Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity
“So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you,
if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses”
Powerful words about the power of forgiveness. It is, I fear, often in short supply in our contemporary culture where the power over words trumps the truth of words and where forgiveness is largely a forgotten concept. Yet it remains one of the most distinctive features of the Christian religion. “Forgive and ye shall be forgiven.” “Forgive even as ye have been forgiven.” Can there be any more powerful words than these in our broken and disordered world?
The great good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as Paul intuited and knew, is that it is the truest liberation from the prison of ourselves. It is entirely about how we are “partakers of God’s grace,” not by any merit on our own but by virtue of the supreme goodness of God himself. In a paradoxical way, that is the message of the Gospel for this Sunday in the late days of the Trinity season. Forgiveness is shown; then forgiveness is rejected. How great is the forgiveness shown; how much greater is the forgiveness denied, but, paradoxically, that illustrates the absolute necessity of divine forgiveness, its infinite power and truth and its movement in us. Forget that or worse, deny it and Hell is the only conclusion, for whatever one might mean by that, it can only mean something negative in and of itself.
The consequences are huge. It is the fullest possible illustration of the denial of God’s goodness. But the Gospel is told to awaken us to the fullest possible understanding of the loving-kindness of God towards us. Such is the point of the parable of the unforgiving servant; the one who is forgiven does not himself forgive others and so negates what he himself receives. The fault lies in contradicting by your actions what God’s actions have bestowed upon you. And yet, God’s forgiveness is inexhaustible; hence, the deliberate exaggeration of seventy-times seven. You have to want it, however, and not deny it. In denying its power and truth, you deny yourself and others.
It is a sad testament to our confused and confusing time that this is an all too frequent occurrence and one which belongs to the narcissism and nihilism rampant in our world and day. Those factors rule out the very possibilities of forgiveness because they deny the truth of the self in relation to others. This is all part of the problem of the radical instability of the self. It thinks it is something when it is nothing and turns the other into an enemy, unable to see oneself in the other.
