Fourteenth Sunday After Trinity

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

 As the law in England changes to restrict social gatherings to 6 people, we’re reminded just how important social bonds are. Conversations online or on the phone are better than nothing, but I miss face to face contact, the ability simply to hug a friend or relative, the conversations that happen around the edges of things. I’m delighted to be back in church for public worship once again: at the height of lockdown, when that was prohibited, celebrating the Eucharist alone, without a congregation, felt like a wound. I know how much many of you missed not just the Sacrament but the community of the church too. Human beings are created for relationship – with God and each other – and Christianity is an inescapably social religion. We can’t do it on our own.

 That much is obvious when we think about our own Christian lives. I was baptized because my family brought me for baptism and because a priest baptized me. I grew up as a Christian because there was a church community to belong to, and people to teach me the faith. I stuck with it because I met people in whom faith was real and active, whose lives were testimony to the truth of the gospel and so invited me into a deeper, more trusting faith myself and in time helped me to recognise and respond to a sense of vocation. Who I am and how I am as a priest has been shaped by the parishes and congregations I’ve loved and amongst whom I’ve worked – though I feel the need to put in the usual writer’s disclaimer that the faults that remain are my own.

 We can’t be Christians on our own. And today’s gospel expands on one of the ways in which that is true. For all that we hope that being part of a church helps us to learn and grow in our faith, brings us together in community and draws us into relationships we might otherwise not have, it also trains us in forgiveness.

 Following on from last week’s Gospel reading, about how to deal with conflict in the church, Matthew’s Gospel expands the theme. Jesus has just said some challenging things about how to deal with another member of the church who sins against you, recognising both the reality and seriousness of sin, and the need to do all one can to restore relationship. Now Peter wants to be sure he’s understood: ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’

 Seven times seems quite a lot. How many chances do we usually give someone who wrongs us? Maybe a second or third, but by then we tend to become wary and mistrustful, or decide to cut our losses. Peter, quite humanly, wants to know where to draw the line. He recognises forgiveness as a characteristic of the Christian community, and forgiving someone seven times seems like giving them quite a lot of chances. But Jesus comes back with the impossible, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’

 In some translations it’s not 77 but seventy times seven. But whether we’re counting to 78 or 491 what Jesus is saying is that we don’t get to put a limit on forgiveness. There isn’t a certain amount we can apportion out until it runs out, at which point our obligations towards our brothers and sisters in Christ cease.

 And Jesus tells a parable to make his point. A king is settling his accounts, and reaching for his ledger book he finds a slave who owes him 10,000 talents. This is a colossal sum. A single talent represents about 20 years’ wages for a day labourer. The idea that the slave who begs the king for patience, promising to pay him everything will ever be able to fulfil that promise is laughable. He’d have to work for 200,000 years. There is no way out other than to plead for mercy.

 And he gets it. ‘Out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.’

 And we might think, or hope, that the slave would be moved by the king’s mercy, full of gratitude that the burden of debt has been lifted, amazed that a future he’d thought impossible now lay open before him. But his actions show this not to be the case. Instead, he seizes someone who owes him money – a much lesser debt than he’d owed himself – and refuses him the same mercy he’s just received. The king hears of it, and the slave’s new-found freedom and future is lost as the king demands repayment of his debt in full. And so, Jesus says, ‘my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’

 Forgiveness is hard. I think that’s why Jesus teaches us to pray for it daily as part of the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Forgiveness puts the desire for relationship above our own desire for retribution or recompense. It asks of us mercy rather than resentment, indifference, or self-righteousness.

 This is only possible, I think, as an overflow of divine mercy. On our own we will end up like Peter, counting out forgiveness, keeping a ledger, even if we’re willing to let the gospel ask of us terms a bit more generous than we might otherwise have offered. ‘As many as seven times?’ means we’re still counting, still measuring out forgiveness and counting mercy. Only God’s mercy will overcome those limits; only God’s mercy is infinite.

 That’s why this is not a parable about forgiving others in order that God will forgive us – nor is that what the line in the Lord’s Prayer means. We do not forgive in order to extract something from God, or to earn the forgiveness of our own sins. ‘Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you,’ writes St Paul in Ephesians (Eph 4.32). God is always the Father who runs out to meet us while we are still far off. Our forgiveness can’t cause God’s forgiveness, for that would put God in our power. We can forgive because we have been forgiven; we can show mercy because God in Christ shows us mercy.

 We put the focus in the wrong place when we ask ‘how often should I forgive?’ It is always easier to keep track of others’ sins than to confess our own, always more tempting to wallow in self-righteousness at being sinned against than to fall to our knees to ask for a mercy we don’t deserve either.

 Matthew is clear that forgiveness should characterise the Christian community because he is clear that the Christian community is made up of people who have been forgiven: children of a heavenly Father who, while we were still far off in our sins, met us in his Son and brought us home. The real question is not ‘how often should I forgive?’ but ‘how often have I been forgiven?’ When we learn to answer that truthfully, gratefully, we find we receive not only mercy that covers our own sins, but enough to overflow to others. And that makes possible a future determined not by our sins but by the love of God, who values relationship with us so much that he sent his only Son to die for us, freeing us from a debt we could never repay, wiping the slate clean for no other reason than because he loves us.