Sermon for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity
“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”
Peter’s question is very much our question, especially in a culture of retaliation and revenge, at a time of polarizing oppositions and the politics of power for power’s sake. Shylock’s great speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice calls attention to certain features of our common humanity, including, sadly, revenge. “Hath not a Jew eyes? … hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?… If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Revenge, starkly put, seems to be a certain kind of justice, a getting back at those who have wronged us, tit for tat, as it were. “If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge!”
And yet, as Shakespeare shows us, revenge is not only a limited form of justice but actually a betrayal of justice. “The villainy you teach me,” Shylock says,”I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.” In other words, we don’t just want to get back, we want to dominate and destroy; in short, to “better the instruction.” We cannot overlook the critical irony. Neither Jew nor Christian, nor Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or any of the philosophical religious traditions should seek revenge; for revenge betrays and destroys our humanity. It is an aspect of our fallen humanity; common, sadly enough, to us all. The play turns on the question of the relation of justice and mercy where “mercy seasons justice”, in other words, perfects justice. The highest form of justice is charity and that is something divine moving in us if we are open to exactly what this Gospel story shows. It is nothing less than a lesson about “the mercies of Christ” and the abundance of his love in us, if we will let it rule and move in us. At issue is the conditional “if”. And if not? Such is the picture of the unforgiving servant, himself a study in self-contradiction.
The Gospel illustrates the point that Portia makes in the play, namely, “that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.” We all stand in need of mercy. The question is about how we come to recognise that common need without which self-interest or the bitter revenge of the self dominates and destroys. The Gospel seeks to awaken us to the significance of mercy. Christ’s parable convicts our conscience with the picture of self-contradiction. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, the servant who was forgiven a great debt refuses to forgive one who owes him a paltry sum. He had sought mercy and received it but when another asked mercy from him he refused it. “We do pray for mercy,” Portia says, “and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.” This Gospel is a powerful indictment of our humanity in its hard-heartedness and selfish disregard for what belongs to our common life. But it does so only to awaken us to the divine mercy which redeems and perfects our humanity in and through our common life. If we will act out of what is given to us.
