24th Sunday Year A, 2023

 (Ecclesiasticus 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35)

 

Our Gospel reading today is very familiar, but don't let that fact lead you into a semi-dormant ‘'we've heard all this before’' attitude of mind; for today’s short passage from the Gospel -- inspired as it is by the Holy Spirit -- leads us to a fount of purest water.  So, let us direct our particular attention to the first two verses of the Gospel reading:

Peter approached Jesus and asked Him, "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?"   Jesus answered, "I say to you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times”.

Why did Jesus give such an enigmatic answer?

Because He intended to show Peter the abhorrently evil root of any wilful refusal-to-forgive, of any and every nurtured-desire-for-revenge.

Not seven times, but seventy-seven times, those words are to be found first in the book of Genesis (4:23-24), in one of Israel's most ancient traditions:

Lamech said to his wives:  "Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; wives of Lamech, listen to my utterance!  For I have killed a man for wounding me, even a young man for bruising me.   If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times."   

According to the Scriptures, Lamech was the great-great-great-grandson of Cain, and in the verses preceding the words I have just quoted we read of great progress being made in the quality of life for the family of Cain: a city had been built by him, and we heard of livestock being raised, of artisans making tools of all kinds from bronze and iron, and -- for times of public rejoicing and personal pleasure -- there were players of harp and flute.  As we would say today, the economy was flourishing.

But, with the growth of prosperity and greater opportunities to seek and find not only what was necessary and good but also what was pleasurable and even addictive, there came also an alarming growth in wickedness and sin.  Cain the original sinner had begged God’s protection lest he himself be killed in revenge for his murdering of his own brother Abel, an action he learned to regret.

However, when we look at his great-great-great grandson Lamech, we find him actually glorying in and boasting about the fact of his having killed a man for merely wounding him, indeed, even killing a young man or boy for simply bruising him.  Lamech’s criminally insane pride culminated in his boast that whoever crossed him would pay for it, and that he alone, Lamech -- not God! -- would decide both the price to be paid and the person to pay it.  He vaunted the irrevocability of his decision and the inevitability of its fulfilment by invoking the traditional tribal and family reverence for the founding father by those words:

If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.

Devilish pride, coupled with a vicious and vengeful attitude, characterised Lamech:  that was the way he ruled his family.  And he was not alone in that, for the society of which he was part developed along similar lines until, eventually, it called down its own destruction by the God-sent flood.  Lamech – the end or ‘culmination’ of the Cainite line -- had become a ‘pus-laden’ boil of pride and violence in the old, pre-flood, world.

Now we ourselves -- or at least some of us -- have ‘in our days’ seen, and are still hearing of, Lamech-like things in Russian aggression – or rather in Putin aggression’ – and in, for example, Sicilian Mafioso society, Mexican gang-rule and drug culture, the handful of old IRA intransigents in Northern Ireland, and going back via Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, and Idi Amin, we can still recall with horror Stalin's horrendous cruelty towards his own people, and Hitler's totally  consuming hatred for all things Jewish. 

Awareness of such depths of human depravity can, perhaps, help us appreciate more seriously something of the importance and the significance of Jesus' reply to Peter’s  somewhat jocular exaggeration :

Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?  

And, if that is the case, we may also learn to gratefully admire, and deeply rejoice in, the vision and insight of Jesus Who knew both the heights of divine wisdom to be found in but a few words of Sacred Scripture, and also the depths and horrendous possibilities of human frailty and sinfulness, if subject to Satan’s unchecked poisonous administrations. 

Peter and the Apostles had been cleansed by the word Jesus had spoken to them and they were to receive new and heavenly life by the Holy Spirit Who would be poured out upon the Church after their Lord's Death and Resurrection. In the meantime, they were being trained to proclaim and proffer His redemption to the whole of mankind, which, despite its own native frailty, was to be re-destined and endowed-anew for heavenly fulfilment in the Church of Jesus to be built on the Rock of Peter’s witness and the fidelity of the Apostles’ proclamation.  The flood-waters of destruction and death which destroyed the gross wickedness of Lamech and his world, were never to be repeated.  Many men would and will continue to destroy themselves by their headlong pursuit of power and pleasure, but the Flood was to be replaced by a far greater outpouring of waters, this time the healing waters of grace, the most sublime juice dripping from the perennially-fruitful-tree of Jesus’ Cross.  Jesus wanted Peter and the Apostles -- as He also wants us -- to realize that they must have total, absolute, confidence in the presence in their own lives, and in the Church, of the intransigent forgiveness and redemptive-power of Him Who loves us as none but He -- our only True Father -- can, by sending His Son to become-one-of-us-for-us, and by His most sublime Gift of the Holy Spirit of Truth and Power.

We are all sinners redeemed by Jesus, and even the best of us are only earthenware vessels, as St. Paul says:

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us  (2 Corinthians 4:7);

and, on the basis of that natural fragility and God-graced humility, forgiveness ought to be an absolutely basic, and therefore characteristic, Christian virtue. Unforgiving vengefulness constitutes for us a most outrageous sin and comprehensive defeat at the hands of Satan, as we heard in our first reading:

Forgive your neighbour the hurt he does you, and when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.

If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath (harbours resentment); who will forgive him his sins?

That is why Jesus, on being questioned by Peter who mentioned the number seven which, for the Jews, was a number of completion and perfection, replied so firmly:

            I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.

This sort of thing goes back to the very beginning, and reaches to the very heart of man, Jesus is saying.  Recognize the signs of your adversary, Satan, whose deceits of old brought about the destruction of those he led astray into pride and viciousness, Lamech above all.  For you are called to be – in Me -- a new creation, and the perfection of that new creation must so great that seven can no longer declare, only seventy-seven can suggest, anything of the supreme wonder and beauty of the heavenly life, which can even begin here-on-earth for you and all My true disciples.

The devil is still at work, dear friends in Christ; still trying to undermine and disfigure God's new creation and your souls too; but, having seen in Lamech whither Satan would lead you, be firm against him and strong in Me and, by My Spirit in you, be prepared to forgive whoever may have -- wherever and whenever -- wronged you,

            Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.