Trinity 15

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

17 September 2023

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

Matthew 18: 21-22 Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

So Peter comes to Jesus with a question about forgiveness. We can assume Peter is talking about something pretty serious. This is not a matter of someone with poor hygiene habits, or someone who was taken a favourite pew. If Peter is talking about a significant sin, then forgiving seven times feels like a generous upper bound. Forgiveness is hard. Someone sins against me if they behave in a way that denies my humanity. If I am a child, or a vulnerable adult, and someone uses or abuses me for their own purposes, then they are not relating to me as a human being, but as a means to their end. If I am losing my mental agility, and someone uses that to steal my identity, perhaps to steal my money, they are not having regard to me, or my needs, my reality, my humanity, my devastation.

That is why it is hard to forgive sin. I cannot safely or rightly say “Okay, I am just a thing, treat me like a thing”. If someone denies my humanity, by word, or by action, in the church – that is harder still.

Church is the place where we have promised to love one another, and to treat each other as precious children of God. Can I, in this place, deny my humanity. Can I say “okay, I am just a thing, treat me like a thing?”. We think of ourselves as generous loving individuals, but when we are wronged, when our humanity is denied, every element of our human psychology cries out for, at the least, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. So forgiveness is hard, and Peter’s offer of seven times feels like a lot.

In the synoptics, Jesus makes it clear that a key thing we need to obtain forgiveness for ourselves is to show forgiveness to others. This connects up with the teaching that we will receive from God as we give to others.

Luke 6. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be poured into your lap. The Lord’s Prayer, Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Jesus illustrates and emphasises this with the parable of the unforgiving servant, and leaves us with a hyperbolic number of times to forgive – 77 times, or in some translations, 70×7.

The trouble with the parable is that I think it depends on our identifying with the unforgiving servant, because we have a strong sense of sin. As the prayer book says, “The remembrance of (our sins) is grievous unto us, and the burden of them is intolerable”. If that is how we experience ourselves, the sense of having been forgiven great sins might well fuel a willingness to forgive our neighbours their smaller sins. Some people do have a deep sense of sin, and some people don’t. Unfortunately, having a sense of sin correlates poorly, and generally negatively, with actual sinfulness. The best tend to feel worst about themselves, and vice versa.

I have always been very wary of moves that try and persuade people who do not have a sense of sin that they should have a sense of sin. Far too many people have been bullied into a sense of wretchedness that clouds the fact that they are beloved children of God. Far too much of that sense of sin has connected up with our sexual desires, which are an easy target, rather than our pride, cruelty and destructiveness. But just at the moment I am wondering whether we are failing to recognise our sinfulness enough.

Sin is the failure to recognise the humanity of other Human beings, to take it into account, to accept that they are as important to God and to themselves as we are. But, We do that all the time. All the time, we fail to recognise and to take into account the humanity of other Human beings. And I am not thinking primarily about failing to be polite when we buy a loaf of bread. We are Living in a world, an in a way, that ensures that our comfort and lives depend on precisely that. We could not live the way we do, as things stand, while sharing the worlds resources as if all people were equally important. This is particularly visible in the areas of migration policy and climate change mitigation. There is so much that we do and permit which we would not be able to do and permit if we were engage fully with the humanity of those who suffer, Christian brothers and sisters, human brothers and sisters. Occasionally, of course, a human story breaks through. A drowned baby or toddler pulled from the Mediterranean. A report of the impact of climate change on the ancient and fragile community. The creation of another layer to the endlessly ramifying complexity of the hostile environment. But most often we put it out of our mind.

If sin is the failure to recognise and act on the humanity of other Human beings, then we are in urgent need of repentance. It is a challenge right at the centre of our comfortable lives and it is one which feels quite beyond our capacity to address. In addition to repentance, we are in urgent need of forgiveness. There is a deep and understandable resistance to taking responsibility for how things have got to be the way they are. There is a deep and understandable anxiety about recognising the humanity of those whose needs and insecurity are correlated to our safety and prosperity. It is not for nothing that the extremists reach out for dehumanising words – swarm, flood, invasion, vermin.

Forgiving Seven times, or 77 times is a big ask, when every fibre of our social selves cries out, at the least, for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And I have not even begun to talk about how forgiveness works, how it takes time, how it is connected with the repentance of the person forgiven. But Jesus is here answering the “Why forgive” question, rather than the “How to forgive” question. And his answer is that we all owe a super colossal debt, for which we will need forgiveness, and we should watch our step with the minor debts that fall due to us.

It is really hard both to repent and to forgive. We need everything God can give us, all the support that we can get. We need to learn how to look at ourselves clearly. We need to learn how to repent. We need to learn how to forgive. We need to learn how to love. As Iris Murdoch says, Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

And then, if we begin to learn to love and forgive, we can be forgiven.