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.