“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.
All this conflicts, I think, with two things: first, what we know through human or natural reason as demonstrated, for example, by Plato and Aristotle precisely about the priority of the ethical in all matters of human life – Plato’s ‘The Good’ as epikeina, as beyond yet the principle of the being and knowing of all things, and Aristotle’s ‘thought thinking itself thinks all things’ upon which all things depend, God working in us by way of nature. Secondly, what we know through Revelation which makes known things which we know we cannot know simply on the strength of our own thinking. Yet things are made known to us which we cannot not think about. Is that not what we see in this Gospel reading? To forgive even as we have been forgiven without which we contradict our very humanity as God-given and as made in the image of God.
The parables of Jesus are effective and yet challenging for us to unpack. The simple fact is that Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant to illustrate the infinite nature of God’s forgiveness through the example of one who contradicts its very meaning! Why?
Because forgiveness cannot be constrained to a finite number, to a limited form of human calculation. Seventy times seven? Who could possibly keep track of that, apart from a kind of troubling obsessiveness? Maybe AI, I suppose. But that is to miss the deeper point. Quantitative logic is but a small part of what belongs to human reasoning and knowing. Ethics cannot be reduced to us as bots responding to bots. There is nothing ethical in the technocratic culture because there is nothing ethical about any kind of tool. Every tool is a means to an end. The issue is really about how the tool is used and for what ends. That ethical question is really a question about our humanity. Here is something which we can know through revelation – the dynamic of forgiveness.
The ethical turns on the end for which things are done. Forget that and you have forgotten what belongs to the real dignity and truth of our humanity as made in the image of God and not in the image of some machine that seeks to usurp your very being as a thinking being. While there may be ‘fifty ways to lose your lover,’ there are really only two ways to lose your humanity: either in defaulting to being like an animal (as shown in the story of Nebuchadnezzar in The Book of Daniel which we have been reading in the Offices) or in becoming like a machine, an automaton, something which was also known in the ancient world such as the statues of Daedalus in Plato’s Meno, an image of how the things we make can have the illusion of being alive.
What the Gospel story most dramatically shows is how we can lose our humanity in contradicting the very mercy which we have received by not showing mercy in return and in so doing negating our very humanity. Yet, the extent of God’s infinite mercy remains for the unforgiving servant “until he should pay all that was due unto him;” justice as mercy. For that would be to discover the infinite mercy of God not as a right but precisely as grace. Such is grace and glory and the hope which alone can overcome the divisions and animosities of ourselves as turned in upon ourselves in neglect of one another. God’s grace is unlimited mercy which only we in our perversity negate at our peril and loss. Yet “no one is as bad as the worst thing they’ve done,” as a character in Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf remarks. God’s grace and mercy are everywhere and for everyone. Should we not want for others what we ourselves have received? God’s ‘ought’ – “shouldest thou not?” – is our ‘is’, the condition of our very being. Mercy is everything.
“Shouldest thou not also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant,
even as I had pity on thee?”
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity 22, 2025