Compassion, Love, and Mercy
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Scripture Readings
Let me share with you two brief passages from the book of Genesis that form a background for today’s gospel reading. The first is Genesis 4:13-15. “Cain said to the Lord: ‘My punishment is too great to bear. Look, you have banished me from the land. I must avoid you and be a constant wanderer on the earth. Anyone may kill me on sight.’ ‘Not so!’ the Lord said to him. ‘If anyone kills Cain, Cain shall be avenged seven times.’” Then, a few verses later, we hear from Lamech, Cain’s third great-grandson, “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; wives of Lamech, listen to my utterance: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for bruising me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech is seventy-seven times.” [Genesis 4:23-24]
To understand the significance of this text and the gospel passage that echoes it, we need to know that, for the Hebrews, seven was the number that signified fullness or completeness. We find the number seven used continually throughout the Hebrew Bible in this sense, starting with the seven days of creation. But the special role of the number seven was common in the Mideast, and very likely came from ancient Sumerian mathematics. Even today, seven has special significance, even as just a “lucky” number.
In today’s gospel, Peter asks Jesus about forgiveness. It’s a logical follow-up to last week’s discussion about fraternal correction. Peter asks whether he should forgive that brother who wronged him seven—that is, the fullness or completeness of—times. Using the same figure the Book of Genesis used to illustrate the limitless vengeance that was Lamech’s boast, Jesus taught limitless forgiveness—seventy-seven times.
Today’s gospel is a gospel of hyperbole, as Jesus uses extreme examples to show not only the limitless forgiveness expected of Jesus’s followers but, more especially, the limitless forgiveness of his Heavenly Father. Not only does he ask for a kind of forgiveness that goes beyond fullness, but he also provides an illustration that takes the concept to the extreme. In the parable, the king forgives his servant of a debt of ten thousand talents. Our translation renders it as a “huge amount.” A talent represented six thousand days’ wages for an unskilled laborer, or approximately $500,000 to $750,000. For ten thousand talents, the debt would have been between five and eight-and-a-half billion dollars in 2026. We might imagine that when Jesus mentioned that sum, his audience would have gasped. Yet, in the story, the king wrote off the debt.
The debt that the servant was owed was about a hundred days’ wages—a sum in five figures, possibly about fifteen thousand 2026 dollars. That seems like a tidy sum until we calculate that the servant’s own debt was 600,000 times greater. There are two lessons that we need to take from this parable. The first concerns the nature of forgiveness. Perhaps we’ve considered the steward’s behavior toward his fellow servant as mean and ungrateful. Yes, but that’s only part of the lesson Jesus is teaching. Jesus highlights the king’s attitude: gut-level compassion, in Greek, σπλαγχνίζομαι (splanchnizomai). We’ve seen this word before, describing how Jesus was moved with pity or compassion for others. In the story, the servant’s fault lay not just in the fact that he failed to appreciate what was done for him, but it was even more so because he lacked the compassion that was shown to him.
I said there were two lessons, and that was the first. The second lesson is more radical and profound. The question Peter posed wasn’t about money owed, but about the forgiveness of a wrong done to us. Before we start meting out punishment to others, we need to assess the forgiveness that has always been ours in God’s kingdom, for evidently, in the story, God is the king and we are the servants. God’s attitude toward us is always compassion, taking pity on us. God’s love for us—in Hebrew, חֶסֶד (ḥesed)—is the endless love a mother has for her child. God’s gift to us is his love and mercy, forgiving the unrepayable debt we owe, even for the gift of life. As in the story, when we fail to forgive one another, it is because we’ve refused to pass on the love and mercy that we’ve so liberally received from God, and we’ve refused to exercise our calling to the ministry of reconciliation that comes with our baptismal commitment. We can rightly say that failures in compassion are, in turn, failures in gratitude.
What about the ending of the parable? We’ve been saying all along that God doesn’t punish and that punishment is not just uncalled-for, but it’s damaging and produces the opposite results from what it’s supposedly being used for. Yet the king turns the uncompassionate servant over to the torturers. This seems like a contradiction, but only if we consider that prison and torture are external realities. Once we realize that these are internal conditions, we see the truth of the matter. Anger, resentment, and refusal of forgiveness imprison the people themselves, and rancor is a poison they themselves take, hoping others will suffer and die. The torturers the king handed the servant over to wear the servant’s own face.
The Scriptures of the last few weeks have led us to this high point, where we’re asked to accept that Jesus’s “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” is neither exclusive to Jesus nor optional. Receiving the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead means receiving the Spirit of חֶסֶד (ḥesed)—compassionate love and mercy—from the Father for the sake of others. God’s love and mercy aren’t confined to those worthy of it. On the contrary—none of us are worthy. Nor can our compassionate love and mercy—our forgiveness—be confined to those we deem worthy of it. God’s forgiveness has no limits and therefore neither can ours.
Think of those who have most offended, wronged, and hurt you. Who’s on that list—individuals or institutions? Which of these stands outside of your forgiveness, your compassion? These are the very ones who keep you locked in your prison of resentment and serve as excuses for your self-punishment. In his compassion, God has let us go and set us free. Might it not be the time for us to show that very same compassion to others—worthy or not—that God continues to show us? Might it not be the time to forgive our brothers and sisters from the heart?
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