Faith Above Fear

Twenty-two days into Lent and our twenty-second resolution is Reciting the Chaplet of Divine Mercy daily. Today's Gospel from Matthew 18:21–22 (NABRE) beautifully aligns with this devotion: “Then Peter approaching asked him, ‘Lord, if my brother sins [against me], how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.’” After replying to Peter, Jesus tells the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, illustrating God's boundless mercy and our call to mirror it. The servant owed his master a “huge amount”—literally “ten thousand talents” in Greek, an unimaginable debt equivalent to about 200,000 years of wages for a day laborer, or roughly 24 billion U.S. dollars in modern terms for a worker making $50 an hour. When the king decided to settle accounts, he initially ordered the man and his family sold into slavery. The servant pleaded for time, promising repayment, and the king, moved with compassion, ...