Trinity 22 – Forgiveness: The Cleansing of Memory

Philippians 1:3-11 St Matthew 18:21-35
It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more.
[Philippians 1:9]
Our journey in Trinity season into the kingdom of heaven is near its completion.
Our Epistle reading is from St Paul in his final days before martyrdom, probably written during his imprisonment in Rome, to the church in Philippi. He is full of thanksgiving for the gifts they had sent to him (Philippians 4:18) and, even more, for the news that the church there is doing well. For those of us who have been following the Bible study in Acts, you may recall in Act 16, St Paul receives a vision of a man calling him to Macedonia on his second missionary trip. Philippi is the first city in Macedonia, and in Europe, to hear the Gospel and St Paul is encouraged to hear that all is well there. St Paul can see that the seed of the Gospel that he planted is working in them a miracle and is preparing them for “the day of Jesus Christ”, a phrase he repeats twice in our reading this morning. St Paul encourages them in his letter to the ending of rivalries and to unity in the Spirit. [see Fr Crouse’s Sermon]
We want to become “pure and blameless” for that day when Jesus returns.
In the work which we are called to in this season, we began way back at the beginning with the call to bring under control our unruly passions which were affecting our outward actions. As Jesus gives us self-control, we can be illuminated by His Spirit, more and more, inwardly. And we are moving towards the perfecting of our hearts inwardly and our lives outwardly. Jesus has given us the confidence to look within, why? Because we know ourselves to be forgiven by Him, so we can do this inward search of our hearts – we know that whatever our shame, our embarrassment, will be met with merciful eyes.
If we are serious in this inward turn, we will also discover lots of ways that we have been hurt by others. And it is important that we are conscious of these hurts or they will fester and be affecting how we treat others unknowingly. In a course I took recently on ministry to those with trauma (online from the Allender Centre in the US), one teacher encouraged people to take letter size paper (A4 for us in Europe) and fill it with the names of people who have envied you and why. He said that if you can’t fill a page, you’re not thinking enough about it. Maybe we haven’t thought of that before, but the idea is to understand both our gifts and why those have been the subject of envy in others, and why others in our family, our friends and enemies, in our work, even in the Church have hurt us.
The reality is that we have been wounded and we have wounded others because of envy – there have been rivalries. The Bible has been written for us in part precisely to unveil this reality. The stories of the Patriarchs in Genesis are full of this from the very foundations: Cain was envious of his brother Abel because he offered a better sacrifice to God and it led Cain to murder Abel [Genesis 4]; Jacob was envied by Esau because his mother loved him more [starting at Genesis 25:28]; Jacob's success was envied by Laban his uncle, who was deceitful to him [starting at Genesis 29], and by Laban's sons, his cousins [Genesis 31:1-2]; Joseph was envied by his brothers because he was the favourite of his father [starting in Genesis 37:2-4]; Moses was envied by his brother and sister Miriam who tried to supplant him [Numbers 12]. And those rivalries continue in the historical writings, such as in the relations between King Saul, who as soon as he met David, and saw his courage and success as a warrior, began to envy him and tried repeatedly to kill him. [starting in 1 Samuel 18:5-9] The book of Esther, which we began in the daily readings to follow last week and will finish this week is all about the unveiling of anti-semitism as stemming from envy.
When we do this inward turn and reflect inwardly on our lives we will no doubt see the wounds from others in our families – parents, siblings, in our work, even in our friendships, and people in the Church. We will see how others have held us back in our lives through deliberately trying to undermine us out of envy – maybe our intelligence, our innocence, our favoured status – and we are right to have some anger in us – it was unjust. What will we do with that anger?
There are two pathways for us when we see these things. We can follow the path of Cain, to live with resentment and bitterness, to a darkening of our hearts, leading us to fight back and even to murder – whether outwardly or inwardly in our hearts. Or we can follow the path laid out for us in word and deed by our Lord Jesus Christ, the way of the Cross.
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In the Gospel today, Jesus tells us a parable in response to Peter’s question, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” And Jesus responds, “I do not say seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Or in other translations, “seventy times seven.”
In the parable a servant is released from an overwhelming debt by a master – this is God’s overwhelming mercy towards each one of us, if we were to count up all the debts we have been forgiven by God. And His forgiveness towards us is perfect and complete if we ask.
And then the same servant who was forgiven much, cannot forgive the one who owed him a much smaller debt.
Jesus is showing us a way for us to deal with the very hurtful experiences we have all had in our lives. Stack up that debt (the hurts we’ve received), against all the debts forgiven us by God over our lifetime and the situation becomes easier for us to forgive, from the point of strict justice. Remember, with horror, all of the unrighteous thoughts we have entertained well beyond the simple temptation since becoming a devout Christian; remember all of the failures of will, actions following upon the unrighteous thoughts entertained; and remember all the failures to act when we knew there was something good we could do but we didn’t (St James says, “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” [4:17].) We are very good at judging what is fair and what is not fair when we are hurt. We are to judge ourselves even more strictly, remembering all of the logs in our own eye, that the Lord has removed. [Trinity 4 Gospel – St Luke 6:36-42] This is not to be morose, but because only then will we have a proper appreciation of the depths of God’s mercy towards us.
And yet, despite this promised and proven mercy, which enables us to get out of bed and face the day, even cheerfully, we can nurture these hurts, they can fester inside us, holding us back from the full release that Jesus has come to bring. He has come to bring the restoration of “purity and blamelessness for the day of Christ”, and that we might be “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.”
We are called at this late stage in our lives, where in maturity we see ever more clearly the life we have lived, and the hurts we have received, we are called to release their grip on us, and to release those bound by their sins against us.
The Kingdom of heaven is unleashed in this way.
Forgiveness is not just one of the things about the Christian life, but it is at the heart of it.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass, who sin, against us.” It is at the centre of the Lord’s Prayer. God’s Kingdom cannot come on earth as it is in heaven without it.
It was what brought the Son of God to earth to take our flesh upon us and walk the excruciating path of the Cross, it was for the forgiveness of our sins. God cares deeply about how we live our lives. It is not cheap grace!
And what are the first things Jesus said to the disciples in his first Resurrection appearance to them? “‘Peace be with you.’ And he showed them his hands and his feet.’ – the wounds received from others. And then, “‘Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, even so I send you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’”
Forgiveness is not one aspect of Jesus’ teaching, it is at the heart of it.
We have all been disfigured in our souls, some of us have been also disfigured in our bodies as that trauma continues to manifest itself in us, we’ve been wounded deeply by others… But we have also wounded many in return.
Jesus has come to stop all this, to cleanse our memories (not to forget things that happened, denying our hurts, but to acknowledge them and purify our relation to them) and so to release our hearts to love. It comes about in the heights of our maturity as a Christian as we climb onto the Cross with Jesus and look upon the world with His eyes, with the eyes of mercy towards all. “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do!” [St Luke 23:24]
The currency of the Kingdom of heaven is not gold, but mercy. We are to spend it and spread it abroad generously.
This is what union with Jesus Christ looks like in our lives. This is what it is to be “pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.” This is how to recover an underlying joy and cheerfulness in our engagement with the world.
In the liturgy, we will now set forth before our eyes the death of Jesus and have opportunity to join Him on the Cross, as we die to the bitterness and resentment of all those hurts and abuses we have suffered. The wounds may remain, but we pray that these wounds will no longer hinder our love, and also be united with Christ’s suffering and self-offering. [Colossians 1:24]
Then He will feed us with His risen life.
I thank my God…and am sure of this,
that he who began a good work in you,
will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
Amen +
[The following Collect is a translation of the Collect appointed in the Gregorian Sacramentary for Trinity 22:
O Almighty and most merciful God, of your bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech you, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that you would have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.]

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