There is a story going around about a man who was trying to save a snake. A man saw a snake being burned to death and decided to take it out of the fire. When he did, the snake bit him. The bite caused excruciating pain, the man dropped the snake, and the reptile fell right back into the fire. The man tried to pull it out again, and again the snake bit him.
Someone who was watching approached the man and said: “Don’t you understand that every time you try to get the snake out of the fire, it’s going to bite you?”
The man replied: “The nature of the snake is to bite, but that’s not gonna change my nature, which is to help.”
With the help of a metal pole, the man took the snake out of the fire and saved its life.
The thing about human nature is, it’s fallen. How we are supposed to act and how we do act are often different things entirely. God created us in His image. More often than not, we instead think of people in the image of the snake. The devil is a liar, a thief, a sadist, and so forth. One of the common phrases today to excuse our behavior is often: “it’s just how God made me.”
No, it’s just how we have chosen to behave. So what do we do when someone continually hurts us? When they offend us by their words or their actions? Often we block them and remove them from our lives. Instead of helping them back to their feet when they fall again, we say, well, that snake is in the fire also. He’ll either burn or get out. His fault, not mine. “I’m not gonna get hurt to try and save them.”
Jesus in the Gospel today calls us to a much harder attitude, one that truly is difficult. He says we are to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven times. To the people listening, seven had considerable significance. They wouldn’t have heard, “forgive them 490 times.” They would have understood Jesus as saying, “forgiveness has no limits.”
All of those negative things that we often think of are not of God. God is everything good. So holding a grudge, jealousy, envy, wrath, and apathy are things of the devil. Something that can only exist apart from God, who has none of that in Him. God forgives the moment we repent; we go to confession to restore our relationship with His Body, the Church, and receive forgiveness directly from Jesus in the Sacrament.
Like the man in the parable, often when we deal with someone who has hurt us, we forget how many times God has forgiven us for similar behavior. The other thing to note is that the value owed to the King was far greater than the small amount the other servant owed him. How much more remarkable is the offense we have given to Him who is all holy than the small injuries we often bristle over from others?
A small phrase that I think is fascinating and often overlooked in today’s readings is “and overlook faults.” The world tells us to worry more about ourselves and less about others. Our focus should be on our success, health, and mental health. Those are important, and self-loathing is far from what God has in store for us. This statement alone should open our eyes: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight. The vengeful will suffer the LORD’s vengeance, for he remembers their sins in detail.” Forgive your neighbor’s injustice. Forgive as we forgive.
God made us in His image. He tasked us to forgive as He forgives, not as our flesh would have us do. The Psalm reminds us of the qualities that we should be nurturing in ourselves. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion. If I place my name there, I can see how I am doing. At this moment, with this person, am I kind and merciful? Am I slow to anger? Am I rich in compassion?
As we move closer to the elections and politics seem to take on a life of their own, how much do we need to overlook each other’s faults?
A reflection on the readings for Sunday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time: September 13, 2020.