by CCW | 31 October 2021 08:00
It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73), the time of scattered leaves which lie in abundant heaps upon the ground, scattered leaves too many to number. “I had not thought that death had undone so many,” T.S.. Eliot says in the Waste Land, written just after the devastations of the First World War but also after the greater devastations of the Spanish Flu. He is channeling Dante’s observation about the souls in the vestibule of Hell. Numbers beyond numbers.
Yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, the spiritual gathering of All Saints’ and All Souls’. Today, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity marks the Eve of All Saints, Halloween. Rather providentially, the Epistle and Gospel complement and prepare us for All Saints and its Octave of commemoration. Paul, in our text, prays “that [our] love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”. In response to Peter’s question about how often shall I forgive the one who has sinned against me, suggesting a limit, “till seven times?”, Jesus says “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven.” It is a deliberate exaggeration to teach that love in forgiveness is without limit. He uses number to point to what is beyond number.
In the lesson for All Saints’ Day, John the Divine in his Revelation beholds “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” who along with angels, and the elders (numbered earlier in Revelation as four and twenty), and the four living creatures, are all engaged in the ecstatic praise and worship of God. It is a marvellous vision of redeemed humanity, a vision of the Communion of Saints. As the Apostles’ Creed wonderfully reminds us, the forgiveness of sins is the connecting link between the Communion of Saints and the Resurrection of the Body which belongs to our participation in that spiritual community.
The parable of the unforgiving servant is a strong indictment of our failure to act out of the abundant love of God in Jesus Christ. He is the forgiveness of sins and as such serves as a strong incentive to forgive even as we have been forgiven. We are recalled to the infinite love of God which is greater than our finite loves but in which by grace we are called to embrace and enact. Here is the love which properly defines us and belongs to the vision of the redemption and perfection of our humanity, come what may in the ups and downs, the confusions and uncertainties of our fallen world where we are scattered in our worries and fears like leaves on the wind. Our being gathered together can only be through the forgiveness of sins.
All Saints’ reminds us of our Christian vocation, the vocation of redeemed humanity. It is set before us in a vision; the vision is revelation, a way of gathering up the whole pageant of the Scriptures. A great multitude which no one could number is a vision of the whole of our humanity. It is inclusive of all nations, families, people, and tongues; all cultures and languages. It includes all spiritual creatures, hence the angels. The four-and-twenty elders symbolize the authors of the various books of the Hebrew Scriptures even as the four beasts are symbolic of the four Gospels of the Christian New Testament. Yet through this Christian imaginary something universal is signified, something which speaks to and complements the idea of the unity and truth of our humanity as a community united in the praise of what is true and holy, a feature that belongs to other religious and philosophical traditions. It is, we might say, a vision of the true city, the city of God in which our humanity finds its truth and dignity.
But the necessity of forgiveness recalls us to our sins and wickednesses, to the forms of our brokenness and incompleteness. There can be no forgiveness without the awareness of our sinfulness and to be aware of our sinfulness is already to be looking beyond our brokenness to wholeness and perfection. What makes today’s parable so telling is that the servant who was forgiven a much greater debt refuses to forgive a much smaller debt owed to him. With the words of forgiveness still ringing in his ears, he fails to show compassion and pity on another. The parable is told to highlight both the depth of human sinfulness in our hypocrisies, and the necessity of forgiveness itself which is far greater than our sinfulness. Even in the parable, the unforgiving servant, we are told, was delivered to “the tormentors till he should pay all that was due unto him,” suggesting that forgiveness is a form of justice that belongs to the divine justice of God. There is just the sense, perhaps, that the unforgiving servant may come to learn about the divine mercy and compassion which he has negated. The point of the parable is to heighten our sense of the power and the necessity of forgiveness. It is nothing less than the love of God moving in us in our love for one another.
This is the condition of our participation in the Communion of Saints. But it also connects to the Solemnity of All Souls which follows upon All Saints’ Day. All Souls’ is a later development that recalls us profoundly to our common mortality, our deaths and the deaths of those in our communities. One tradition in some places is the attempt to remember by name all those who have died in the past. Sometimes it can be a great, long list, to be sure. But in that exercise I am always reminded of the contrast between our poor attempts at remembering; in short, our forgetting, and the idea of God’s eternal knowing and loving of all souls. Our finite knowing, at best, is about our attempt to remember to God what is always known and loved in God. In him there is no forgetting. At best, we seek to place our loved ones by name in God’s eternal knowing of them. It means, too, that we remember at least by extension that there are many, many souls unnamed, unknown, and unremembered by us, “a great multitude which no man could number”. This year I cannot think of All Saints’ and All Souls’ without remembering the more than six thousand indigenous children who died in the Residential Schools of Canada and who were buried in unmarked graves, unnamed and forgotten. In such things we confront our own failings and the limits of the finite. We can only seek to place the souls of the native children with God seeking his loving mercy and compassion for them and for us.
We have here “no continuing city”, as Hebrews reminds us. The heavenly city is the pattern for our lives in faith. In Dante’s great vision in the Paradiso, the gathering of redeemed humanity is imaged like the scattered leaves of Sybil’s oracles being “bound by love into one volume”, what is in the Christian view, the book of life and love. To be found in that book means reading from it and acting upon what we read. That means seeking that “our love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgement”, a knowledge and a judgement tempered by the forgiveness of God which knows no limit, no number.
Shakespeare’s sonnet is about more than a commentary on the season of scattered leaves. It, too, is really about ourselves, beholding in ourselves “that time of year”, seeing in ourselves “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west”, seeing in ourselves “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie”. They are at once images of the fall of our own lives, our common mortality, but even more they suggest our growing in maturity and understanding. Perceiving such changes in ourselves, the poet suggests, “makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” That recalls us to the abundant love and never-ending mercy of God, the divine forgiveness which is beyond number.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 22, 2021
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