Today’s gospel reading deals with a major theme of Jesus, and that is sin and forgiveness. That was why he came here to earth, as we well know, and today he tells us why, while sin can run rampant, it will never have the final say.
“Things that cause sin will inevitably occur,” he says. And don’t we know how right he is! Anyone who has had to deal with some pattern of sin knows how futile it can sometimes be to battle it. Just when you think you have made progress, something or someone comes along, presses the wrong button in us, and – just like that – we are back in our sins again. The inevitability of sin is one of the scourges of this present life, and it is the root cause of so many of the ills that plague us, ills like depression, disease, war, terrorism, death – all these and many more owe their very existence to the inevitability of sin.
Sin has to be rebuked. We have to be open to accountability, and to the warning of our brothers or sisters to get us back on the right track. Kind of like when my doctor told me that my asthma would get a lot better if I lost a little weight. I didn’t like hearing that, but I knew he was right, and if I want to be able to breathe better, I need to listen to him. So when a brother or sister urges us to turn away from sin, blessed are we when we are open to their counsel.
But as inevitable as sin is, Jesus tells us, it never gets to have the final word. Forgiveness does. Mercy does. Love does. If a brother or sister “wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him,” Jesus tells us. Because that’s what he is about. The only thing Jesus came to do was to forgive sins. That’s what opens to us the gates of heaven and the promise of eternity. And our job is to keep those gates open for each other, even if we have been wronged seven times in a day.
Sin is rampant and it can dog us day in and day out. But it doesn’t get to mar our eternity. Not if we let Jesus do the one thing he came to do: to forgive our sins. And of course, that means we have to forgive as we have been forgiven as well.