The Twenty-fourth  Sunday in Ordinary Time; Cycle A, 

September 13, 2026

Readings: Sirach 27.30-28.7; Romans 14.7-9; Matthew 18.21-35

We have some kinship with animals.  We live out of souls that are partially animal-sensual, even though we are also spiritual. Our life principle is spiritual, unlike the animals, but like these creatures, we feel the movements of instinctual drives. 

Catholic mystical theology teaches that the soul is comprised of two parts, sensual and spiritual.  We are the two—it’s not a dichotomy but two distinct aspects of our one human nature.  The sensual part is itself of two distinct patterns.  One is concupiscent: we have desires and drives to satisfy our life needs.  The other is the irascible: we direct our energy to attack the attacker, to destroy what is perceived to be destroying us.  Also is present the possibility of summoning energy to flee the attacker.  Like the animals, anger and aggression in all their forms are part of our constitution.

It is beyond the purpose of this meditation to go into the deep intricacies of all the psychological and sociological ramifications of anger as a life force.  The bottom line is that it is easy to follow the lead of the sensual impulse of aggression.  To be willfully angry with others in irrational ways is sinful; and, the repeated pattern becomes a habit which is a vice.  "The fruit of the flesh is enmity, strife, anger, dissension...those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.  The fruit of the Holy Spirit is peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, goodness..."  (see Galatians 5.19-26).

Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.  The vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance, for he remembers their sins in detail.  Forgive your neighbor’s injustice, then when you pray, your sins will be forgiven (First Reading).

The key phrase in that quote from the First Reading is, the sinner hugs them [i.e. wrath and anger] tight.  It is the holding on to the taste of anger that is the problem.  The sudden bursting out of energy to defend oneself can be initially a good thing since it flows from the need to defend oneself against aggression.  The problem is the hugging of anger; the caressing of it; the delight in it; the exaggeration of it. After a while anger and wrath become our bedfellows.  We would not feel like ourselves if we were not nurturing some kind of anger flowing from perceived hurt.

In God's nature, in the divine life, judgment and mercy are one.  God punishes by showing mercy.  God's wrath is his love.  To surrender to the fear of God is to find love and union which cast out fear.  When we hold onto our anger and nurture it, we block the life of God flowing through us.  God does not nurture anger but lives in merciful love. 

(Divine merciful love does not mean that God dispenses with moral living.  Nor does it mean that immoral life can be coated over with self-deceiving sentimentality.  Merciful love is not a rationalization for immoral behavior.)

Think of the commandments, hate not your neighbor; [think] of the Most High’s Covenant and overlook faults (First Reading).

The Gospel Reading with its parable illustrates this principle of divine life.  How can we ask for forgiveness for the immeasurable magnitude of our offenses against God if we on our own part do not allow divine mercy to flow through us in the matter of forgiving personal offenses.

My heavenly Father will treat you in exactly the same way unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart (Gospel Reading).

The words of Jesus hold some good cardiac advice.  One way to avoid heart disease, we are told, is to work out our anger and resentment, otherwise they contribute to the hardening of the arteries in the heart--"unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart"—in other words: don’t “eat your heart out.”

Anger is lethal. It is the working principle in our unwillingness to forgive.  Someone hurts me.  My reaction is anger in a basic self-defense.  The refusal to forgive is the willful holding on to the basic anger.  All this becomes a pattern, a vice, that is inimical to my sharing in God's life.

Ultimately it is the contemplative practice of centering into God that frees us from the vice of anger.  We do not belong to ourselves.  This precious sovereign self that has been offended is not mine in the first place.  This self, the center of my person and spirit, belongs to God.  God is the center of my soul through our very creation and supernaturally by the regeneration of Christ's grace given in Baptism. 

What is this self we cling to by caressing our anger over these hurts?  This self-centered self is illusory.  We are real in our souls when our deepest self is centered in God.  We are created beings that will always exist in our being a person, free in the image of the Word.  (Unlike our friends, the Buddhists, we say there is a substantive self.) The great Christian truth is that self exists, but it exists only in God as the center of the self.  To make our false self the absolute center is hell; to find our true self in Christ is heaven.  The reality of our contemplative practice shifts the center of our life, as the Second Reading explains:

None of us lives as his own master and none of us dies as his own master.  While we live we are responsible to the Lord, and we die we die as his servants.  Both in life and in death we are the Lord’s.  That is why Christ died and came to life again, that he might be Lord of both dead and the living (Second Reading).

Centered in sharing in the divine life of the Trinity, gradually compassion will become the first response, not anger.  The grace of transformation is creating a new creature.  Will I ever be able to smile at and forgive immediately the person who cuts me off on the road?  Forgiveness is the fruit of the Spirit.

It is in the Holy Eucharist and in the Sacrament of Reconciliation ("going to confession") that we are healed.  Little by little we see anger for what it is; we see the knots in the unforgiving heart caused by our anger.  We see it all in the power of Christ's love.  Drinking his most precious blood from his sacred side, washed in the water flowing from his side, nourished in the love that is his Body broken for us in the Eucharist, we are moved into mercy. Here is freedom from the shackles of the unforgiving heart.



--William C. Fredrickson, D.Min. Oblate, St. Mary's Benedictine Monastery, Associate of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Scapular