24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Sirach 27:30–28:7 · Psalm 103 · Romans 14:7-9 · Matthew 18:21-35
Every team keeps an unwritten set of books. Who stood in for someone last time, who took on the thankless job, who was still answering at eleven at night. The balance is recorded nowhere, and still everyone could name it from memory.
The entries are one-sided. You see your own effort from the inside and the other person's from the outside. In my books it says what it cost me, what the team got out of it, and what I am owed for it. There are as many accounts as there are people in the team, and no two of them agree.
The account is rarely opened. And when it is, it is never about the point at hand but about the balance as a whole. Then the summer two years ago comes into it, and the business with the stand-in.
Why keep it at all? It secures a claim for the day you might need it. It saves you from deciding each time how generous you want to be. And it tells you where you stand.
In this Sunday's gospel Peter asks how often he has to forgive his brother. Seven times? That is meant generously, more than anyone would ask for, and it is still a number. He wants to know where the line is. The answer names no higher line. The German lectionary reads it as seventy times seven, the English as seventy-seven; either way it is a figure that has stopped being one. What it says is: stop counting.
Then Jesus tells a parable. A servant owes the king ten thousand talents. The sum is absurd, more money than was in circulation in that part of the world. The king cancels the whole of it. Afterwards the same man meets a colleague who owes him a hundred denarii, a few months' wages. Because the man cannot pay, he has him thrown into prison.
The servant is in the right. A hundred denarii are a hundred denarii, his claim stands, and nobody in the parable disputes it. He keeps two accounts: on one, what was cancelled for him; on the other, what he is owed.
None of us lives for himself, Paul writes in the second reading, and none of us dies for himself; whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. I had been missing the second half. Without it you are left with a sentence about belonging together; with it, it gets less comfortable. Nobody is his own master, and so nobody is the master of anyone else. Whoever keeps books on another person makes himself into the one that person has to answer to. Nobody appointed him to that, except himself.
So the reckoning is not where the division starts, it is how the division shows. The servant does not cut the world in two, he treats it as though it had been cut long ago.
The first reading makes nothing pleasant of this. Wrath and anger are hateful things, Ben Sira writes, and the sinner holds on to them tight; whoever takes revenge will find the Lord taking revenge on him. How can a man nurse anger against another and then look to the Lord for healing? That is a threat, and meant as one.
The parable in the gospel ends the same way. The other servants see what has happened and tell the king. He withdraws the cancellation and hands the man over to the torturers. He is not imposing anything foreign on him; he is enforcing the measure the man chose for himself. Anyone who settles accounts has to expect accounts to be settled with him.
The psalm is the only text this Sunday that demands nothing and threatens nothing. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our debts from us. Nothing is settled there and nothing is balanced out. It is carried away, and so far away that nobody can go and look it up.
This is a reading aid, not a second full version. Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.