Mirrors of mercy

Summer sermons in our community have been focused on the parables and sayings of Jesus.  I’ve not been present for the whole series, but have enjoyed the challenge of preaching from these bracing, disorienting, reorienting stories over the last few weeks.

This week, my text is Matthew 18:21-35—the famous passage where Jesus instructs Peter on the new math of forgiveness.  It’s a familiar enough story: a servant is forgiven an outrageous sum of money by his master, and promptly responds by refusing to forgive his fellow man a paltry amount in comparison.  The lesson is obvious: we ought to forgive as we have been forgiven.  More disturbingly, perhaps, Jesus says that our refusal to forgive will block us from receiving the forgiveness of the Father.

I’ve been reading Jean Vanier’s Becoming Human this week, and deeply appreciated his closing chapter on forgiveness.  He suggests that forgiveness is based on the three-fold conviction that, 1) all of us have value and share a common humanity; 2) each of us can change—human redemption is possible; and 3) unity and peace are at the core of what all of us long for.  Without something like these three convictions at work, Vanier suggests, true forgiveness will be impossible for us.  And, to return to Jesus’ harsh words at the end of Matthew 18, perhaps the absence of these three convictions places us—temporarily, it is to be hoped—outside the forgiving embrace of our Father.