Day: November 16, 2025

“Shouldest thou not also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”

The Church year runs out in the themes of judgment and mercy. Next Sunday is The Sunday Next Before Advent, signalling the end of the Trinity Season at the same time as catapulting us into the mystery of Advent, the beginning of a new Christian year. The Trinity and Epiphany Seasons vary in length according to the date of Easter but regardless there is a pattern and movement of thought in the latter Sundays of the Trinity Season whether shorter or longer, whether twenty-three or twenty-seven Sundays. There is a logic, a way of thinking theologically, centered in the eucharistic lectionary that remains in the classical Prayer Books of the Anglican tradition.

What is that pattern and movement of ideas? It is the interplay between judgement and mercy in a kind of dialectical relation: there is judgement in mercy and mercy in judgement. Both are concentrated for us in today’s lessons, especially in the Gospel. The year runs out, it is not too much to say, on a profoundly ethical note about good and evil, about right and wrong, in our hearts and our lives. Sanctification is the overarching theological theme of the Trinity Season – the pageant of Christ in us – but that presupposes and constantly returns us to the theological theme of Justification – the pageant of Christ for us in his redemptive acts. The two are intertwined and are further informed and amplified by the cycle of the Saints in glory; in short, Glorification. These themes reach a crescendo of expression in the parable of the unforgiving servant precisely in his not doing to another what had been done to him, namely showing mercy, the mercy in which we find our good and our blessedness. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy,” the Beatitude which is at the centre of the Beatitudes.

But doesn’t all this confront us with our contemporary dilemma about the very idea of the ethical? In the culture of moral nihilism there is no ethical, no real meaning to good and evil, to right and wrong. There is only the empty relativism of ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’; in short, solipsism, a kind of gnosticism, where there is no truth that holds us accountable to one another as human persons; and not just bots in the machinery of technocratic culture. What is good for me may not be good at all, let alone good for you. But isn’t it only just what you can get away with? What’s missing? God? Well, yes, but other things too.

In the culture of moral nihilism, the ethical is simply negated: not just relativized, which leaves the door open, perhaps, to a conversation upon what relativism ultimately depends, but denied and quickly reduced to the pragmatism that whatever you can get away with is fine. – for you and who cares about anyone else? There is ‘no ought from an is,’ David Hume argued in the 18th century, the legacy of which, it seems, is that the ethical is seen as arbitrary and unintelligible, and the assumption, common in our age, that natural science, naturalism or scientism, explains everything; a kind of material determinism which negates human freedom and dignity.

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