Reflections in Ordinary Time

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time - September 11, 2005

Peter approached Jesus and asked, "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 times seven."

Matthew 18:21-22

Closure

Crime stories are covered in the media in such a way that you can almost finish the sentences yourself as you listen to them. The story is always the same. The victim is usually a defenseless young woman or a child. The crime is especially brutal, usually involving kidnapping and rape, sometimes torture, and always ending in a grisly death. The killer is apprehended, tried, and convicted, and then a long process of judicial appeals begins.

The media coverage always includes interviews with the loved ones of the victim. At every step in the judicial process they are brought before the cameras and given an opportunity to speak. As the appeals drag on, their grief deepens and hardens into anger and outrage, and it spills out in words of bitterness and hatred toward the killer. They want vindication, an eye for an eye. A life sentence is not enough; it would cheat them of justice. They say they want closure - they always use that word - and they are convinced that only the death penalty will bring it.

Jesus teaches a very different idea of closure. Running through every page of the Gospels is a teaching that is as hard to miss as it is hard to accept. Jesus says that the right way to answer an offense is to forgive it. This teaching is clear and simple. It is not an elaborately expounded theological notion. It has no nuances to it. It means exactly what it says.

Jesus goes so far as to say that forgiveness is the one condition that God places on his otherwise unconditional love. You cannot receive the mercy and forgiveness of God for your own offenses unless you forgive your brother from your heart. It's that simple. And it's not negotiable.

Forgiveness has no underlying motives. Jesus does not teach a psychology of forgiveness. He does not suggest that forgiving an offense will make you feel better, or that it will heal the wounds caused by wrongdoing. Nor will it necessarily cause a change of heart in the offender. Even if you forgive "as many as seven times," he may not get the point.

Jesus teaches forgiveness because it is a commandment. It is given on the same authority as all of God's other commandments. Jesus made this clear by the way he obeyed it himself. Near the end of his own horrific ordeal of being falsely accused, tried, and convicted, after being brutally beaten and scourged, after being stripped and humiliated and hung on a cross before a jeering crowd and left to die, he looked up to heaven, and with the last gasp of life he had in him he said,

And with these words he taught us once and for all the real meaning of closure.

- Responsorial Psalm for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Read another reflection on forgiveness.

Remembering September 11