Mercy and the Forgiveness of Debt:  This is Not a Bill

In today’s Gospel, the Apostle Peter comes to Jesus with a straightforward question about how many times he has to forgive his brother:  Seven times?  His initial proposal seems at once to be that of a good fishmonger (propose a quantity and start bargaining) as well as that of a generous Jewish believer (the number seven recalls the covenant---beginning with the divine commitment which creates the world in “seven days;” in Hebrew, the word “oath” literally means “to seven oneself”). 

Perhaps Peter’s new life as an Apostle bound in the Lord to his ten new “brothers” (his sibling Andrew plus the other ten) has prompted his question about forgiveness; or maybe the growing misunderstandings and rejections by his Master’s interlocutors has made the issue acute for him.  Whatever the case, one gets the sense that Peter’s intuitive quantification of mercy’s optimal dispensation expresses a deep and urgent desire to find the “right dose” of mercy for spiritually healthy fraternal relations or perhaps even a prudential limit before surgically “cutting off” a diseased member.

Christ’s explanation of forgiving seventy-seven (or seventy times seven) times paradoxically upends Peter’s calculations by situating them squarely in the realm of relative quantities of debt.  In Jesus’ parable, a man initially finds himself in a nexus of mutual but asymmetrical obligations of owing and being owed.  On the one hand, he is in debt to the “King” for a “huge amount”---so large that “there is no way of paying it back.”  By contrast, what the man is himself owed is merely an ordinary matter between “servants,” involving a “much smaller amount” (presumably capable of actually being repaid, incrementally).  It is precisely this dizzying disproportion---the Lord teaches those who would follow Him---which divinely recalibrates the human measure of mercy.

Given the signs of our times, the disorienting nature of what is rightly owed is ever before us.  My TMJ surgery, for example, plunged me into a labyrinthine world of extravagant medical debt and niggling insurance repayment that has all of the maddening logic and utter incomprehensibility of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland.  Every several days, I receive the latest in an unending raft of copied paperwork exchanges between my hospital (with its litany of differentiated but generic “professional fees” for the attending physician [who was already paid fully and directly before the surgery---with cashier’s check!], anesthesiologist, radiologist, pathologist, etc.) and my insurance carrier (with its ridiculously titled “Explanation of Benefits” explaining exactly nothing but always reassuring:  “This is Not a Bill”). 

On a single statement, for example, there were detailed thirty separate charges for my 24-hour hospital stay---each and every one helpfully labeled in the “Description” column as simply “Hospital Services”---ranging wildly from charges of $53,032.70 (and seventy cents!) to $9.75.  None of these amounts “charged” has, of course, anything whatsoever to do with (a) the actual cost of the service rendered to me, (b) what the insurance carrier allows, (c) what the insurance carrier pays, or even (d) what I as the patient am ultimately liable for paying. 

The overriding and underlying truth of contemporary health care economics that is not stated on any communication from either the hospital or the insurance company is that there is apparently no straightforward way to separate out what any given individual justly owes from the tangle of debts accrued by the totality of those who use our health care system; for better or worse, sustainably or unsustainably, we are in this together and become responsible---one way or another---for contributing to, or helping to subsidize payment of, someone else’s debt.

For me it is a relief to know that---thanks to Bishop Rhoades’ care for his Priests---the Church in our Diocese covers the extraordinary medical expenses of my jaw surgery.  This means that I literally owe my restored health to the sacrificial generosity of the people of God.  Spiritually and materially, I am more than ever a debtor both to the flock I have explicitly been given to serve, as well as to the goodness of countless people whom I shall never meet until Judgment Day.  This gift has saved---and continues to sustain---my life.

Thus, in the encounter in today’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus ultimately wants to teach Peter more than a simple calculation of forgiveness; He gives the “Rock” on whom He will build His Church a foundational introduction on how interconnected human lives actually are in the endlessly variegated giving and receiving of grace.  We are formed as Christians by this unquantifiably wondrous exchange of mercy and its extension in the life of the Church.  Christ gives to Peter not a number (with an implied limit) but the very keys to the salvific Passion of His own Person.  On the Cross and from the empty tomb, the Crucified and Risen One will reveal the new calculus of infinitely gratuitous love, which transcends mere earthly multiplication (even seventy times seven) through a qualitative leap into heavenly integration.