Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 14 2011

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-end

Philippians 2:1-13

Matthew 21:23-32

Well it’s a funny kind of September. After a rather chilly and damp August we seem to be having shorts bursts of summer and autumn mixed together. I never know what to wear in the morning or how many blankets to put on the bed at night. And to make matters all the more confusing, today is – Palm Sunday!

Well, of course it isn’t really. But today’s Gospel reading is set on Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph, greeted by the crowds as the Messiah, God’s anointed leader. The same crowds who in five days will turn on him and demand his crucifixion.

The first thing Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem that day was to go to the temple. Now the temple was meant to be a sign that God dwelt in the midst of his people, and was always accessible to them. It was meant to be a “house of prayer for all nations”. It was meant to be the place where God’s love for all people would be made known.

Instead, by the time of Jesus, it had become an oppressive and authoritarian institution. It swallowed up the last meagre savings of the poor to feed its insatiable sacrificial cult and to keep the priests and religious elite in the style to which they were accustomed. It stood as a reminder, not of God’s presence, but of human authority. An authority which was all about power and control and keeping the status quo.

Just before the scene we read this morning Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers and declared that the temple, instead of being a house of prayer for all nations, had become a robbers’ den. And then, we are told, the blind and the lame had come to him in the temple and he healed them. Now according to the purity laws the blind and the lame weren’t allowed in the temple, but Jesus is showing what the temple really should be about, the place where God is present and accessible for all people to heal and restore them.

It was after Jesus had done this, in the temple, that the Pharisees came up to him and asked, where does your authority come from. Now the Pharisees in Matthew serve a dramatic function, they illustrate what Jesus is about by contrast, by always opposing him and failing to understand him. So when they ask Jesus about his authority they mean the kind of authority they understand, all about power and control.

But Jesus’ authority is completely different. St Paul in the reading from Philippians this morning tells us what authority that comes from God looks like:

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.

The authority of God is not self-asserting but self-emptying. It does not impose itself but suffers what is imposed on it. God makes himself known in Jesus by, so to speak, falling into the tragedy of the human condition.

But the temple, as the Pharisees understand it, has no place for tragedy.  The imperfect, the unclean, life’s failures, are not allowed in. It demands perfection and purity. Ordinary people really aren’t good enough. The temple cult is constantly demanding more and more – money, livestock, livelihoods, all must be subservient to the demands of an authority which imposes itself as a crushing burden. The Pharisees cannot imagine that God’s authority might be found instead in failure, in tragedy, in suffering and rejection. This, I think, is why Jesus does not answer their question. They are incapable of understanding.

Jesus, instead, tells them a parable. The parable of the two sons – one says to his father, “yes, I will work for you”, and then doesn’t; the other says “no” but then does. And it is the one who fails and repents who does the father’s will. To repent is to change your mind, to change your understanding. The discovery of what God’s authority is really like changes our understanding, leads us to repent. And we happen on that discovery by failing.

In the gospels almost nobody says “yes” to God and simply does what they’ve said. Only Jesus and Mary can be seen to do so, and even Mary at the annunciation says “yes” to the unfolding of a tragedy she cannot at the time imagine. For most people the pattern is to fail and repent. Peter, who denied Jesus; Paul, who persecuted the Church; Matthew the extortionate tax collector. There is something fundamental to the Gospel here. It is those who fail and fall who are able to discover what God is really like, and by that discovery can change their understanding and repent.

Somehow it is necessary for us to fall, in order to be caught in the movement of God’s falling, the God who empties himself to meet us where we are. It is necessary to own our fallenness, our part in the human tragedy, because that is where God is. The cross is not, as some Christians would have it, God venting his righteous anger on Jesus because we’re not good enough. When we look at the cross we see God suffering the inherent tragedy of being human, in a world where all the time we are falling, failing, and needing to be forgiven. The cross is God with us and for us, not God against us.

In this scene this morning in the temple, the Pharisees and the temple structure represent something very deep and oppressive in our consciousness that we need to be liberated from. A terrible idol enthroned in our ego, which is always demanding more, always whispering that we’re not good enough, always running in fear from the possibility of failure. And so turning away from the very place where God is really waiting to meet us.

The Franciscan Richard Rohr writes this:

In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemptive experience itself. Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content...

Sin and salvation are correlative terms. Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favour. That is how transformative divine love is.

So often we try to avoid the inherent tragedy of life, to pretend to perfection in ourselves and demand it of ourselves and others. So many people hate themselves because they’re not perfect, not successful, not good enough. This is to set up a interior “temple”, a structure of sacred violence, an oppressive authority, an idol that demands that there be victims. The gospel tells us otherwise: God is found in the midst of our constantly failing and being forgiven and learning to forgive.

Repentance means first of all owning the truth about ourselves. By that means alone can we dethrone the idols of success and perfection. By that means we are caught into the movement of God’s falling into our abyss of tragedy and death. Only there can we find resurrection, because Christ humbled himself even to death on a cross and therefore God has highly exalted him.

At the great liturgy of the Easter vigil the deacon sings, “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, that won for us so great a redemption”.  The Church has hit on something profoundly true in rejoicing that we are sinners, in singing triumphantly the joy of being wrong. The demand of the ego for perfection in the end leads only to death. It is in the discovery that we are just the same as the prostitutes and tax collectors that we find we are entering the kingdom of heaven. 

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 12 (September 11) 2011

Genesis 50:15-21

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

How often should I forgive? That question has a particular sharpness today, when we remember the terrorist attacks that took place ten years ago. Some of us may have known personally people caught up in the attacks, and no-one who saw the events unfold on television can fail to have been affected by the horror of those images, the trauma of mass murder enacted in such an audacious and public way.

And then there was what followed, what we are told is a “war on terror”. The Big Issue magazine this week published some facts and figures on the post 9/11 conflicts: so far, 225,000 dead, 7.8 million refugees, and a cost in money of 4,400 billion dollars. Meanwhile, there is famine in Africa…

Today is rightly a day of memories, of grief, of commitment to a better future. So to ask today, “how often should I forgive?”, may seem to be out of place and insensitive to memories still so deeply wounded. And yet it is precisely the scale and the horror of the violence that has engulfed our world that makes the question all the more urgent.

Peter comes to Jesus with what he thinks is quite a small question. “If my brother [that is, in the context of Matthew, a fellow church member] sins against me, how often should I forgive? As often as seven times?” Jesus, in his answer, goes beyond the question. He expands Peter’s upper limit of generosity beyond anything he could have imagined, “not seven times but seventy-seven!” and he applies the principle of forgiveness, not just to people you know in the church, but to the whole human race.

The problem goes right back to the start of the Bible. The myths of the book of Genesis, like all great stories, tell us the deep truth about ourselves. In symbolic and heroic narratives they hold up a mirror to the human condition and show us what we are.

The story of Cain and Abel is about how our desires lead us into rivalry and violence and revenge. Cain and Abel were the first brothers born outside paradise, that is, born into the humanity we know with all its flaws and tendency to go wrong which we call original sin. Cain and Abel were the first rivals, and Cain the first murderer when he killed his brother out of envy. Cain was cursed by his own action to wander as a fugitive, and when he feared that he would be killed in his turn, Yahweh said “whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance”. That is not Yahweh’s doing, it is simply that Yahweh foresees that this is how it is going to be from now on, this is the path that humanity has chosen.

Vengeance, once unleashed, has a life of its own. Four generations on from Cain we meet Lamech, a violent-tempered man who swears, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

So when Jesus repeats those numbers, ‘not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times’, he is going right to the heart of the problem, and changing that ancient escalation of vengeance into an escalation of forgiveness. Jesus is pointing the way out of the cycle of violence that has engulfed humanity from the beginning.

We sometimes hear people say that revenge is “getting your own back”, a pernicious lie if ever there was one, as it’s the guaranteed way of everyone losing. But the parable that Jesus then tells to reinforce his point is precisely about getting your own back – or choosing not to.

The servant in the parable has a ridiculously large debt – billions of pounds in today’s money. And yet when he pleads for time to pay – as if he ever could have time to pay back that much – the king cancels the entire debt. It’s an act, a sudden revelation, of astonishing generosity.

Now the servant could have chosen to imitate his master’s generosity and forgiveness. Something so amazing and overwhelming should surely have brought about a change of heart, given him a new insight into the debts of others, made him a different person. Alas, no. The servant, unmoved and unchanged by his master’s forgiveness, refuses to forgive a trifling debt owed him by another servant. He demands his own back. And in strict justice, of course, he’s right. He is owed a hundred denarii, he has the right to demand them back.

But by doing so, he shows that he is still living in that old way of being human, the way of Cain and Lamech, the way of vengeance and getting your own back, the way of ever escalating desires and retaliation. He has seen the new way of forgiveness and love shown him by his master, but he has failed to enter it. And in consequence the King orders him to be handed over to the torturers.

The King in this parable seems to be very quixotic, at one moment loving and generous, at the next fiercely angry. Is the parable meant to be telling us that this is what God is like?

Well, we need to remember that parables are stories which operate on many levels; they can’t be read as simple allegories. Someone has said that it’s not so much that we read parables, as that parables read us, probing our consciousness and understanding.

God, of course, is always loving and forgiving, and does not change. It is our perception that changes. We can choose to live according to God’s revelation of love and forgiveness, or not. If we do not, we remain living in those old cycles of violence and vengeance, and everything will be a torment for us.

Not only will our vengeance sooner or later rebound on our own heads, but we will be continually fighting against our own created nature, what we are meant to be. God has created us in love to live in love.

In Jesus Christ, that becomes possible at last. His death and resurrection wipe out our own debt of sin and enable us to live in his risen life. And that means to live according to God’s love and forgiveness. It is to live in the new way of being human that Jesus has shown to us, that he taught and enacted in his life even to his death on the cross, and that he gives to us, gloriously free from death, in his resurrection.

So when we pray the Lord’s prayer, we pray to be forgiven our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. It’s not that God is bargaining with us, but that receiving and giving forgiveness are two inseparable aspects of the new life God gives us in Jesus.

Of course, that’s easy to say. On this anniversary we must recognise that to speak of forgiveness, for some people, will be an enormous challenge. Those who have been deeply wounded by sin sometimes say they can’t bring themselves to forgive. But the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. If we can’t yet say, “I forgive”, can we say, “Lord, I want to forgive”? Even that intention turns us round, begins to point us out of the snare of vengeance in which we are trapped, begins to free us into the new life which God offers. For forgiveness, in the end, is God’s work, because it is what God is like. If we will let him, he will make us like him, transform us into his image.

This is not an easy solution to the violence of the world, not a trite answer to the sufferings of 9/11 and all other acts of violence. In fact, in the world as it is, the path of forgiveness is inevitably the way of the cross. Jesus himself lived that forgiveness all the way to his death, the apparent last desperate failure of his mission and teaching. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” But we do believe in resurrection. We do believe that God can and will bring new life beyond the uttermost limits of all human failure. Ultimately, the last word on the universe, as the first, is love. And we can begin to live in that love, if we will, here and now.