24th Sunday 2026
Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18: 21-35
It’s amazing, really. Some weeks, it is a struggle to find anything in the Readings which catches my attention as an aid to constructing a homily: on other occasions, there is enough for three homilies. Don’t worry! You are only going to be afflicted with one.
Today’s First Reading, from the Book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, amounts to an examination of conscience. Do you, do I, give way to “anger and wrath”? Do you NURSE anger, allowing it to fester? Do you give way to outbursts of anger, causing distress particularly to the people nearest to you?
Sirach insists, as does Our Lord in today’s Gospel, that, if you wish to be forgiven your anger and your other sins, you must forgive others:
“Does one person harbour anger against another, and yet seek for healing from the Lord? Does he have no mercy for someone like himself, and yet pray concerning his own sins?”
I have vague memories, from Primary School, of reading in class “The Water Babies” by Charles Kingsley which, if I remember correctly, made a similar point. I don’t imagine that anyone reads it now—no great loss, if they don’t—but I seem to recall a character in it named Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by who, somehow, is able to ensure that children who bear grudges, and who won’t restore relations with someone who has upset them, receive their comeuppance.
In the Gospels, not least today’s, Jesus insists on this point with which Sirach (and, perhaps, Charles Kingsley,) has made us familiar, by reminding us how much we have been forgiven by God. That divine forgiveness entails the total self-surrender of God to us, taking our human nature, undergoing intense suffering, accepting a dreadful death, to wipe out the debt owed to God by the human race.
We would never be able to pay that debt, which is symbolised by the ten thousand talents owed by the First Servant in the parable. That is a vast sum, amounting to billions of pounds in today’s money, completely dwarfing the hundred denarii owed to him. It is generally considered that a denarius represented a day’s wage for a labourer, so this wasn’t a tiny sum, but a drop in the ocean compared to the unimaginable amount cancelled for Servant Number One. We have been forgiven a vast amount by God; hence we have an unarguable duty to forgive our neighbour.
This plays out almost literally today in the matter of international debt. Wealthy nations and multi-national companies have further enriched themselves by loaning money at crippling rates of interest to developing countries. The latter cannot begin to repay the capital, because they are being further impoverished by their struggle each year to pay the interest.
In 2005, there as a massive campaign in this country to cancel the debt owed by poorer countries, and it achieved considerable success. Since then, as the citizens of even wealthy countries have begun to feel the pinch, and as a selfish brand of nationalism has mushroomed throughout the western world, the pressure to cancel international debt has waned; yet it still exists. Perhaps you and I, aware of our deep indebtedness to God, should pay more attention to it. Googling “International Debt Campaign” tends to entangle us in a whole web of references, as debt has become a huge problem for individuals in this country, but the whole question deserves to be studied.
Every day we pray, perhaps several times, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. This is sometimes translated “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are in debt to us”. How do you and I respond?
