The Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, All Souls

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt.

In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

I’m going to take this oppourtunity to address a real bugbear of mine and one which I believe is also a bugbear of Fr Neil - although he might want to clarify my words.

Needing “justice to be served” in the form of receiving a payment before one can forgive is simply not forgiveness. Needing “justice to be served” in the form of receiving a payment before one can forgive is simply not forgiveness. This is a particular bugbear of mine because, coming from the Evangelical world, this is how Jesus’s death on the Cross is normally understood - as a payment to the Father for our sin, the penalty of which was death, so that, having received justice, the Father can then forgive us.

This is not forgiveness. God forgives us not 7 times but 77 times, in otherwords, God forgives us infinitely.

What does God want then if he has already forgiven us? Why does God send his Son to die? Big questions but fundamentally, God wants to change our hearts, for us to learn to truly be his image, to love like God does and to forgive like God does. God doesn’t need a payment in order to forgive us but God does want us to learn how to love.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean everything is okay with the world if it keeps going the way it is. Just before this parable in Matthew are Jesus’s words that if thy brother sin against thee, go and tell him his fault and, if he will not hear thee, take two or three with you. To say that God forgives us and so it doesn’t matter if I learn to love more consistently or not is to make the opposite error of seeing Jesus’s death as a payment that satisfies justice. To overcompensate, so to speak. In Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving servant, the Lord forgives the servant but wants the servant to be like him and to forgive his fellow servant. The servant is given an example, a pattern to follow but fails to conform to that pattern of being, of forgiving relentlessly.

Like the servant, we too are given an example, a pattern to follow in the life and death of Jesus who’s words from the Cross come to us as children trying to learn how to love like the heavenly children we were born to be, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I do think that Jesus’s life lived faithfully even unto death was more than just an example. It is the beginning of creation; the moment in which the powers are defeated; the act in which the Spirit is given to the Church; the birthing though death of the first truly human one, and so on. It might even be a gift to the Father or perhaps a gift to us, not the death itself that is, but the life lived faithfully even unto death at the hands of politcal and religious powers. But the fundamental thing about this gift is not that it is a payment to satisfy some form of abstract justice, but it is a gift which says “I love you.”

In the Mass, do we come to receive this gift, to receive the Word of God in an embodied form, the Word which says, “I love you?” Can we also receive the heart which knows that it is forgiven but says, I can always learn how to love better. The heart which wants to learn to also forgive infinitely but can also be honest with others when they have sinned. The heart which wants to be conformed to the sacrifice of Jesus, a life lived faithfully even unto death.

This is not to say that if we somehow don’t learn to love perfectly, we won’t ever be included in the heavenly kingdom of Jesus. God is infinitely forgiving and will give us eternity to become the same. As we get older, however, this change may become more difficult and even painful for us, but time to change there will be, as implied by the last two verses in today’s chapter, which you might want to ponder later today. This is why the sacraments and prayers of the Church are so important - not to draw too bold a distinction between the sacraments and prayer - they are important as they help us in our maturing as children of God both now and after we are born through death. In the book of Revelation, it is the cosmic Mass, the slain lamb before the throne of God, which all creation gathers round to worship. It is also why we offer the Mass for the dead. In the faith that the embodied prayer of Jesus makes a difference to all souls, alive with us or alive in God, in their continued journey to become more like Jesus.

On All Souls then, we pray for all souls, living and dead, that, as we offer the sacrifice of Jesus in the Mass, all souls may learn to infinitely offer their lives as gifts to God and to each other.

In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.