Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?
Love gives without expectation of return simply because love is its own reward. The Gospels teach us to love for love’s sake. Love is its own reason. What does this mean?
It means that love cannot be a matter of calculation – giving with the expectation of receiving in return. For then we limit love. We put limits and restrictions on our love and the love of others. It is a poor and impoverished kind of love which constrains and restricts the boundless love, the unlimited love, the love-without-counting-the-cost kind of love shown to us in Jesus Christ.
Does this mean that love is crazy, irrational and without reason? No. Love is its own reason and that reason is known and named. “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, as he gave us commandment.”
Christ’s love draws us into the company of the Trinity and into the Communion of Saints. The love that is without calculation is the infinite love of God. In this Gospel parable, Jesus uses a finite quantity, seventy times seven – you can do the math – to indicate an infinite quality that is beyond counting. The quality of love is something infinite. It is something of God in us. The love that is of God is always with God and with God all things are beyond mere calculation.
We are named not numbered, for instance, in our baptisms. The Octave of All Saints’ embraces as well the wonderful Solemnity of All Souls’. What is that about? It is a remembering of all the faithful departed, particularly within the context of our Parishes. One custom at All Souls’ is to name, not number, all who have died in the life of the Parish. Think about what that means. Many of you can look around in the Church and remember, perhaps, even by name, many who are no longer with us. But they were here in these pews and in this place. Our act of remembrance, of course, brings to the fore how hard it is to remember by name even those who were once quite close to us. We are such forgetful creatures and such are the limits of our finite minds. Mercifully, it is not so with God in his infinite loving and knowing of all souls. In him, they are not only numbered, but named and known.
We live in a world where everything, it seems, is numbered. It is a world of numerical determinancy. The technological and the economic forces which circumscribe our lives are all driven by numbers – by a numerical logic, as it were, by the dreary reality of binary function. Everything, it seems, can be numbered; but numbers cannot capture the reality of anything. There is something more. We sense that in a world where everything and everyone is reduced to a number something is lost. Somehow the description of ourselves as numbers is seen as dehumanizing, as making us less, not more than what we are. A numerical logic, after all, cannot capture the truth of who we are or what we are about.
Yet through the finite quantity of a numerical equation, Jesus shows us the infinite quality of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the quality of divine mercy bestowed upon us so as to be active in us. It is not something static but a dynamic quality that is to be alive in us – our forgiving one another even as we have been forgiven, our acting out of the love that has been shown to us. That is the point of this parable, the parable which is often known as the Parable of the “Unforgiving Servant”. Forgiveness is the quality of divine love in us. It is beyond calculation. It speaks to the truth of our selves in the truth of God, an infinite content revealed through the finite context of the humanity of Jesus Christ.
In the Epistle which complements this Gospel, Paul is writing from his Roman imprisonment to the church in Philippi. The love of Christ has no prison walls. It cannot be contained. “I have you”, he says, “in my heart, inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defence and confirmation of the Gospel, ye are all partakers of my grace”. What is that grace except the grace of Christ crucified and risen from the dead, the grace which neither grave nor prison can contain? It is beyond limit, beyond human calculation. In the company of the Trinity and in the Communion of Saints, we are all together whether we are in prison or in Philippi, whether we are in the agony of death or in the ecstasy of salvation. You see, we are defined not by numbers, nor by the prison walls of our daily griefs and pains. We are defined by grace.
The forgiveness of sins is defining grace of the Christian religion. It goes beyond the limits of hurts given and received, not by ignoring them, but by going through them to something more. It is given to be received and acted upon. We are bidden to receive the grace of forgiveness and to show that we have received it by our acting upon it. It is the condition, too, of our participation in the Communion of Saints. Just look at the Apostles’ Creed.
It is beyond calculation. The grace of Christ for us is given to be lived in us. We are blessed by the quality of mercy bestowed upon us in Christ. All our giving and all our taking make us partakers of his grace, but only if we will act upon it. Not to do so is to deny God’s forgiveness of us, a forgiveness which knows no limit, except the limit we put upon it. Such is our folly, the folly which Jesus challenges and overcomes, especially in this Gospel parable.
Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXII, ‘09
Christ Church, Windsor,
8:00am Service