St
Isaac the Syrian, the 7th century Bishop of Nineveh and monk wrote: ‘as
a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as
compared with the mind of God’ and ‘just as a strongly-flowing fountain
is not blocked up by a handful of earth, so the compassion of the Creator is
not overcome by the wickedness of his creatures.’ Now, it is salutary to be
reminded on a regular basis of the infinite nature of God’s love and mercy. I
suspect that if the truth be told, many of us, and I count myself among this
number, struggle with this fact. We do so because we struggle to believe that
we can be forgiven: our awareness of our frail and sinful nature means that we
cannot see how God can love such a thing. Yet, God’s love and forgiveness is
not something which we can earn. Herein lies the fault of Pelagius (among
others): that humanity can somehow earn its way into heaven. It doesn’t work
like that; what God offers us in Christ is something far more radical, far
stranger: love and forgiveness to heal our wounds, to restore us, to do that
which we cannot.
In answer to Simon Peter’s question at
the start of this morning’s Gospel, Jesus offers a vision of a community of
love and forgiveness. The number 77 echoes the establishment of the Jubilee in
Leviticus: what is promised in the law becomes real in the person and teaching
of Jesus, the Messiah, who gives true liberty to the people of God, the new
Israel. It anticipates and gives a concrete example of Our Lord’s summary of
the Law: cf. Mt 22:40 ‘on these two hang all the law & the prophets’. In
finding the lost sheep and bringing them back, the community is restored.
So we have a vision of God’s love and
forgiveness and how this can heal the wounds of our human nature. In the
parable which Jesus tells in the Gospel this morning we both how God forgives
and loves us and how we as Christians, people loved and forgiven by God are to
act towards each other: by showing to others what God shows us. It is why, when
Jesus teaches us how to pray, we are told to ask ‘forgive us our trespasses, as
we forgive those who trespass against us’. We are, as Christians, to be a
community which displays, and which embodies what God is and does for us.
We are not to hold a grudge; we are
instead to live out in our lives what God in Christ does for us. The Cross thus
becomes a demonstration of God’s love and healing for the world. We meet today to
be fed by word and sacrament; to feed on God’s love, to allow God’s love to
transform and transfigure our human nature, and by living it out in our lives,
to offer the world something radically different: a vision of humanity both
loved and loving, forgiven and forgiving.
It is both difficult and challenging,
and it makes great demands on us. We can only live as God intends us to by
embarking upon this costly and counter-cultural way of life, in a relationship
with God and each other. It is truly difficult and yet deceptively easy, we have
to do it, and we have to do it together, to become a community of love, to offer
the world an alternative to the ways of selfishness and anger.
We are called to do nothing less than to
change the world, by whom and what we are, by loving and forgiving, as we are loved
and forgiven. So let us live out this love and forgiveness in our lives, continuing
the transformation of ourselves and of the world, through love lived out in our
lives, so that we and all creation may give glory to God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Ghost, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all
might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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