Only God Forgives Like This

Micah ends his book by asking a question that happens to be his own name. Micah is short for Micaiah, “who is like Yahweh?” So when the prophet writes, “Who is a God like thee, pardoning iniquity,” he is signing his work. He has spent seven chapters cataloging judges who take bribes and prophets who preach for money. Then he stops accusing and starts adoring. And what draws the adoration is not God’s power over the nations. It is his willingness to forgive them.

Sit with that a second, because it should unsettle us. Micah is not identifying mercy as one of God’s traits. He is identifying it as the thing that makes God incomparable, the attribute no rival deity can counterfeit. Centuries later, the Pharisees would grant him the point without meaning to: “No man can forgive sins, but God alone” (Mark 2:7). They were right about the theology and wrong about the man standing in front of them. Today the Church gives us Saint Lawrence of Brindisi, a Capuchin who read this text in Hebrew and preached it to rabbis who assumed he was one of them. And in the Gospel, the God who alone can drown your sins stretches out his hand toward a room of ordinary people and calls them mother and brother.

Shepherd and flock of sheep. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 475832591.

The Readings

First Reading: Micah 7:14–15, 18–20

Shepherd thy people with thy staff, the flock of thy inheritance, who dwell alone in a forest in the midst of a garden land; let them feed in Bashan and Gilead as in the days of old. As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt I will show them marvelous things.

Who is a God like thee, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger for ever because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion upon us, he will tread our iniquities under foot. Thou wilt cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. Thou wilt show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as thou hast sworn to our fathers from the days of old.

Gospel: Matthew 12:46–50

While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood outside, asking to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and your brethren are standing outside, asking to speak to you.” But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brethren! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Scriptural Analysis

Micah prophesied in the eighth century before Christ, a contemporary of Isaiah, watching Assyria swallow the northern kingdom and press down on Judah. Today’s reading is how his book ends, and it ends in prayer. “Shepherd thy people with thy staff, the flock of thy inheritance.” The Navarre commentary catches what the petition is really asking: that the Lord himself be the one and only shepherd of his people, the way Micah had already promised in chapter 5, and that the flock occupy the whole land again.[1] Israel had been badly shepherded by the men in charge. The prayer goes over their heads.

Geography carries some weight here. Bashan and Gilead sat on the eastern banks and highlands of the Jordan, and they were famous for rich pasture.[2] Assyria had stripped them away by Micah’s day. Asking to feed there “as in the days of old” is asking for the return of something forfeited by sin. And the Lord’s answer reaches back further still: “As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt I will show them marvelous things.” The exodus becomes the pattern for every rescue God will ever work.

Saint Augustine read that verse and saw the font. Our sins are overwhelmed and extinguished in baptism, he wrote, the way the Egyptians were drowned in the sea.[3] Saint Basil the Great made the same connection from the other direction, calling the grace of baptism a flood, water that rises until everything filthy beneath it disappears, and pointing to Micah’s promise that God will cast our iniquities into the bottom of the sea.[4] The Fathers were not being clever. Micah put an exodus and a drowning in the same short passage, and the Church has been washing people in that water ever since.

Then comes verse 18, and the register changes. “Who is a God like thee, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance?” The Navarre commentators note that these last three verses turn liturgical, a hymn celebrating the Lord’s steadfast love, and that the believer’s only possible response to a God who pardons sin and keeps his promises is gratitude and awe.[5] Words that have been circling through the whole book- remnant, inheritance, faithfulness- get gathered up one last time. And they point forward. Zechariah will echo this hope in the Benedictus when he blesses the God of Israel “for he has visited and redeemed his people” and kept what he “spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old” (Luke 1:68–70).[6] Micah’s closing hymn and Zechariah’s opening one are the same prayer, separated by seven hundred years of waiting.

Saint John Chrysostom found the sharpest edge in this verse, and he found it by arguing with the Pharisees. When Jesus forgave the paralytic, his critics objected that no one can forgive sins except God alone. Chrysostom points out that they wrote the rule themselves, and then Christ trapped them with it. If pardon belongs to God alone, and Micah says exactly that when he names God’s special attribute as “pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression,” then a man who forgives sins is claiming equality with God.[7] Micah 7:18 is not merely comforting. It is a test of divinity, and only one man in history has ever passed it.

Saint Ambrose put the verse to a different use, pastoral rather than polemical. When you are in trouble, he says, in bodily pain or grief or some other struggle, the devil comes around asking where your God is now. Ambrose’s answer is Micah’s question thrown back: who is a God like this one, pardoning iniquity?[8] The verse works as armor.

Matthew places today’s Gospel at the end of a long stretch of rejection. The scribes and Pharisees have just demanded a sign, and Jesus has called them an evil and unfaithful generation, language that deliberately recalls the Israelites in the desert who saw miracle after miracle and still refused to believe (Deuteronomy 1:35; 32:5).[9] Against that backdrop, his mother and his brethren arrive.

The word “brethren” needs handling, because it has been used against the Church for centuries. Hebrew had no separate word for cousin, and the Greek Old Testament uses adelphos, brother, for relationships well beyond blood brotherhood: a cousin in 1 Chronicles 23:21–22, an uncle in Genesis 13:8, men bound by covenant in 2 Samuel 1:26.[10] Saint Jerome laid out the same distinction long before, listing four ways Scripture calls men brothers: by nature, by nation, by kinship, and by affection, and showing that only kinship fits this scene.[11] The internal evidence agrees with him. Two of the men named as Christ’s brothers in Matthew 13:55, James and Joseph, turn up in Matthew 27:56 as the sons of a different Mary. And from the cross Jesus hands his mother into the care of John, which no one does when there are natural brothers to take her in (John 19:25–27).[12] The Catechism keeps this reading (CCC 500).

Now the harder question, the one that makes people wince. Jesus hears that his mother is outside and answers, “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?” Chrysostom refuses to read that as a rebuke. Had Christ wanted to disown his mother, he would have done it when his enemies threw his birth in his teeth, and he never did.[13] Saint Hilary of Poitiers adds the decisive fact: a man who arranged his mother’s care while dying cannot be accused of thinking little of her.[14] What Jesus is doing is naming the ground of belonging. “Whoever does the will of my heavenly Father” nearly repeats what he said back in the Sermon on the Mount about who actually enters the kingdom (Matthew 7:21). His new family is made of disciples.

And that expansion honors Mary rather than sidelining her. She meets the standard he just set, and met it first. She is the one who said “let it be done to me according to thy word” and who was called blessed because she believed (Luke 1:38, 45). So she is his mother twice over, by nature and by discipleship, and in the second family she is the preeminent member.[15]

Then Jesus stretches out his hand. Saint Gregory the Great noticed something most readers skim past: Christ names three relations, brother, sister, and mother, and Gregory asks how a man could possibly become Christ’s mother. His answer is that one becomes Christ’s brother by believing and Christ’s mother by preaching, since whoever pours Christ into the heart of a hearer begets the Lord in that soul.[16] Belief makes you kin. Handing the faith on makes you a mother.

Put the two readings together. Micah begs God to shepherd a flock that has forfeited its inheritance, and stakes everything on an oath sworn to Abraham. Matthew shows the Shepherd standing in a house, extending his hand, enlarging the family past the boundaries of blood. Membership comes down to one requirement: doing the will of God.[17] The remnant turned out to be larger than Micah could have guessed.

Daily Application

Start where Micah starts, with astonishment. If God’s mercy has stopped astonishing you, the remedy is usually specific rather than vague. Go name a sin out loud to a priest. Not a category, not “I’ve been impatient lately,” but the actual thing you did on the actual Tuesday. Micah’s God does not tread abstractions underfoot. He drowns real sins in real water, and you feel the weight leave only when you have handed over something that had weight. Augustine and Basil both read this passage as baptismal, and the sacrament that keeps applying that flood to a baptized man’s life is confession.

Then take the harder half. Micah says God “does not retain his anger for ever,” and we ask to be forgiven as we forgive every time we pray the Our Father. Retained anger is the most respectable sin most of us commit, because it comes with a case file. We can name exactly what they did, when, and why we are entitled to keep it on the shelf. God has a far better case file on us, and he throws it in the ocean. Origen made the connection between God’s forgiving and our giving, reading the same verse alongside John the Baptist telling the crowds that whoever has two tunics should share with the man who has none.[18] What God does with your sins sets the standard for what you do with someone else’s. If a name surfaced while you were reading, you already know what today asks. Forgiveness is a decision to stop charging the debt, renewed as often as the memory comes back.

And then the family question, which is where this Gospel gets personal for most people. Plenty of Catholics are the only believer at their table. A daughter has stopped going to Mass. A brother makes jokes about it at Thanksgiving. Christ’s words in Capernaum are not permission to give up on those people; they are the promise that your obedience to the Father has already made you kin to him and to everyone else who is trying. That bond runs deeper than the one you were born into. So you are not alone at that table, even when you are the only one who genuflects.

Careful, though, that the idea stays concrete. The Church as the family of Jesus can slide into vagueness and sentiment if we forget that the family is defined by doing God’s will, and that God’s will is known from Scripture and from the example of Christ.[19] Real families have conflicts and crises, and so does this one. Belonging is proved on the days it costs something.

Saint Lawrence of Brindisi lived what Gregory the Great described. He learned Hebrew well enough to preach to the Jews of Italy at the request of Pope Clement VIII, and well enough that the rabbis assumed he was a convert from Judaism. Eleven of the fifteen volumes of his collected works are sermons, and they move through Scripture almost line by line. That is a man begetting Christ in other hearts. You don’t need his eight languages. You need his two habits: know the text, and see the person in front of you.

So read Micah 7:18–20 again tonight, slowly, and let the question land. Who is a God like this? Then go be somebody’s mother in the faith.

Notes