24th Sunday Year A

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I have heard it said many times that we have lost our sense of sin in the Church. We don’t talk about it anymore but then I did a little bit of research and had a think about the Mass something that we are so familiar with. We have so many references to sin but also our need for God’s grace all the way through the Mass. At the beginning of the Mass we are asked to remember where we have gone wrong throughout the week. We look at it again in the Our Father, the Eucharistic prayer the Lamb of God.

And the reason I think that the reason why we focus on it so much is because the Church realises that it is such a difficult thing to do and to acknowledge. We all go into justification mode when it comes to realising that we must forgive and acknowledge our own faults. Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive my brother. He asks at least 7 times and Jesus replies not 7 times but 77 times. Seven being the perfect number Jesus says to him that you need to carry on forgiving all the time.

So how hard is it to forgive? In a word: very. I am sure that you are aware that today is the 11th September and two years ago this day we were witnessing the horrific attack on the Twin towers in America. One could argue quite successfully that this is an unforgivable crime against the innocent and there have been other such crimes in our history of crimes against the innocent. And yes sometimes it is hard to forgive. 

I remember once that I asked people to pray for Bin Larden. And this is very challenging. We should pray for all sinners after all we pray for each other. Prayer is at the heart of forgiveness and over comes our anger and purifies our heart. 

In one way or another every one of us sitting here are shaped by what happened 10 years ago As St Paul tells us that the “ Life or death of each one of us has an influence on each other” Our thoughts and our attitude are shaped by those events in New York. And yet these people who did this crime are our brothers they are children of God. Yes what they did was horrific but we should never lose sight of God’s love and compassion.

And this is the challenge we are set by today’s Gospel to forgive but how? I remember a few weeks ago I challenged people to think that we should pray for Bin laden when we discovered that he had died. Someone told me that this news had got about the town and that some people were outraged that we should have the audacity to pray for such a man. GOOD. This is exactly the challenge of the Gospel. This is what Christ means. IF we find it difficult to forgive and yes we do we should ask the Lord for help. Offer that person over to him. Let him take the strain ask God for help in this impossible task.


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