by CCW | 4 November 2012 15:36
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.
It is all beyond number. There is an important connection between All Saints and All Souls and the teaching of the Gospel for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity. Spiritual life, our life in the Communion of Saints, is only possible through the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness, like the Saints in glory and the numberless dead, is beyond calculation. Beyond human calculation, that is to say. For nothing is lost, either unnumbered or unnamed, by the God who knows every hair on our heads.
These are matters which belong to the very essence of the Christian understanding. To put it in contemporary terms, there is more to each of us than what can be captured and expressed in number. There is nothing so dehumanizing than the reduction of our humanity to a numerical quotient. “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” Stalin infamously said, having contributed to the sad and mad reality of many statistics – many million deaths. It serves to illustrate the point about how number can numb us to the deeper meaning and truth of our humanity, render us essentially inhuman.
Jesus not only responds directly to Peter’s question but he also responds by way of a parable about the wonderful and terrifying nature of forgiveness. In one way, it is so simple. “Forgive and ye shall be forgiven.” Forgiveness is the condition of Christian life; forgive others even as you have prayed for God’s forgiveness. It is what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. And yet, forgiveness turns out to be the hardest thing which explains Peter’s question, a quantitative question: “how oft?” How many times? Can we name a fixed number? The whole point is that we can’t. Why not? Because the infinite grace of God cannot be reduced to such finite calculations. It must always be more in the sovereign and free nature of itself. We would like to limit God’s grace; we can’t. And a good thing, too!
There is a great paradox about number it seems to me. One the one hand, there is the desire to be precise, to nail things down, to put things in the appropriate box; on the other hand, there is the realization that number is ultimately indeterminate and imprecise, it is endless which is not the same thing as infinite. Number eludes the idea of an infinite self-completeness which is the inner dynamic of the life of God himself, the life of the Trinity. God is not a conjecture (like Goldbach’s conjecture) but altogether and something more.
That we cannot number the host of heaven or the host of the dead does not mean that they are not numbered and known. They are known, numbered, and, more importantly, named by God. That is the saving grace. We are known, embraced, and loved in Christ’s forgiveness of our sins. Without forgiveness we remain ever cut off and removed from the community and from the truth of our selves. We have already had occasion on several times throughout the Trinity season to contemplate the tremendous power of mercy and forgiveness. We have seen how it is one of the very things which Jesus very much wants us to know.
And so the parable which Jesus tells us here as the further illustration about the importance of forgiveness underscores how it is so far beyond finite calculation that not to forgive others is itself, well, the unforgivable sin! The parable relates the story of a servant who was forgiven a great debt by his master but then immediately, with the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, refuses to forgive the much smaller debt of a servant owed to him. When the Lord in the parable heard about this he responds with chilling clarity and righteous wrath. The words should convict our hard hearts. “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiderdst me; shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?” These are words that go straight to our hearts, if we have hearts, for the application of the parable is made perfectly clear. He is delivered to his tormentors until all that is owed is paid. “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.”
The forgiveness of sins is the condition of our fellowship in the Communion of Saints. Like that multitude which no man could number, it is beyond human calculation. It is about nothing less than the grace of Christ moving in our hearts and bringing us into the Communion of God himself. And, of course, it is only his grace that makes that possible.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXII in the Octave of All Saints
November 4th, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/11/04/sermon-for-the-twenty-second-sunday-after-trinity-in-the-octave-of-all-saints/
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