Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time
September 11, 2005


Do you know the three truths about being in the doghouse?

I sometimes hear couples speaking about the less than stunning times in their relationship. One of the metaphors they use to describe this is ‘being in the doghouse.” If you know that metaphor, and/or if you’ve ever ‘been in the doghouse’ in a relationship, then perhaps you also have come to know some of the truths about the doghouse. The first truth is that once you are there, you are stuck there until the other lets you out. Once you have hurt another and are in need of forgiveness, you cannot buy your way out, connive your way out, beg, borrow or steal your way out. You can try chocolates, roses, games of golf, good dinners. They won’t work. You cannot ‘take forgiveness’ from another, nor can you pay for it. Forgiveness – being let out of the doghouse – is something that can only be received. Do you know that truth, deeply in your bones?

Jesus, to make sure that we ‘get that’- to make sure we understand that truth – tells a little story. A man was brought before the king. (King = God in almost all of Jesus’ stories. It is said he owed a HUGE amount. Literally 10,000 talents. Here is the math. 1 denarii = one day’s wage. 1 Talent = 6,000 denarii. So, if the debt is 10,000 talents, that’s 60 million days wages. The man who owed it would have to work 7 days a week for the next 164,383.56 years to pay it off… You can’t buy forgiveness! It just can’t be done! But, it can be received. And so the king writes off the debt, and the man is set free.
But he hasn’t learned all the lessons of the doghouse, namely, the second truth about the doghouse. What you receive as a gift, you must give as a gift. If you’ve been forgiven, then you must forgive. It is what Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord ’s Prayer: “forgive us our sins AS we forgive those who sin against us.” We know the ominous ending to the story. The man is handed over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt…

Forgiving does not come easily to us, it seems. If we are honest, we create a thousand reasons not to forgive people. 9-11 has given our nation 3,041 reasons not to forgive. What if they hurt me again? Attack again? Forgiving means forgetting. Forgiving means dishonoring the lives of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Forgiving means THEY WIN. What Jesus would have us know is that forgiveness is the only way to turn an enemy into a friend without becoming what you are fighting against.

Hannah Arnt, a Jewish philosopher, says that forgiveness is the only new act in the world. What forgiveness does is sunder the causal connection between what happened in the past and what we will do in the future. When I forgive, I don’t forget. I simply choose to act from a different place in relationship to the one who wounded me. I choose to not let their past action dictate how I will respond in the future. I let them out of the doghouse.

77 times A DAY, Jesus tells us we need to create a new world, to act out of a place of mercy and not judgment, a place of compassion and not vengeance. Because the third truth about the doghouse is this: When we put someone into the prison of unforgiveness, guess who has to stand there guarding the door. We are stuck in that moment as surely as the person whom we have put there. And you are forced to keep watch over that doghouse for as long as you choose to hang on ‘tightly to wrath and vengeance’ as Sirach tells is in that first reading. ONLY forgiveness sets both of people free.

This week - take a trip to the doghouse. (If it’s a short one, then count your blessings for the timing of this gospel.) Who have you locked up in there who is asking to be free? Whom do you need to ask to let you out? Then pray, beg, seek, ask for the grace to forgive 77 times today. And tomorrow. And the day after that. “So that when we stand before the throne of God, he will with joy forgive us our sins, because we have forgiven our brothers and sisters from the heart

ps - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each one's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all our hostility."

pps - Forgetting is not part of the gospel requirement, forgiveness is...