Stop Keeping the Ledger

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Peter asks Jesus a question that sounds generous: “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” But Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” In other words: stop counting. Stop keeping the ledger. And then Jesus tells this story about a man who owes ten thousand talents. In the New Testament, One talent was roughly six thousand denarii, and one denarius was about a day’s wage for an ordinary worker. So ten thousand talents is around sixty million days of wages – an impossible debt, more than a person could repay in many lifetimes. Yet the king forgives all of it. Then this same servant finds someone who owes him one hundred denarii – about one hundred days’ wages – and grabs him by the throat. That second debt was real; it was not nothing. But compared with what he had just been forgiven, it was tiny. And that is Jesus’ point: we forget how much mercy we ourselves are living on.

So the first thing Jesus asks of us is: remember what you have been forgiven. Forgiveness becomes almost impossible when I only stare at what someone else has done to me. But when I stand before the Cross, the perspective changes. I remember my own sins, my own failures, all the times God could have given up on me and did not. Sirach says, “Forgive your neighbour’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.” This is God saying: if you have received mercy, let mercy change you. Christians are not people who have never needed forgiveness. We are people who know exactly how much we need it.

The second thing is: Release the Debt. Forgiveness is not easy. Sometimes you really do want to forgive, but the hurt is still there. You remember what was said. You remember what was done. You can feel the anger rise again even after you thought you had moved on. Forgiveness does not mean pretending the wound was small. It does not mean trusting someone who is still unsafe. And it certainly does not mean saying that evil was acceptable. Forgiveness means I refuse to spend the rest of my life demanding payment from this person in my heart. Sometimes that decision has to be made again tomorrow, and again next week. You may have to pray, “Lord, I want to forgive, but I’m not able to because of the pain in my heart.” That is not hypocrisy. That is honesty. And God can work with an honest heart.

And the third thing is perhaps the hardest: Receive Mercy for Yourself. Sometimes the person we keep locked in the prison is not someone else but it is us. We replay the stupid decision, the relationship we damaged, the sin we confessed years ago, the person we used to be. God may have forgiven us, but we keep reopening the case. St Paul tells us today, “Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” Your past does not get the final claim on you; Christ does. Of course we take responsibility. We confess our sins, make amends where we can, and do penance. But after God says, “I forgive you,” humility means believing Him. There is something strangely prideful about saying, “Yes, Lord, Your mercy is enough for everyone else but not for what I did.” The Cross says otherwise.

Maybe that is the invitation this Sunday: stop keeping the ledger. Remember the mercy you have received. Release the debts you keep carrying. And receive God’s mercy for the person you once were. The unforgiving servant’s tragedy was not simply that he had a debt; it was that he had been given an ocean of mercy and still chose to live as though mercy were scarce. We do not forgive because the hurt was insignificant. We forgive because the mercy of God is greater. And sometimes forgiveness begins with nothing more heroic than this: “Jesus, I am not there yet but I want to be. Help me take the next step.”

Prayer: Lord Jesus, You know the wounds I still carry and the memories I struggle to release. Help me remember how much You have forgiven me. Give me the grace to forgive others, even when it takes time, and the humility to receive Your mercy for myself. Free me from anger, resentment, and shame, and teach my heart to live in the freedom of Your mercy. Amen.

– Homily by Rev Fr Patrick Agbeko