“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.
That’s another problem. To know ourselves as sinners. It seems so negative and judgmental, so absolute and uncompromising. While it is true that we are often pretty good at beating up on ourselves, we are not always very good at knowing ourselves in terms of our strengths and weaknesses, our virtues and our vices. On the one hand, we may take forgiveness for granted and not give any serious attention to the thoughts, words and deeds in our hearts and minds, thereby entirely nullifying its force and truth. On the other hand, we may obsess about certain features of our personalities and work ourselves up into a real tizzy of negativity. Yet, more often than not we are wrong about ourselves and others. We see “but in a glass darkly.”
There is the problem about our knowing and our unknowing. The forgiveness of sins belongs to the life-long task of seeing ourselves as God sees us, seeing ourselves as embraced in his all-knowing love and knowledge of us. That in turn affects how we deal with others, including those who have injured us in some way or other or whom we have injured.
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Christ’s first word from the Cross speaks to the reality of our unknowing knowing. “Against thee only have I sinned,” David says in his great penitential psalm, highlighting the critical nature of all sin. It is about our denial and rejection of God in one way or another. It is against God and ourselves and one another. Sin denies and seeks to destroy truth. Forgiveness is about the power of God’s truth and goodness restoring us to himself and to the Communion of Saints.
The Church year runs out in the themes of mercy and forgiveness. Next Sunday is The Sunday Next Before Advent and so we end the pageant of Trinity Sundays with this very powerful Gospel story. Can there be a limit placed on forgiveness – “till seven times”? Such is Peter’s question. Jesus’ response is twofold: an answer and a parable. The parable helps us to understand the answer. “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven.” The point is not four hundred and ninety. The point is that forgiveness is beyond calculation. As such we need to see how it works. That is the point of the parable.
We are always being called to account. In that sense, there is always judgment – such is truth. Our being called to account speaks to the worth and the dignity of our humanity. The humble reality is that we always come up short. We know this at least abstractly. Do we really know it in our hearts? We say that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done” and that “we have done those things which we ought not to have done”. Or we say that “we acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time” – meaning all the time – “most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed.” Are these just empty words or are they the truth of our hearts?
To say these memorable words and mean what we say is to believe in the forgiveness of sins. It is altogether about our openness to God and to the power of his truth to create and recreate, to renew and restore. God alone forgives sins; making something out of our nothingness; making us whole again. But we have to want forgiveness. And it has to move in our hearts and be alive in us. That can be hard.
How forgiveness actually works out in the play of human lives is a question which Shakespeare explores in a number of his plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Tempest. In Measure for Measure, for instance, there is the situation of the person who has been twice wronged wanting mercy and forgiveness to be shown to the person who has twice done the wrong even though that person in the awareness of his sin seeks the ultimate punishment. An interesting dynamic.
And one that turns upon the infinite quality of forgiveness. We can’t forgive ourselves or one another simply. Forgiveness is about God’s grace moving our hearts so that, then, and only then, we can forgive ourselves and one another because it is Christ who lives and moves in us. In Timothy Findley’s brilliant novel, The Wars, one of the characters asks whether “we will ever be forgiven,” meaning for the hideous carnage of the First World War and what it did to civilization. To which he gets the memorable reply: “I doubt we’ll ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they’ll remember we were human beings.”
Not human simply in the sense of the mindless destructiveness of war but human in the awareness of our utter limitations. That, it seems to me, is about a true openness to God and hence to the possibilities of real forgiveness. Not human but divine.
In the Gospel parable, the servant who asked for the forgiveness of a huge debt and got it, then refuses to act in the same manner towards others. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he condemns his fellow-servant. He is thus brought to account a second time; this time in relation to his lack of compassion after having been shown compassion. To be shown pity and then not to act on pity is to deny pity. He is caught in a kind of self-contradiction. The parable forces us to think about forgiving others even as we have been forgiven. It shows us the force and power, the beauty and the wonder of the forgiveness of sins. Without it, we are dead in ourselves, dead to God and to one another. Far from love abounding in us, as St. Paul suggests, and abounding “more and more in knowledge and in all judgement,” it is dead in us. It has to come from our hearts. It is the great Christian insight about grace: it is all totally God and it is all totally us.
The forgiveness of sins joins us individually to The Holy Catholic Church and The Communion of Saints; it is about Christ’s Resurrection in us and Life everlasting. It is the reality and the truth of our liturgy. I believe in The Forgiveness of sins, the doctrine which opens us out to the truth of our humanity as found in the love of God.
“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 22, 2014