Matthew 18:21-35
Seventy-seven Times?
by Rev. Steven G. Oetjen
Reprinted with permission of "The Arlington Catholic Herald"

Home Page
To Sunday Gospel Reflections Index

Matthew wrote to show that Christ was the
Messiah and fulfilled the Jewish prophecies.

Then Peter approached Jesus and asked him, "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him?  As many as seven times?"  Jesus answered, "I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.  That is why the kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who decided to settle accounts with his servants.  When he began the accounting, a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.  Since he had no way of paying it back, his master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his property, in payment of the debt.  At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.' 

The Incarnate Lord has just taught his disciples how to deal with the kind of serious sin that causes grave harm to Christian community.  This is what we heard in last week's Gospel (Mt 18:15-20).  First, Christ said, approach the offender yourself.  The, bring one or two others along.  If needed, get the authority of the church involved.  After all this, if the offender is still not willing to reform and repair the scandal, then the church may need to resort to excommunication or some other censure - that is, to cast the offender out for his own good and for the good of the whole community.  Each of these steps provides an opportunity for him to repent, and our help is always that he will repent, amend his ways, and repair the damage he caused.

After hearing this important teaching on addressing sin and scandal, Peter's mind naturally turn to the need for forgiveness.  In this Sunday's passage, Peter proposes something generous, maybe even excessive: "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive?  As many as seen tines?"  Surely our mercy cannot extend that far, can it?  I wonder if Peter was trying to overshoot the correct answer, expecting Our Lord to tell him, "No, five times.  But you are very generous to propose seven, Peter."  Our Lord doesn't say that, however.  He says, "I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times."

Now, we might ask why Christ says to forgive seventy-seven times, rather than seventy-six or seventy-eight or one hundred times.  St. Augustine observes that there is more than meets the eye in this "seventy-seven."  It's not meant to set a limit at an arbitrary number; the number itself has a deeper significance - the number, he says, refers to "a great mystery, a wonderful sacrament."  St. Augustine noticed that this number has a particular connection to the sacrament of baptism, and you see this by looking at the genealogy of Jesus as presented in Luke's Gospel.  Both Matthew and Luke include a genealogy of the Christ in their Gospels, but they do so differently.  Matthew begins the genealogy with Abraham and culminates with Christ, while Luke begins with Christ and traces the line backward, not stopping at Abraham but going all the way back to Adam.  Furthermore, Matthew's Gospel begins with the genealogy, but Luke waits until chapter three to present the genealogy, right after the baptism of the Lord in the Jordan River.

Here's where St. Augustine sees the connection to our puzzling question about "seventy-seven times."  Since Luke traces the genealogy all the way back to Adam, he covers a greater number of generations more than Matthew does.  How many?  You guessed it: seventy-seven generations.  After the baptism of the Lord, Luke wants to remind us of all those generations of sinners going back to Adam, the first sinner.  Just as no generation is passed over; but all seventy-seven are named, so too there is no kind of sin that is passed over or excluded from the forgiveness that Christ offers us in baptism.  The all-holy and innocent Christ descended into the waters of the Jordan so that we sinners could be washed by the waters of baptism and thereby receive the total remission of our sins.

When Christ, then, teaches us how often we are o forgive one another; he wants us to recall how God has forgiven us.  The "seventy-seven," with a little help from St. Augustine, should remind us of the vast and unbounded mercy we have received from God through Christian baptism.  We encounter this same mercy when we are absolved in the sacrament of confession, because there we are restored to the baptismal grace that we had lost or diminished by sin.  That mercy is meant to flow through us, transforming us, transforming us along the way, and to affect the way we extend forgiveness to others.

This is reinforced by the parable that follows.  A servant is forgiven an incomprehensibly large debt and, moments later, proceeds to throttle his fellow servant who owes him much less.  Jesus' parable shows us how absurd it is to receive such great mercy and not to be transformed by it.  When we struggle to forgive our brother from the heart, have we simply forgotten what vast mercy God has shown to us?