to condemn what we today think are heinous crimes, he didn't say a word about it. He assumes it, and if if silence gives consent, he consented to it. How about that? He never changed tried to change the form of government. Of course, he talked about a kingdom, and, of course, that was interpreted as his enemies wanted to interpret it, but he certainly did talk about another kingdom, his kingdom.
He talked a lot about it. But there's one little thing he said about it that we often forget. My kingdom is not of this world. Our blessed lord in his life, as I say, didn't write a single book. As far as he know we know, he didn't put one word on paper.
As far as we know, we have no textual evidence. Today, when we put so much emphasis and value upon the written word, however it be written, we have none of that kind of testimony directly from Jesus Christ. Writing was available at that time, folks. You could write your last will and testament in those days. You could write poetry.
You could write history. You could write philosophy. It was being done. Christ didn't write a single word as far as we know. He gave his message to a living ecclesia, to a handful of men to begin with.
That's where he gave his message, not to a book. And in what he gave to those men and what they handed down is what we accept as the living word and voice of Jesus Christ. And in what our blessed lord gave, he gave them a very strict, severe, well defined mission, burden, responsibility. His one message was to love god, to love your neighbor as yourself, and to be saved, and the slave can be saved as well as the emperor and the king. You don't have to transform the slave into the emperor to bring him to heaven.
I know our blessed lord did a lot of good in his time, but it what he did was infinitesimal. It was nothing compared to the misery of the world. And, again, in instances where he had an opportunity of condemning social evils, he didn't. And he even used them to illustrate his doctrine. Now whether we like it or not, that's the way it is.
And that's what our holy father is trying to bring home to those who ought to know better. There are men and there are women dedicated to the kingdom of god, specifically to spread that kingdom. But it's the kingdom of god, not the kingdom of man of the world. And our holy father has tried and he's I don't know whether he's succeeding, but he certainly is trying to bring this message home. The message of Jesus Christ ought to be the message of his messengers, specifically.
Now this this is not at all this is not at all to say that men and women of their day and of their time should not try to take as far as they can see the doctrine and theology or what you want to call it of Jesus Christ and apply it to daily living. As we get new insights, as as living reveals truth, we find truth in in living. The dead don't find much truth in this world. They may find it in another one. I haven't been there yet.
But to live is to is to exist, to change, is to see. We prayed in a we prayed in in a prayer at this very mass that we will behold the works or something like that of the lord. We should learn from these things. But you see what works what Christ came was not to make this a better world. It was to give man a better chance for the next world, for his kingdom.
And when all is said and done, the kingdom of man has value, has worth, not in itself. It's not an end in itself. It's the tool, the instrumentality. It's the channel. It's the passage.
Whatever you want is the vehicle for getting us where we have to go. And this brings me back to what I said yesterday. We do we we have a destiny which we do not project and create out there. It's there. And the very fact I exist, I am dedicated to it.
The choice I have is the choice of the means of getting there or rejecting it and rejecting the means. And so we have to look when we say that the world is sacramental, what do we mean by that? Have you ever thought about it? It means that the things that god has created help us further the cause, impel us along our regular channel even when we go off the track. It brings us back or should or should if we see god in his creatures.
And so and when we take come to this, this is the kind of a passage, of course, which is has its problems. But as I see it, what did Christ say? What did he do? And that's a good place to begin with what our lord came to do. And one of the things he came was to bring us into his kingdom, which he said time and again is not of this world.
The name of the father, the son, and spirit. Amen.