Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity
“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven”
Don’t worry, it’s not a math test. Quite the opposite. Jesus is pointing to something altogether beyond number though using numbers to make the spiritual point about forgiveness which is an infinite quality that cannot be constrained and tied down to a finite and calculative logic. After all, 490 or 490,000 or 490,000 trillion is just more of the same – one finite number after another. It is what Hegel called the false or spurious infinite (schlechtes unendliche) and not the true infinite.
Between “The Holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints” and “The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting” in the Apostles’ Creed, there is “The Forgiveness of sins.” I like to think of it as being the bridge between the community of the faithful and our individual participation in that spiritual community. A most important doctrine or teaching, yet the forgiveness of sins is either poorly understood or openly rejected.
Recently someone, closely connected to the therapeutic culture, remarked on the upswing in couples’ counselling and added that, surely, I must see a lot of that, too, since forgiveness is such a powerful concept and idea. Well, forgiveness is a most powerful concept and idea but, sadly, I am not sure that it is at all wanted when blame-and-exit is the real game and where there are really only victims jockeying for position. Thus the Church’s pastoral and priestly ministry is not wanted at all and precisely because of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. It is an almost too powerful and poetic idea for our prosaic and practical world.
Yet forgiveness is the great and necessary thing. It has a special force and potency in the Christian religion and challenges the contemporary culture of cut-and-run, do-it-and-be-done, get-it-and-be-gone, and let’s just move along. To be sure, there are no end of difficulties and hardships, especially in relationships, but the forgiveness of sins gives us a way to look at ourselves and one another differently and not just as the hurt and the hurting. It requires us to look at ourselves and one another as God sees us. That is the true wonder. How does God see us? As sinners who have been forgiven.
