A Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity


Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

—Saint Matthew 6:12


         As our Saviour Christ hath taught us we are bold to pray, every day, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But do we forgive those who trespass against us? Do we actually want God to forgive us as we forgive others? Or do we want God to forgive us whether or not we forgive others?


         And how long must we be forgiving, anyhow? Saint Peter got the message that it was necessary to forgive, not just once but again and again. But Saint Peter was a practical man. (Remember: he was the one who, on the mount of Transfiguration, when he saw Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah, came up with the bright idea of pitching three tents.) Saint Peter figured that you have to draw the line someplace, and so he asked Jesus: “How many times do I have to forgive?” Once or twice, anybody can handle that; three or four times, well, okay, for Jesus’s sake; but surely not as many as seven times?


         “No,” Jesus answers, “not seven.” How about seventy times seven? And Jesus cannot be understood to be telling Peter that on the 491st occasion it would be okay to say, sorry buddy, you’ve offended one time to many. What Jesus is saying is that one must forgive again and again and again: as often as necessary, however many times it comes up, one must always forgive.


         That is what Jesus says; but it is not what the world says. The world around us, the society in which we live, purports to value forgiveness. But does it really?


         A few years ago, the voters of this State enacted an initiative called the “Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights.” One of the provisions of that initiative requires courts to allow so-called “victim impact statements” prior to the sentencing of convicted criminals. Whatever the intention may have been behind that provision, the most visible result has been to provide the media with dramatic, emotional material to broadcast on the television and radio news.


         Those who were themselves victims, or those who are the survivors of victims, are encouraged to speak quite harshly against those who have done them wrong. The highlights on the evening news and the drive-time talk radio programs are full of people saying: “I can never forgive you for what you did.” And the statements most often repeated are those in which family members of victims say to the perpetrators: “I hope your soul rots in hell for all eternity.”


         Our society claims to value forgiveness; and yet anyone who truly forgives, or who even mouths the words of forgiveness, is apt to be ridiculed as a wimp or a fool. The person who forgives is surrendering a kind of power, and therefore is becoming relatively weak. Forgiveness is not the way of the world.


         If someone wrongs us, and if he knows that he has wronged us, and if he knows that we know that he has wronged us, then he knows that retribution is owing. He knows that we have a right to take our revenge against him. Maybe, at any given time, we do not have the ability to strike back effectively, but we have the right—the moral right—to strike back. He knows that he has something coming; and because he knows that, he is morally in our debt.


         To forgive is to cancel that moral debt. It is to relinquish the claim to revenge or retaliation. It is to clean the slate. And that is why we hear Jesus, in the parable that follows, talking about monetary debts; that is why the same word is translated “trespass” in the Prayer Book and “debt” in the

authorized 1611 translation of Scripture. We are talking about the moral account books; and in moral accounting, to forgive an offense is to cancel a debt. And Jesus says, whenever you get a credit in the moral account books we must be ready to write it off.


         But why should we forgive? The parable in this morning’s Gospel lesson tells us. Why should we forgive? Because we have been forgiven.


         In the parable, the servant owes his master ten thousand talents. How much is that? We could probably figure it out in terms of exchange rates or purchasing power; but that would be to miss the point.   What the servant owed was an

unimaginably large amount of money—a gazillion dollars, maybe: more than the Governor’s infrastructure bonds, more than the national debt. The servant could have worked his whole life, he could have cashed in all his IRAs and 401(k)s, sold everything he owned, taken a second job at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, but it would not have helped; he could never, ever have paid back all he owed to his master. And yet when he asked his master to be patient, his master forgave him the whole debt.

         On the other hand, his fellow servant owed him a pitiably small amount. Let us say, in our terms, a few bucks, borrowed until next pay day. It really was not very much at all. And yet, when his fellow servant asked the first servant to be patient, the first servant turned the debt over to a collection agency.


         When the first servant put the squeeze on his fellow servant, he had already been the beneficiary of his master’s forbearance. His master had already set him an example to be followed. But he did not profit by the example—and he ultimately paid the price.


         So who in the parable represents us? The first servant represents us. Our offenses against God are infinitely great. Ten thousand talents barely begins to describe it. And the fellow-servant? Where does he fit in? He represents all those people who have offended us. Sometimes we are grievously offended; and nobody should try to suggest that the offenses that we suffer are less than what they are. If someone breaks into our house, or steals our money, or commits an act of violence against us, or betrays a secret, or cheats us, we are really and truly and justly offended. Even if the offense does not rise to that level, we suffer too from hurtful words, gossip, petty thefts, ingratitude and a host of other slights.


         If the offenses against us were not real, there would be no point to our forgiving them. Of course they are real; some greater and some smaller, some worse and some not so bad, but real all the same. It is only in comparison with the magnitude of our offenses against God that they wane into near insignificance.



         God has set us the example. God has forgiven us. He has forgiven us for all we have done and left undone, for all our offenses against his holy laws, for all of our erring and straying from his ways. In the realm of moral bookkeeping, we have run up a lot of red ink; but God has cancelled the debt; indeed, he cancels it over and over.



         Why, then, should we insist on keeping the books open in regard to all of the offenses committed against us by our fellow servants? Why should we not learn from how our master deals with us?


         There is also another reason why each of us should forgive everyone his brother. And that is that all that moral bookkeeping is a distraction from what we ought to be doing. When we feel offended, when we actually are offended, and we make that entry in the books that so-and-so owes us, we put ourselves in the position of managing and monitoring the accounts.


         Jesus has called us and saved us and incorporated us into his kingdom; he has commissioned us with a Great Commission and sent us forth as Apostles; he has gathered us around his altar and made us the very limbs and organs of his body, the Church. He has work for us to do, even if, at any given time, we may not be sure what that work is.


         What business have we then to be keeping accounts? From what other work, from what work toward the spread of his kingdom, do we pull ourselves away to spend our time doing moral bookkeeping. So long as we are concerned with getting ourselves even with one another, or with balancing the books, we are distracted from our real work as citizens of the kingdom.


         There will be those who run up their debt to us by hurting us again and again. But we do not have to let those debts remain on the books. No one can force us to be a moral creditor against our will. We are free to cancel the debt not just once, not just seven times, not just 490 times, but again and again and again. In so doing, we become ever more like our master, who, hanging on the cross in the heat of an April day in Palestine prayed, “Father forgive them.”


         And isn’t becoming ever more like our master just what we would choose to do?


         When we pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” let us mean that we have wiped the slate clean, closed the books, written off all our moral debts. And let us pray that our master will do the same for us.



Church of Saint Mary Magdalene

Orange, California

12 November 2006



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