“Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Such are some of the great ethical teachings that belong to the philosophical and religious traditions that once shaped our souls and our worlds. Are we alive to them and to their transformative power? That is the question which is set before us in today’s readings.
The year runs out in a wonderful juxtaposition of the themes of judgement and forgiveness. In the Gospel, the servant whose ears are still ringing with the words of forgiveness refuses to forgive another. In the Epistle, Paul prays “that your love may abound yet more and more in all knowledge and in all judgement … being filled with the fruits of righteousness.” The pageant of the Trinity season is concentrated for us in these readings. These are all the motions of God’s grace towards us but is that grace moving and alive in us?
We come to the near end of the Church year. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. It marks the transition from the pageant of God’s grace which seeks our increase in holiness and virtue, the grace of sanctification, to the pageant of justifying grace in Advent through to Trinity Sunday. We come to an end only to be returned to our beginning. Our end and beginning are one and the same. We end and begin again with the grace of forgiveness. As always the challenge is about what is in our hearts with respect to the ethical teachings which in some sense or another belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in God. The Gospel offers at once a strong warning and great mercy. The warning is all about ignoring the great mercy, the forgiveness which is really beyond number. It is, after all, the infinite quality of God’s grace given to us in the finite conditions of our lives.
November is the grey month of our remembering, a remembering at once of the homeland of the spirit envisioned in the Communion of Saints beyond number but embracing the common grave of our deaths in the Solemnity of All Souls, the remembering of all the dead, a number itself beyond all number it seems; at least beyond our capacity to number. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, T. S. Eliot notes in The Burial of the Dead, the first part of his modern poetic and philosophical classic, The Waste Land, written exactly one hundred years ago just after the horrors of the First World War.
It stands as a profound and sombre reflection upon the fractured and fragmented world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His remark is even more telling when we realise that he is echoing Dante’s observation about the souls of the dead in the Vestibule of Hell in the Inferno of the Divine Comedy. He had never thought that “there were so many men whom death had slain”. Yet, perhaps more telling is that this first image of souls are those who are worthy of neither Heaven nor Hell, souls who chase after this and that ideological fad and fancy unable to commit to anything. Unable to will. It is a telling indictment of the fear of commitment in our own culture, on the one hand, and the futile character of souls empty of meaning and purpose, on the other hand. You either stand for something or you fall for everything. Yet the greater ethical question is about what one stands for and in what way. This is what we are asked to consider this morning. Will God’s mercy and compassion live in us or will we deny and reject it?
The Gospel is clear about what it means to negate the mercy and forgiveness of God. The servant who sought and obtained forgiveness for himself negates that very principle of forgiveness by refusing to forgive another who owes him but a paltry sum. The contrast is put quantitatively: a debt of ten thousand talents, a large amount, in contrast to a mere hundred pence. In refusing to forgive another even as he had been forgiven, this “wicked servant”, as he is now named, is “delivered to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto” his Master. This suggests that God’s justice is always fulfilled, that mercy does not override justice but perfects it.
In the Beatitudes, it is not accidental the fourth Beatitude about “hunger[ing] and thirst[ing] after righteousness” is followed by the fifth about “mercy for mercy.” Their conjunction is like a little commentary on the profound ethical teachings about the interplay of the cardinal and theological virtues, especially about the relation between justice and mercy, a point which Shakespeare seems to have grasped. As Portia says, “mercy seasons justice”, perfects it and is itself the greater justice of God. It is a strong reminder to us about the folly of reducing justice or mercy to a finite quantity. “How oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?” Peter asks Jesus.
Basil the Great, one of the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, reflects on Jesus’ response by way of the seven sins of Cain, and argues for exactly the precise number of 490. But I wonder whether it is really at all possible for any of us to keep a tally of wrongs and injuries even in the heightened grievance culture of our day. Jesus, it seems to me, is opening us to forgiveness as an infinite quality, of grace unbounded and unconstrained, unlimited. The question is about our openness to its strength and character.
All Saints sets before us the Communion of Saints in Revelation as “a great multitude, which no man could number,” composed “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues”; in short, the unity of our humanity in and through the differences of cultures and languages, of political communities and families. But it is beyond number. What does that mean? In a world such as our own, number or quantity seem to dominate our thinking; in short, the quantification of everything. If you can’t count it, it doesn’t count, it seems.
And yet, this is to forget that quantity or number is not all. The concept of number itself is not a number, for instance. The idea of infinity is about what is not finite and thus saves the finite from endless indeterminacy, of mere numbers without end, without meaning. By grace we participate in the infinite life of God whose grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. We are brought home to God, to Christ and the Holy Spirit as “the alpha and omega” of our lives, and to that grace as moving in us. The judgement is the folly of our denial of grace, especially the grace of forgiveness. It leads to division and separation.
The Introit Psalm for today is Psalm 130 which complements the Gradual, Psalm 133. Out of the depths of the abyss of human sin and sorrow, the soul recognises that “there is forgiveness with thee; therefore shall thou be feared”, honoured. And that in turn is the blessing of our “dwell[ing] together in unity”. It is “like the precious oil upon the head,” and “like the dew of Hermon,” images of grace overflowing out and falling upon us. Such is God’s “blessing, even life for evermore” (Ps. 133.4), “for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption” (Ps. 130.7). But only if we are open to its strength and power.
For without forgiveness we remain trapped in our divisions and animosities, in our sins and follies, in a kind of endless contradiction with ourselves and endlessly separated from one another. At the heart of the Beatitudes is the great blessing of mercy for mercy. For “then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again,” as a poem by Marilyn Plessner puts it, and as used in Louise Penny’s novel, The Madness of Crowds; “or will it be as always too late?” Such is the warning note but such, too, is the strong reminder of the grace and power of forgiveness.
“Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 22, 2022