Fr David King 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There are some things in life that are relatively easy to forgive. Someone says something thoughtless; they apologise; we move on. Someone makes a mistake that causes us inconvenience, but they genuinely regret it. We may still remember it, but we can let it go.

And then there are the things that are much harder to forgive.

Peter's question in today's Gospel gets right to the heart of that difficulty: “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?”

Seven sounds generous. Peter probably thinks he is being extraordinarily generous. But Jesus answers: “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Jesus isn't giving Peter a calculation. He isn't saying that we should keep a mental record and stop forgiving when we reach number seventy-eight. He is saying that forgiveness cannot be reduced to a number. It is to become a way of life for the Christian.

And Jesus then tells the parable of the servant who owes an enormous debt.

The servant cannot possibly repay it. He pleads for mercy, and the master has compassion on him and cancels the debt altogether.

It is only after receiving such extraordinary mercy that the servant encounters someone who owes him a much smaller amount. Yet he refuses to show the mercy that he himself has just received.

The tragedy of the story is not simply that the servant is unforgiving. It is that he has received forgiveness without allowing that forgiveness to change him.

And perhaps that is where this Gospel becomes particularly challenging for us.

Because we can all say that we believe in forgiveness. We can pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But sometimes the forgiveness we receive from God can remain rather abstract, while the wrongs done to us feel very real indeed.

We know our own excuses. We know the circumstances in which we have failed. We know that God sees the whole of our story. But when someone else hurts us, we may see only the thing they have done.

That is why forgiveness begins, not by pretending that nothing happened, but by remembering how much we ourselves have been forgiven.

The first reading from Genesis gives us another beautiful picture of this.

Joseph's brothers had done something terrible to him. They had sold him into slavery. Years later, when their father Jacob has died, they are afraid that Joseph will finally take revenge.

But Joseph says to them:

“Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?”

And then comes that extraordinary sentence:

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

Joseph does not deny what they did. He does not say that it was acceptable. He does not pretend that evil was somehow good. But he refuses to allow the wrong done to him to determine the rest of his life.

He leaves judgement in God's hands.

That connects beautifully with St Paul's words in Romans.

Paul is addressing a Christian community in which people have begun to judge one another over matters of religious practice: what they eat, which days they regard as special, and other differences of conscience.

His response is remarkably direct:

“Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?”

And then he reminds them that “each of us will give an account of himself to God.”

There is a great freedom in that.

We do not have to be the judge of everyone else.

We don't have to settle every argument.

We don't have to make sure that everyone sees things exactly as we do.

We don't have to carry the burden of deciding who is worthy and who is not.

There is one Judge, and it is not us.

That doesn't mean that everything is unimportant, or that there is no such thing as truth, or that we should never challenge wrongdoing. But it does mean that we should be very careful about the spirit in which we do so.

There is a difference between discernment and judgement, between seeking what is right and placing ourselves above another person.

And there is a similar difference between forgiveness and pretending.

Christian forgiveness does not mean saying that hurt doesn't matter. It does not necessarily mean restoring a relationship to exactly what it was before. It certainly does not mean tolerating abuse or refusing to establish proper boundaries.

Forgiveness means refusing to let resentment have the final word.

It means placing the person and the situation into God's hands.

It means saying, sometimes very slowly and painfully, “I will not seek revenge. I will not allow this person to occupy the centre of my heart. I will leave judgement to God.”

And that is possible because of the cross.

The parable of the unforgiving servant ultimately points us towards the extraordinary mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We are the people who have been forgiven an immeasurable debt. At every Eucharist, as we come before Christ, we come not as people who have got everything right, but as people who depend entirely upon his mercy.

And therefore the Christian life is learning to live out of the mercy we have received.

Perhaps there is someone we need to forgive.

Perhaps there is an old resentment that we have carried for too long.

Perhaps there is someone whose opinions or actions irritate us, and we need to stop making ourselves their judge.

Or perhaps we simply need to become more conscious of the mercy that God has already shown us.

We may not be able to change another person.

We may not be able to undo the past.

But by God's grace we can choose what we do with it.

Joseph looked back upon what his brothers had done and said, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

Peter asks, “How many times must I forgive?”

Jesus' answer is, in effect: as many times as it takes to become a person shaped by mercy.

And Paul reminds us that we are not the judges of one another.

So perhaps our prayer this morning is very simple:

Lord Jesus Christ, help me to remember how much I have been forgiven.

Give me grace to forgive those who have hurt me.

Keep me from judging those whose lives are different from mine.

And when I cannot yet forgive, help me at least to place the person into your hands, and to ask you to begin the work of forgiveness within me.

For we are all servants who have been forgiven an immeasurable debt.

And the more deeply we know that mercy, the more freely we can begin to share it with others.

For the one whom we follow has gone before us—and he will never leave us to walk the road alone.