Peter does the arithmetic out loud. Seven times, he offers, and he thinks he's being generous. Jesus answers with a number that ends the counting, then tells a story about a man who owed roughly six hundred thousand times what he owed. Ben Sira had already made the same argument two centuries earlier in a Jerusalem classroom, and the Psalm supplies the line Israel had been singing since Sinai. What follows runs through all four readings, with Chrysostom, Jerome, Origen, Augustine, and the Catechism on where the Fathers disagree about seventy times seven and why each lands in the same place.
The Readings
First Reading: Sirach 27:30—28:7
Anger and wrath, these also are abominations, and the sinful man will possess them.
He that takes vengeance will suffer vengeance from the Lord, and he will firmly establish his sins. Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does a man harbor anger against another, and yet seek for healing from the Lord? Does he have no mercy toward a man like himself, and yet pray for his own sins? If he himself, being flesh, maintains wrath, who will make expiation for his sins? Remember the end of your life, and cease from enmity, remember destruction and death, and be true to the commandments. Remember the commandments, and do not be angry with your neighbor; remember the covenant of the Most High, and overlook ignorance.
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12
Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.
He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger for ever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
Second Reading: Romans 14:7-9
None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.
Gospel: Matthew 18:21-35
Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.
"Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began the reckoning, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents; and as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, 'Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.' And out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But that same servant, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat he said, 'Pay what you owe.' So his fellow servant fell down and besought him, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you.' He refused and went and put him in prison till he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his lord delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."
Scriptural Analysis
Ben Sira On The Man Who Holds His Anger
The first reading comes from a classroom. Ben Sira taught wisdom in Jerusalem sometime between about 196 and 175 BC, and his grandson carried the Hebrew scroll to Egypt and translated it into Greek, telling us in his prologue that he arrived in the thirty-eighth year of Euergetes, which lands us in 132 BC.[1] For centuries the Hebrew behind that Greek was lost. Then fragments turned up in the Cairo Geniza at the end of the nineteenth century, and a scroll of chapters 39 to 44 came out of Masada, so we can now sometimes read over the translator's shoulder. None of this is decoration for a homily, but it's worth a sentence from the ambo, because Sirach is a deuterocanonical book. Trent reaffirmed the Church’s answer to that question in 1546, listing Ecclesiasticus among the canonical books. The practical result is that this passage is one your congregation almost certainly has never heard preached.
Notice the verb. The Lectionary your people will hear reads "the sinner hugs them tight," while the RSVCE gives "the sinful man will possess them." Both translations reach for the same picture: not a man losing his temper, but a man holding on to something. Wrath here is property. It gets held, stored, carried around, and (this is the sting) it belongs to its owner in a way that eventually defines him. Ben Sira's whole argument depends on that image, because you cannot ask a man to stop feeling an injury, and Ben Sira doesn't. He asks him to put down what he's been carrying.
The moral tradition has stayed close to this distinction. The Catechism defines anger as a desire for revenge, then immediately quotes St. Thomas to separate the vengeance that seeks to do evil to someone who ought to be punished, which is illicit, from the restitution imposed "to correct vices and maintain justice," which is praiseworthy.[2] So the sage and the schoolman agree: the sin isn't the recognition that you have been wronged. A deacon or priest preaching this ought to say that out loud clearly, because half the people listening have been told at some point that a Christian isn't supposed to notice injury, and that counsel has done real damage in marriages and in families where someone was genuinely harmed.
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