Readings (Year A):
Sirach 27:30–28:7
Psalm 103:1–2, 3–4, 9–10, 11–12
Romans 14:7–9
Matthew 18:21–35
Reflection: God’s grace often leads to the unexpected
What makes a good movie? My husband and I love going to the movie theater, and while we are not film buffs, we enjoy discussing every movie as we walk out, dissecting each scene and character. My husband has an incredible knack for guessing what is going to happen next.
Anytime we walk out of a theater, we can always agree that what makes a movie a good movie is … the unexpected. If we know exactly what is going to happen, scene by scene, the movie can become boring. But when the story takes a turn we did not anticipate—when the person we thought was the villain becomes the hero, when the impossible becomes possible, when the ending is completely different from what we expected—we are often more satisfied. Who could have expected Luke Skywalker to be told, “no, I am your father”? Even people who have not seen Star Wars can quote the line. It is memorable and sticks with us because it shocks the listener.
The same is true of the gospel. Again and again, Jesus does the unexpected. Flips how we view everything around us, upside down. Our relatable friend Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” Peter must think he is already generous, he might even be trying to show off to Jesus a little bit. Seven already sounds pretty charitable.
But Jesus responds with his own shocking line: “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.” In other words: Stop counting!
Now that is unexpected. We most often expect justice when someone has wronged us to mean keeping score. We expect relationships to operate on a balance sheet: You hurt me; I will forgive you once. Maybe twice. But eventually, you owe me. Jesus is telling us here in the passage that the kingdom of God works differently, and not how we expect.
The first reading from Sirach tells us that anger and vengeance are ultimately destructive. If we hold on to resentment, we poison ourselves, while imagining that we are punishing someone else.
Then, the gospel gives us the shocking climax: a servant who has been forgiven an enormous debt refuses to forgive the much smaller debt owed to him. The point is not merely that forgiveness is just a nice virtue. Jesus is revealing something deeper about what we actually need. We often think we need to be vindicated. We need the other person to admit they were wrong. We need an apology. We need justice to be satisfied according to our expectations.
Forgiveness does not say that wrongdoings do not matter. Forgiveness says that they just won’t have the final word. This is where Jesus does something even more unexpected: He tells us that the greatest freedom may come not when the other person changes, but when we allow God to change us, and our own hearts.
Now think again of a great movie. The satisfying ending is often not the ending we predicted at the beginning. The story takes us somewhere we could not have imagined. In the same way, God’s grace often leads us toward a satisfaction we would never have chosen for ourselves. We think we need revenge; God offers freedom. We think we need to win the argument; God offers peace. We think we need the other person to suffer; God offers us a heart that is no longer imprisoned by what they did.
That is the unexpected climax of our Catholic movie: we are saved not because we have perfectly settled every debt, but because God has forgiven the debt we could never repay. So today, perhaps the person we most need to forgive is the very person we least expected to forgive. Perhaps the grace we need to ask for is simply the grace to stop keeping score. When we forgive as Christ forgives, we may discover something truly unexpected.
