9-13-26 24th Sunday Ordinary Time
In the gospel today Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive his brother when he sins against him? This is a difficult question particularly if the “brother” is repeatedly testing us. We can become very angry, and emotionally paralyzed when we have been wronged many times, and we are unable to forgive. We can feel we are justified in wanting revenge and incapable of forgiving the other person. As it says in the first reading this Sunday, “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.” (Sirach 27:30). Some actions done to us may be small things and we can forgive them easily. Like when a friend bumps into us while we're carrying a cup of coffee and we spill the coffee over our clothes. Clothes can be washed and dried and cleaned easily. But when someone seriously wrongs us, repeatedly, our capacity for forgiving may be tested to its limit. We might be tempted to say, “enough is enough.” It is then that we need something outside of ourselves, to begin to forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t mean we don’t hold people accountable for their actions and expect them to change. It means we see the goodness in the other and we want them to see it also. There was a tribe in Africa that when someone did wrong, they would put the person in the middle of circle, and everyone would surround the person and repeat all the good things that they have ever done and encourage the individual to change. Then, they would ritually accept the individual back into the community with renewed hope and trust that the person would change. At times the giving of forgiveness requires grace and trust in our Lord’s capacity to empower us to be able to forgive one more time. “In 2025 a woman stood in an El Paso courtroom and asked permission to cross the floor. Her name was Yolanda Tinajero. She was seventy-one years old. On the other side of that courtroom stood a young man in an orange-and-white jail uniform, his wrists shackled, a ballistic vest strapped around his body. His name was Patrick Crusius. Six years earlier, on an August morning in 2019, Crusius had walked into a Walmart in El Paso carrying a rifle. Before it was over, twenty-three people were dead and twenty-two others wounded. One of the dead was Yolanda’s brother, Arturo Benavides, a sixty-year-old husband, uncle and beloved member of a large extended family. Now he was gone. And six years later, his sister was sitting only a few yards from the man who had killed him. There are distances measured in feet. There are distances measured in miles. And then there are distances no ruler can measure at all. The distance between those two people in that El Paso courtroom was one of them. On April 22, 2025, Yolanda Tinajero faced Patrick Crusius, the man who had murdered her brother, and told him something almost unimaginable. She forgave him. Then she said to the judge, she wished she could hug Patrick. Judge Sam Medrano asked whether embracing this man would bring her peace and comfort. She said it would. And so, the judge allowed it. Yolanda began walking across the courtroom toward the man who had taken her brother’s life. Nothing about what followed erased accountability. Crusius would remain imprisoned. Forgiveness would not restore Arturo to his family or undo a single second of that terrible day. But still she crossed the room. When she reached Crusius, she put her arms around him. He put his arms around her. The judge turned away and wiped tears from his eyes. Others in the courtroom wept. Then another woman came forward. Adriana Zandri had lost her husband, Ivan Manzano, in the same attack. She too asked permission to approach Crusius. She too crossed the courtroom and embraced him.”1 Perhaps this story of forgiveness is uncharacteristic of many situations which we might face, but it does call us to think of the times when we count up the injustices that we have experienced from other people and the times we might have said to ourselves “enough is enough.” Jesus’ statement to Peter in the gospel of “70 times 7” is too much to bear sometimes. This statement by Jesus means we are to forgive an infinite number of times. To put it into numerical figures it would be like 70 to the 7th power which equals: 823,543,000,000. Such forgiveness may look like it is impossible for us to do. And we would be right, that by ourselves that amount of forgiveness seems impossible for us. Except Jesus understands our limitations and that is why he said, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” (Matt 19:26) It is through God’s grace that we can be capable of great expressions of forgiveness. For when we reach that point of feeling enough is enough, and we cannot forgive another time, it is then we have only to look at the cross of Jesus Christ to find the strength to forgive one more time. For in that symbol of the cross we see the greatness and hugeness of God's forgiveness for our sins. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”(John3:17) St. Paul experienced this saving activity of God in his own conversion and thus was able to say later in his letter to the Corinthians in explaining Jesus’ mission “…..namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19). This message of reconciliation and forgiveness is the message Christ entrusted to his church (i.e., the people of God) that they might bear witness to the level of God forgiveness which can never be counted up as “enough is enough.” And thus, Paul came to this conclusion, concerning our mission of reconciliation “So, we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, to be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:20). In the story above involving, Yolanda Tinajero and the criminal Patrick Crusius, she was not seeking to change the parameters of the justice system that Patrick would receive for his crime. She was seeking, through her hug, an expression of forgiveness on her part for Patrick. That expression of forgiveness touched not only Patrick, but everyone else, including the judge. Perhaps that day many in that courtroom went home with a new understanding of Jesus' commandment to forgive as we have been forgiven by God. Maybe when hurts come into our lives and the call for forgiveness is challenging us to say, “enough is enough,” perhaps, we can remember the opening lines of psalm 95: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts. (Psalm 95:1-2). And then maybe the lines from the Responsorial Psalm this Sunday, which speaks of God’s compassion for us, can echo in our hearts and lead us to forgiveness:
“As far as the east is from the west so far has, he put our transgressions from us
