Deacon Mike Meyer / Sunday, September 13, 2026 / Categories: Blog, Homilies The Divine-Human Knot Homily for the Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A The Human Knot is an icebreaker activity where teams of 8 to 10 players stand in a circle and hold hands, but they can’t hold the hand of someone next to them or hold two hands of the same person. Then the group works together to untangle the knot without ever letting go of each other’s hands. The winning team is the first to stand hand in hand in a circle without ever having broken the chain. As you can imagine, the Human Knot emphasizes communication, cooperation, and the unbreakable connection among the players. Well, we Christians throw one more player into the mix—God—and this Divine-Human Knot that entwines us all lies at the heart of today’s readings. St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans that “none of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself.” We live and die for the LORD, or as poet extraordinaire, John Donne puts it, “No man is an island.”[1] Whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, we’re all inextricably tied to God, because God created us, and because God sent his only Son, fully human and fully divine, to dwell among us and buy us back from slavery to sin through his passion, death, and resurrection. We’re also intimately bound to God and each other as members of the Body of Christ. That’s why Jesus commands us to love God and our neighbor. Loving God includes loving our neighbor. Loving our neighbor is loving God. No matter how hard we may try, we can never delink ourselves from the Divine-Human Knot. Nothing we do affects only ourselves, which gives us the formidable power to heal or to hurt by our conduct. Each one of us has an influence, makes an impact that can lead others to good or to evil.[2] So, to live as God intended us to live, to experience the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, we all need to be in harmony with one another. While we can’t remove ourselves from the Divine-Human Knot, it is our job to help untangle it. That leads us to forgiveness, the common thread in today’s readings. While today’s Psalm makes clear that God pardons all our iniquities, Sirach, in our first reading, and Jesus, in our Gospel, clarify that we only receive God’s forgiveness when we imitate God by forgiving others. That clarification may seem like a limitation on God’s surpassing kindness, but it’s not. In fact, we pray for exactly that every time we invoke the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We ask to receive God’s forgiveness in the very same measure that we forgive others. I emphasize the word “receive” because God never stops extending his boundless forgiveness to us. It’s an offer we have to welcome and receive. If our hands are clenched in fists of anger, they aren’t open to receive God’s forgiveness. God forces nothing on us, including his forgiveness, but Divine and human forgiveness go hand in hand. Together, they’re the key to untangling the Divine-Human Knot so we can live in the infinite circle of peaceful harmony with God and each other. Now, before we get too stressed about having to forgive the people who’ve hurt us the most, and the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks are a good example, let’s make sure we understand what forgiveness is, and what it’s not. Forgiveness is, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains, “abandoning [our] right to retribution, [our] right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin.”[3] In other words, forgiveness is giving up our right to an eye for an eye. When we forgive, we leave vengeance to God. Now on to what forgiveness isn’t. Forgiveness isn’t an obligation to be all lovey-dovey with every person who’s wronged us. Some people are physically or psychologically abusive, and we may need to keep our distance from them for our own well-being. Forgiveness also isn’t forgetting. The Judeo-Christian tradition is one of memory, the good and the bad, because God works his wonders through it all. Remembering is an invitation to look for the good God wrings out of the bad we’ve experienced and to learn and grow from it. It’s also an invitation to forgive again. That’s what Jesus means when he tells Peter that we have to forgive completely—seventy-seven times in Biblical terms. While we don’t have to grasp the hands of the people in the Divine-Human Knot who’ve hurt us, we do have to acknowledge their place and live in harmony with them in it. So, what’s our challenge from today’s readings? We need to forgive. We need to forgive not just because God tells us to, but because it’s good for us. When we forgive, we untie ourselves from the thoughts and feelings that bind us to the offenses committed against us. When we don’t forgive, we hold onto the injury and remain a victim. It’s like walking around with a hot coal in our hand, waiting to throw it at the person who wronged us. Most importantly, though, we need to forgive to live in harmony with those to whom we’re inextricably tied for all eternity—God and our neighbor. We need to forgive to untangle the Divine-Human Knot into the unbroken circle of peace and harmony that it’s meant to be. I’ve used the Human Knot as an opening exercise at many retreats, and watching how groups work together to detangle themselves has been fascinating to say the least. The team that inevitably wins is always the one that openly communicates and cooperates, of course, but it’s also the team that forgives. The teams that squabble, blame, and stay angry with each other lose, and that’s the message of our readings in a nutshell. Do we want to be winners or losers? To win, we need to untangle the Divine-Human Knot with communication, cooperation, and forgiveness. Readings: Sirach 27:30-28:7; Psalm 103; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35 [1] John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). [2] William Barclay, The Letter to the Romans, The New Daily Study Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 219. [3] Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Image, 1999), 218. Infinitely Valuable Print 102 Please login or register to post comments.