Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot
Readings – Romans 14.1-12; Matthew 18.21-35
“Jesus saith unto him, ‘I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.’”
On Thursday, it was Holy Cross Day and, to celebrate, A.N. Wilson wrote a thunderous article about the state of the Church of England in The Times. I didn’t agree with all of it. Then again, I doubt that A.N. Wilson agrees with everything he writes either!—but he did have some good points.
One was to remind us that whatever we think about the issues that currently consume the most oxygen inthe Church, like women bishops and gay marriage, they are secondary to what he called, “the awesome Gospel” whose values, he says invert those of, again I quote, “liberal modern life”. I would go much further than that, in fact—the Gospel subverts and often inverts the values of every human system and civilisation.
Now I have strong views on both gay marriage and women bishops – I’m vehemently in favour of both – but to reduce the Gospel to our culture’s quite correct concern for equality and inclusion is to make it both less strange and less wonderful than it actually is.
Perhaps no Gospel passage is more confounding to any conventional understanding of morality than the encounter between Peter and Jesus we heard this morning. Peter asks how many times he must forgive someone who has sinned against him. Is it as many as seven times?
Christ gives Peter the Keys of Heaven, by Christ gives Peter the Keys to Heaven (1820) by
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Hangs in the Musée Ingres, Montauban, France.
Firstly, note what Jesus doesn’t say in his reply. He doesn’t say, “You know Peter, one of these days a lot of our conversations are going to be written down, and many of them are going to be about how you’re always getting the wrong end of the stick—maybe you want to remember that before you accuse people of sinning against you.” It’s quite clear we’re talking about Peter actually being wronged. Yet, Jesus still says that we are to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven.
Christian forgiveness is supposed to be either limitless, or very nearly so. How upsetting of any system of worldly morality is that? Surely, there comes a point when we realise that someone who continually does us wrong is just taking the mickey? Surely if we keep forgiving someone who continually does us wrong, we’ll encourage them to exploit others, making for a world with more injustice?
What makes this even more difficult is that instead of getting a rational explanation from Jesus of how this counter-intuitive idea is supposed to work in practice, instead, we get a grizzly and disturbing parable about a king with many slaves whom he treats with great cruelty. I’m not going to pretend that I like this particular parable, because I don’t. I’m not sure we’re necessarily supposed to like the parables. The point is that we are to understand, firstly, that we are completely within the power of God; and, secondly, that none of us would like God to treat us in the appalling that way we have all sometimes treated others. It is to remind us of our dependence upon God, and our need for His mercy and forgiveness.
One of A.N. Wilson’s most quotable lines in his article on Thursday was, “Christianity is a very strange and a very difficult faith. It is difficult to believe and it is even more difficult to do.”
Christianity is a strange and difficult faith. We continually domesticate it because it’s so hard to believe.
But Wilson is wrong to associate struggling with the unreasonable demands and sheer strangeness of Christ’s teachings purely with what he terms modern liberal life. Yes, it’s true that we in our time and in our own Church have often hidden behind a diet lite version of the Gospel because the full-fat version is so challenging. But so did the muscular imperialist Anglicanism the came before the cuddly social Gospel version; and back before so did to various factions of the Reformation, and on through the Byzantines to the Christians that St Paul wrote to in this morning’s Epistle reading, in the Church that was beginning to emerge in the great Imperial capital of Rome in the mid-50s AD.
There are no pure Christians. We are all in debt to God for our failure to truly live as Christ taught us, and people have always found the implications of this difficult.
When St Paul wrote to that emergent Church in the Rome of Nero, in the early years before he went completely crazy, its members were as divided on doctrinal issues as we are today. Not about gay marriage or women bishops, but on circumcision and a subject central to this morning’s Epistle reading, whether it was acceptable to eat food sacrificed to idols. This seems obscure to us now, but the issue was, at its root, about exactly the same issues that divide the Church today—identity, and whether we’re called to engage with the world to transform it, or instead to maintain our purity as a people set apart from the world.
Interestingly, St Paul doesn’t pronounce and one side or another of this debate. He instead says that whatever people think, they should do so sincerely for the Lord, for it was God who welcomed all of them into the Church. And it is God who welcomes all of us to Church this morning, regardless of our opinion on one particular issue or another. What God seeks from us when we worship Him is not our theological correctness, still less our political purity, but instead a pure and humble heart that sincerely seeks to be close to Him.
Paul puts God at the centre of the Church—we should be here in Church for God and His purposes, and not to use God as a vehicle for our purposes. Thought God knows that happens often enough.
Paul finishes a purple passage that even A.N. Wilson would have been proud of by reminding his readers that all of them would be accountable to God for how they had lived their lives. And so we shall be too. That is why we will all pray together, after we receive Holy Communion this morning, that God will judge us “not weighing our merits, but pardoning or offences.”
A.N. Wilson cited Goethe, writing in Faust, to argue that “humanity’s best part is to shudder, to feel awe.” So let us open our hearts to the possibility that in this little village church this morning, we will do two things at our Holy Communion that ought to make us shudder with awe. One is to recreate the Last Supper the disciples shared with Christ on the night before he died. The other is to receive a foretaste of that great heavenly banquet that after we have been held accountable by God, by His grace we will share in his nearer presence.
While that should make as tremble, it should not overwhelm us with fear, for, as I will say, shuddering with awe myself as I play the part of Christ in this re-enactment of the Last Supper, Jesus Christ has already on the Cross “made … a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.”
If you find the Christian faith very difficult – and I do – never forget that Christ has already paid the price of the sins of the whole world, and that means that He has already paid the price for your sins. The lesson of this morning’s Bible readings is that you should never forget that God waits to receive you into heaven with love not because you deserve it, but because Christ opened the way to eternal life for you in his sacrifice on the Cross.
If it wasn’t so difficult to believe, it wouldn’t be so wonderful. And as God has forgiven you, you are commanded to share that forgiveness with others.
And now to that God of love, who is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
