Homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A, September 13, 2026On the 25th Anniversary of September 11, 2001By the Very Reverend Canon Gary S. Linsky, VG, VPRector of the Basilica of Saint

Two days ago, our nation marked twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. A quarter of a century. Long enough that some in this church were not yet born that day. Short enough that many of us can still tell you exactly where we were standing when we heard. Twenty-five years is enough distance to look back with some clarity, and still close enough that the grief has not entirely finished its work in us. It seems fitting, almost providential, that this Sunday's readings hand us exactly the tools we need to reflect on that day rightly — not to forget it, not to excuse it, but to carry it forward without letting it poison us.

Let's be honest about something first: nothing in today's Gospel asks us to pretend that evil isn't evil, or that a nation has no right to defend its people. Sirach doesn't tell us that justice doesn't matter — quite the opposite, Scripture takes wrongdoing with total seriousness. Legitimate defense, the protection of innocent life, the pursuit of those who plot mass murder is not a betrayal of the Gospel. It is itself an act of justice, the kind of justice a society owes to its citizens and, frankly, to the memory of the nearly three thousand people who never came home that day, to the untold thousands of sons, daughters, parents,  grandparents, friends and colleagues who were forever marked by the grief of loss as well first-responders and others who have died or have been afflected by cancer and other ailments received because of their courageous response or proximity to death and destruction on that day and those that followed.

So whatever else these readings ask of us today, they are not asking us to be soft on evil, or to treat 9/11 as some kind of unfortunate misunderstanding to be smoothed over. That would dishonor both justice and the dead.

But Sirach draws a sharp, uncomfortable line that I think is exactly where today's readings want us to stand: "Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight." Notice the image — we don't simply feel anger, we hug it, we hold it close, we let it become part of how we define ourselves. Sirach goes on: "Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?"

There is a real difference between justice and the wrath we hug tight. Justice looks outward, toward right order, toward protecting the innocent, toward the truth of what happened. Wrath, nursed and held for twenty-five years, looks inward — it becomes a wound we keep reopening, not because it protects anyone anymore, but because we don't know who we would be without it. A nation can pursue justice, maintain vigilance, and honor its dead with clear eyes and a steady hand, without that becoming an excuse to let hatred take up permanent residence in our hearts. These are two different things, and today's readings are asking us to tell them apart.

Challenging us further, in our Gospel we hear Peter asks Jesus the question so many of us have quietly asked ourselves: "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive?" And Jesus answers with a parable that should make us uncomfortable. A king forgives a servant an impossible debt — ten thousand talents, more money than a person could earn in several lifetimes, essentially an unpayable debt. That servant then finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii — a few months' wages, a real but modest sum — and has him thrown into prison for it. When the king hears, he is furious, and hands the man over "to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt."

Jesus isn't telling us this story to talk about ancient finance. He's telling us that the mercy we've received from God is so disproportionate to whatever anyone else owes us, that refusing to forgive becomes both its own kind of insanity and prison. Notice what actually locks the servant up at the end of the story: not some outside punisher, but his own refusal to forgive turned back on him. The debt he wouldn't release becomes the very thing that holds him captive. That's often how it works for us too — unforgiveness rarely wounds the person who hurt us. Mostly, it just keeps us in prison.

I think of that morning twenty-five years ago and of Father Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain, who ran toward the towers instead of away from them, and who died giving last rites to a fallen firefighter in the lobby of the North Tower — the first officially recorded death of that day. Saint Paul's words to the Romans could have been written for men like him: "None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself... Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's." So many first responders that day embodied exactly that — not living for themselves, laying down their lives so that others might live. That is not weakness. That is love in its most costly form, and it belongs in the same conversation as forgiveness, because both are ways of refusing to let self-preservation be the final word.

So here is the invitation of this anniversary, and of these readings together. Honor the dead. Support those who still grieve — some of them may well be sitting in these pews. Support a nation's just and sober vigilance against those who would do this again. None of that requires forgiveness to be abandoned, and none of it requires wrath to be nursed or foreign entanglements to be entered into without due provocation. Indeed, the Psalm today reminds us that we’re ultimately called to to imitate: "The Lord (who) is kind and merciful, slow to anger and rich in compassion... (who) does not deal with us according to our sins." If God, who owes us nothing, treats us that way, we are being invited — not commanded to forget, but invited — to ask what "hundred denarii" of anger, resentment, or hatred we might still be hugging tightly after twenty-five years, and whether it's time to let the King settle that account the way He has already settled ours.

Let us pray today for the souls of those who died, for those who still carry that grief or the physical and mental scars caused by responding to the crash sites as well as for the safety of our nation, and for hearts — including our own — to be free enough to hold justice and mercy together the way God Himself does. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.