Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity in the Octave of All Saints
“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven.”
Jesus’ response to Peter’s question is provocative and profound. “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?” Peter asked. Jesus says, “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven.” If you do the math and take Jesus literally at his word – 490 – you have missed his Word and his point profoundly. There is no finite calculus when it comes to forgiveness, no worldly way of numbering that can possibly capture the infinite nature of our life in Christ. Forgiveness is the quality of the infinite in human lives and wondrously so.
The conjunction of the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity with the Octave of All Saints is especially and poignantly providential. “After this, I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number,” John tells us in his great vision of redemptive glory, that work which we call The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. I want to emphasize this point, the Saints are “a multitude which no man could number.” Somehow what belongs to the nature of the vision of redeemed humanity transcends number. Not everything can be reduced to a numerical formula, not everything can be reduced to number.
“I had not thought death had undone so many,” T.S. Eliot says in The Wasteland, the poetic masterpiece of the modern world in the awareness of its own emptiness, a work which continues to haunt the highways and byways of our contemporary world. It is actually a quote from Dante, from The Inferno of The Divine Comedy and it captures a feature that belongs to The Octave of All Saints. The great festival and feast of All Saints embraces the sombre yet profound reality of All Souls. The one follows upon the other. The Solemnity of All Souls follows upon the celebration of The Feast of All Saints; it marks the common reality of human mortality in the naming of Departed Souls. They are named in God’s own knowing and loving of All Souls and so there is a sense in which All Souls is only possible through the greater reality of All Saints, the vision and reality of our redeemed humanity. Yet our naming and numbering is always incomplete. So great is our forgetfulness.
