The Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time-Cycle A 2019-2020

  Sirach 27:30–28:7 | Romans 14:7-9 | Matthew 18:21-35

Look upon us, oh God, creator and ruler of all things, and that we may feel the working of your mercy, grant that we may serve you with all our hearts.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The theme of today’s liturgy is a fascinating theme about why we’re here, who we really are, why God has made us as we are and what is our task while we’re here.  I’m going to start with the second reading from Romans, because it makes it clear that one of the things that we’re here to do always is to live for the Lord.  If we live for him, that means we will find life, and we will do the things that bring life to other people, and the main thing in this reading is the idea that we’ve come into the world not to take care of ourselves but to take care of others.  In the Old Testament the demand of God was so clear to his people.  “I want you to obey me.  Obey me.  Do what I tell you, and then I will be there for you.”  The level of consciousness of those people was obviously fairly low, because they only understood something like, “If you don’t do what I tell you to do, you will be seriously punished.”  And over and over again, you see in the Old Testament, when they turn back to their own ways, God was furious, and when they did something negative to him, like forgot him, refused to honor him, he refused to honor them and instead would condemn them and even decided at one point in their journey with Moses that he wanted to kill them all, because they were so unfaithful and so ungrateful.  And it created rage in God.  A vengeful God is very much a part of the Old Testament.  The thing that’s so risky about studying the Old Testament and knowing it is to understand that what God was always doing was working with people where they were.  What they could understand he could teach them, but if he was asking them to go beyond their comprehension, beyond their ability to comprehend something, it would be like teaching a five-year-old calculus.  It wouldn’t work.  So what was it about the consciousness back then?  It was that it was very, very self-centered.  It remained primarily in the brain, and what ancient human beings could understand because of, in a way, their almost animal nature was they understood things that made sense to their ego.  If it made sense, they would do it.  If somebody attacked you and you just didn’t do anything, they’d come back and attack you again and attack you again, and so it made a logical sense that, if someone attacks you, the best way to protect yourself is to destroy them.  So you destroy the enemy in order to protect yourself. 

By the time the New Testament comes and a new level of consciousness exists, a phrase would come out of the lips of Jesus that said something like this:  if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.  If you return evil for evil, you will live in nothing but evil, just as radical, radical change in the New Testament.  And one way to imagine this is there is something in the seed that God has placed in every single one of us that is a human being more and more like the God who created us, and since God had to work with us as we expected him to be, in the Old Testament he was vengeful, and he was the source of everything.  Everything good came from God; everything bad came from God.  The goal of the Old Testament was monotheism.  There is only one God out of all of these gods.  I think to myself, “Of all of these gods,” and I think to myself, “Today where do we go for the truth?”  God is truth, and I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a world more confusing as to who is the one speaking the truth.  Is it a politician?  Is it a businessman?  Is it a pharmaceutical person?  Who is speaking the truth?  And the one we trust in and we believe in, they become our kind of god.  We surrender to that.  You can see how dangerous it is to surrender to a human figure that has authority and power over us.  The difference between turning our life over to them and turning our life over to the God who exists is the difference between living in truth and lie.  So the goal of the New Testament was to make a major shift from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and this was a major shift that could only happen unless there was some kind of enormous increase in people’s consciousness.  And there’s a lot of things we can call redemption.  Your sins are forgiven, freed, but one of the things I love to talk about is, when we were redeemed, there was a wakening in our consciousness of what our true nature is to the level that we realized there is something in us that is not made for revenge, hate, destruction but something else, something really different.

So you look at the first reading, and it’s clear that, when we look at this reading, we see that there’s a condemnation of anger, wrath, vengeance, yet you kind of listen to this, and you see God is saying to people, “Okay, if you are vengeful to other people, I will be vengeful to you.”  So there is God in the Old Testament being who he doesn’t want us to be.  A vengeful God will suffer the Lord’s vengeance.  That’s what it says in Sirach, but if you go down further, you see the seeds of something new.  He said, “You should try to forgive your neighbors in justice.  When you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.  When you pray for your enemies, your sins are forgiven.”  You can’t forgive yourself, but if you forgive someone else, God will forgive you.  Remember that you are here, it says, for a while.  Remember death and decay and cease from sin.  Okay, what does that mean?  Well, think of it this way: in the reading from Romans, we have this image of Christ came into the world and died so we could all have life, and he’s going to be Lord of both the dead and the living.  So whatever this is, this increase in consciousness, this growth of understanding that vengeance is not what God really wants but he wants forgiveness and understanding and compassion, and when you have it, you’re living for the Lord, not for yourself but for the Lord.  And whether you live or die, according to St. Paul, he’s saying you came into the world to give life to the world.  That’s what you’re here for.  He said, “Remember that Christ came and died for everyone so that everyone could come to life.”  And he’s Lord both of the dead and the living.  Now, this is a little side thing, so don’t be distracted by this, but what I find fascinating about that is, if he’s Lord of both the dead and the living, that means he is a source of life for both.  He keeps you alive, on this earth alive, and the dead never die.  So he has people living in this world and in the next, and their goal is the same, to take care of each other.  The only way you can express love for God is by giving love to another person.  God does not need you to love him back.  You can be appreciative and thankful and grateful for all he does for you, but he doesn’t need you to say, “Oh, I love you so much.”  What he needs is for you to believe that he loves you so much and that that belief says to you that you’ve been given something from him to do for other people that you could never do yourself.  Imagine, this gift of living for another person, always wanting what’s best for them, never reverting to a lower level of consciousness where you want to hurt them or destroy them or compete with them, whatever, that isn’t in human nature’s natural thing.  It’s a gift of a spiritual life that’s been placed inside of us as that seed.  It needs to grow and become fully mature. 

So Jesus tells a story about this transformation that’s about to come, and of course Peter asks him a typical question after Jesus talks about forgiveness.  He said, “Now, wait a minute.  How many times do we have to forgive our brothers and sisters?  Because we’re not used to that.  That’s not in our DNA.  We punish them when they do not do what we ask them to do.  You, God, punish.  Your father, Jesus, punishes people that don’t do what they do.”  He said, “Well, let me tell you a story.”  So it’s about a man obviously who has a debt, and he goes to his master, God, and said, “Please, I can’t pay this back.  I can’t become the person I’m supposed to be in order to please you.  I can’t.  I’ve got a selfish, self-centered mind that has a logical dimension to it that always looks out for self first.”  It’s natural, but when he turns, this man, turns to the image of the Father in this reading, he discovers that there’s a compassion in this God that was never revealed before as fully as it is here.  And he feels that he has just been gifted, but listen to this.  He doesn’t understand it.  He doesn’t take it in.  I’d wonder – I’d love to talk to him after he was forgiven, on his way to see the other person who owed him money.  What do you think the conversation was like?  “God, that guy was stupid.  I just talked him to letting me out of it, and I got out of it.  That was great.  That was a great deal for me, so I got served.  Thank you.  Now, I’m still a taker.  So I’ve got some more money, and now I think I can even get some more than that.”  So greed steps in.  “So I’ll not only get back what I owed somebody else, but I’m going to get some more from somebody else.”  It’s just a typical figure that hasn’t yet been transformed, and so what Jesus is longing for, desiring is to move human beings into a new place of understanding, which is a new organ in your body, in a sense.  It’s the heart.  The heart by nature forgives, understands, has compassion, has empathy.  The mind, by its kind of basic nature, is more logical and practical and self-focused.  They work together wonderfully well, but they need each other to balance each – they need to balance one another.  The heart, that thinks and feels just like the brain does, can override a mind’s selfishness, but how does it work?  It has to work through a transformation that human beings cannot make.  I can’t move the center of my being from my mind to my heart and open up myself to the presence of God there in my heart unless I’m redeemed.  Something shifts inside of me.  And the disciples hadn’t yet been redeemed when they asked these questions. 

I just would love to know the conversations that the disciples had with Jesus in the 40 days that he spent after he died and they were already filled with the Spirit or just about to be filled with the Spirit, however timing it was.  What an amazing transformation, and if we don’t believe in transformation by grace, we can never enter into this new world, because it is not something that we are capable of doing.  It has to be a gift, and the gift is so sweet and so potentially powerful and brings so much peace.  But it’s a gift.  It has to be believed in.  

Father, our ego resists being given a gift when it would rather be the one that creates the thing that it needs to be.  It loves to be the source of its own stuff.  So bless us with this transformative grace that you won for us when you gave yourself over to evil and refused to give in to your strong ego that would want nothing like what you accepted.  Such a strong, beautiful image of who we can become, someone like you, through your gift of self, letting go of all that control.  Awaken us to this great gift to surrender to a grace that enables us to be exactly who we’re meant to be and who we’re called to be, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.