“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.
Mercy is, quite simply, beyond calculation, beyond number. It is at once more than human and yet perfects our humanity. The Church year runs out in the mercy of forgiveness. Such is the justitia dei, the justice of God in the human soul which alone transcends the limits of human love, even the all-too-human desire for revenge. We confront ourselves in the Gospel. It highlights the primacy of forgiveness and the possibilities in all of us to deny its power and truth. As the parable powerfully suggests, our denial of mercy places us in the hands of the tormentors “till [we] pay all that was due.” Mercy does not override or ignore justice but perfects it. If we seek mercy and in turn render mercy.
Forgiveness is the greatest of all ethical principles precisely because it transcends the divisions and enmities in our hearts and bids us look at ourselves and one another as God sees us. In the Christian understanding, that means as Christ sees us and as we are in Christ as partakers of the grace which has been given to us in Christ. In Aquinas’ famous phrase, “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” That logic underlies the sacramental theology of our liturgy and extends into our hearts and lives.
We come to the end of the Church year. Next Sunday is wonderfully titled The Sunday Next Before Advent, heralding the culmination of the progress of our souls in grace and a beginning again by the grace of God in Christ. What makes the transition at once stirring and wonderful is the idea of turning back to the one from whom we have turned away, the idea of repentance which is utterly dependent upon the concept of the Good, upon the mercy that is God’s goodness, a goodness which is ever before us and ever there for us, apart from our denial of it. The unforgiving servant negates the forgiveness given to him by refusing to “render the deeds of mercy” to others. He turns back upon himself in denial of himself. Forgiveness is given so as to be lived in us. This he negates.
Forgiveness is the great and only counter to the ways in which we get buried in our obsessions, in our endless revisiting and recalling of the hurts and injuries whether real or imagined that we think we have suffered. For that would be about being defined by our hurts and hatreds. The radical nature of forgiveness is that it frees us from the bitter hurts and the bitterness of revenge that belong to such patterns of disordered thinking.
Forgiveness is our freedom towards one another because it is grounded in God; it is God’s love at work in us overcoming the worst of ourselves in relation to one another. It is not about denying the thoughts, words, and deeds that belong to human sin; it is about what is greater than such things and which alone restores us to truth precisely in the face of our evil. The mercy is the goodness of God who is “greater than our hearts.” Something beyond calculation, beyond number; something infinite. Such is the grace of forgiveness and such are the conditions of its being alive in us.
And so Jesus’ response to Peter is deliberate exaggeration: “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but until seventy times seven.” Are you really going to count? Now that would be obsessive! Do you really think you can? That was the four hundred and eighty-ninth time you have wronged me. One more and, and … and what? The great teaching here is that mercy cannot be limited because God’s love cannot be limited. To be aware of the infinite goodness of God changes everything in terms of our relation to one another and to ourselves.
How we forgive one another is a different question in terms of what it looks like and exactly what it means. But it is certainly not about indifference. It is not the casual shrug of ‘whatever’ nor is it about algorithmic calculation in the pretense of accuracy. It is exactly about seeking the good of the other, even the one who has sinned against you. That will and can only happen when we see ourselves in the sins of others and as a consequence seek the mercy of God who sees us all in Christ. In him we are who we truly are. Such mercy frees our hearts from the darkness and abyss of revenge and from the ways we feed upon our resentments and hurts. Such is the mercy of this Gospel. In wanting forgiveness for ourselves we have to seek it for one another. The paradox of this Gospel is that we learn about forgiveness from the one who did not forgive as he was forgiven.
“How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 22, 2019