It’s a bit of a challenge this parable, isn’t it? That ending – Jesus telling us that if we don’t behave then God will torture us. That’s a tough thing to hear on a Sunday morning.Especially since the point of this parable is to tell us to forgive people. It seems, well, let’s say it seems rather contradictory for God to be telling us to forgive one another – and then not forgiving us. What’s that about?And it’s not just that part that’s hard – it’s also this –Jesus seems to be saying that we have to forgive other people in order to be forgiven. Which sounds worryingly like a transaction. If I forgive someone for some petty grievance, then God will forgive me for some petty sin. But the logic of that is terrible – if I forgive lots of people then I will be forgiven a lot – which means I can sin a lot.Surely not. Surely not what we are intended to take away from this Gospel. We’re going to have to dig a little deeper. And my starting point is that this is a story. Jesus is a master storyteller – over and over we see him come up with stories to help us understand something about God. And this particular story is one which is full of hyperbole, wild exaggeration, great overblown fabrications which make a point – make several points actually. And the first point he makes is to tell Peter to think big.How often should I forgive someone, Peter asks – as many as seven times? And Jesus – well, you can practically hear his eye roll as he says to Peter “Seven? Not seven – seventy seven!” In fact – little aside here – in Greek, the language the Gospel was written in, the phrase used could mean 77 – but it actually says seventy times seven, 490. The point is that Peter is thinking way, way too small. He thinks he’s being generous suggesting that he forgives someone seven times – in fact, Jesus tells him to up his game, to be much, much more generous than that.And Jesus’s dramatic overstatements continue in the story he tells to help Peter understand. So this first servant, he owes the king 10,000 talents. Ten thousand – that’s going to be a lot, right? We might not know how much a talent is, but we can be pretty sure that this is a big sum of money, because 10,000 of anything is going to be quite a lot of cash.Well, I did the maths. Let’s start with the second slave. He owes the first one 100 denarii. Even if we know nothing of biblical currency, we can tell from the story that this is a lot less money. In fact, we know that historically the going rate for a day’s work was one denarius. So actually, 100 denarii is going to be a significant sum of money – 100 days’ work is a fair bit. I worked out that if the slave were paid the London Living Wage, 100 denarii would amount to over £8,000 by today’s standards. So not insignificant.But how much is 10,000 talents? Well – are you ready? - a talent was apparently 6,000 denarii. Six thousand. Six thousand days’ work for one talent - and this slave owed the king 10,000 of them.Works out at £5 billion. Five billion. Our low-paid London Living Wage slave would have to work for 2,300 lifetimes to pay that back. It’s a staggeringly large amount of money, a ridiculous amount of money. Basically Jesus just said the slave owes the king eleventy billion dollars – and the king let him off.Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Bearing in mind that this is a parable about God’s forgiveness of us. God is prepared to cancel a huge, huge amount of debt, debt beyond our wildest imaginings, debt it would take us forever to rack up and which we would literally never be able to pay off. God will forgive. But we must also forgive. That’s the bottom line. But it’s not the bottom line because this is a transaction, a quid pro quo. No, it is, I think, simply because it is impossible for us to be forgiven if we don’t forgive. Forgiving is what enables us to be forgiven.Tom Wright, the former Bishop of Durham and one of the most important New Testament scholar of the last 100 years, describes forgiveness as being like the air in your lungs. There is, he says, “only room to inhale the next lungful when you’ve breathed out the previous one”. I think this is a brilliant metaphor. Forgiveness, like breath, is life giving – but you have to keep doing it. Seven times isn’t enough. Even seventy times seven isn’t enough – you have to keep at it, forgiving all the time.If you don’t, if you hold onto that lungful of breath, if, as Tom Wright says, “you insist on withholding [forgiveness], refusing to give someone else the kiss of life they may desperately need, you won’t be able to take any more in yourself”.And I think that’s true. We have to forgive in order to be forgiven because forgiveness only works if we ask for it, confident that it will be given. That’s the problem Joseph’s brothers have in the first reading – they don’t think they will be forgiven. Not unreasonably – they did after all sell their brother into slavery… And like Peter, they simply can’t imagine forgiveness big enough.So the point of Jesus’s parable of forgiveness is not the threat of torture at the end – which suddenly starts to look like another piece of ridiculous exaggeration. No, the point of the parable is in fact the certainty of forgiveness, the ridiculous generosity of the God who will forgive us eleventy billion times.The forgiveness is there for us. It is there for everyone who understands that forgiveness is the air that we breathe, who understands that letting go, releasing the anger, the pain, the regret, the bitterness of refusing to forgive - who understands that forgiving other people is quite simply how we heal. How we are forgiven ourselves. There is no end to God’s forgiveness. All we have to do is to understand that we too can forgive. All we have to do is let go of our injury. All we have to do is ask God, confident that God’s forgiveness is infinite. All we have to do is breathe out.
“When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.”Was happy to welcome him. Zacchaeus hurried down from his tree and was happy to welcome Jesus into his home. Now, you might think you know where I am going with this. You’re pretty familiar with this story, right? It’s an absolute staple of Sunday School and family worship because it’s such a great image. The short guy who wanted to see Jesus, so he climbed a tree to get a better view. I bet quite a few of you sang the song too – do you remember? Zacchaeus was a very little man and a very little man was he And at the end of that Sunday School lesson, or that family service, I am willing to bet that the teacher or preacher said something like this:“Now children, Zacchaeus welcomed Jesus into his house – but we need to welcome Jesus INTO OUR HEARTS”.Am I right?Now, it’s not that this isn’t a good message. It is. It’s a brilliant message, because we do need to welcome Jesus into our hearts. And if I stopped right now and you went away with the message that you should welcome Jesus into your heart I would have done my job.But these are special circumstances. Our first day back in church after so long, our first worship together in this pandemic, I couldn’t rest with the obvious message – I needed to dig a little deeper. So as I’ve been thinking and reading and praying about this service, I’ve kept coming back to the Psalm we heard earlier, Psalm 84, and thinking about the dwelling place of the Lord. “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!”This is such a lovely psalm, full of such lovely images about the dwelling place of God – a place where everyone is happy, singing praises to God, a place so lovely that a day there is better than a thousand anywhere else. God’s dwelling place is a place of strength and protection. It’s also a place of safety, a place where even a tiny bird can nest. It’s a place that replenishes everyone who lives there, fills them up so much that they overflow with goodness and wherever they go they bring God’s abundance with them, so that pools spring up in their footsteps.Beautiful. To us, such a beautiful set of images of God’s kingdom. But think about this for a moment – this is the reason I’ve been thinking and praying with this psalm so hard lately. To the Jewish people of the Old Testament, God’s dwelling place wasn’t Heaven – it was the temple. Don’t forget, for them, God was literally present in the temple, in the Holy of Holies. Sometimes physically visible as a pillar of smoke, sometimes audible as a voice, actually present. God’s dwelling place, the place described in the psalm, was the temple.So fast forward a few thousand years and that means that for us, God’s dwelling place is ……… this. Here. This building. Our church.Now of course we have a much more complex understanding of God’s dwelling place than that. We are the temple. Each one of us is the Body of Christ, a living sacrifice, God’s holy temple – which is why the Sunday School teacher at the start of this sermon was right to say we have to invite Jesus into our heart.And of course, God is everywhere, in everything, always present, throughout all creation. There is nowhere that is not full of the presence of God.And yet, we build churches, we cherish churches, we make them beautiful, with architecture that fills us with awe, with art, with stained glass. We gather here to worship – not because we have to, because God is everywhere and we know that. We gather here to worship because we want to, because we know that while God is everywhere, there are some places where we feel that more strongly, where God’s presence is more evident to us. Churches are thin places, where the barriers between us and God are more permeable, where we hear God’s voice and feel God’s presence more strongly.“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord;my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.”God seeks us out. We saw that in the story of Zacchaeus – God doesn’t miss a single detail, sees us where we are, with all our imperfections and shortcomings, and calls us by name. God invites Godself into our lives, into our homes. And then, then God invites us into God’s home. Into God’s kingdom, into the heart and body of Christ, into heaven. And also, yes, God invites us into this little, physical dwelling place of God, God calls us to church. God’s home, right here.And our home.Welcome home, my brothers and sisters. Welcome home.
Mother Anna writes...What a treasure trove of parables we are getting at the moment! In recent weeks, we have read the parable of the sower and the parable of wheat and tares and now today we get five all at once – so many images and stories for us to learn from in one sitting. As you know, Jesus used parables to help us to understand mysteries. God is beyond our understanding, words are inadequate to describe or explain God, so Jesus used these stories, these images and symbols of everyday things in order to reveal something to us about God. Everything we can possibly say about God is inadequate, but by using parables Jesus lets us glimpse something of the infinite reality of God, but safely within our own limits.But of course symbols and allegories and images are by their nature a bit unspecific – we can’t take them at face value but have to interpret them. Usually, Jesus helps us out, as he does here, by telling us something about what they mean, in this case the kingdom of God. But these parables are all very different, so what exactly are we to learn about the kingdom from these parables? I’m not going to tell you.No, really, I’m not. I am not going to tell you what these parables mean, I’m not going to tell you what you should learn about God from these parables. No. Because that’s your job.It may be that you think you’re not up to the job - I certainly felt like that when I first started reading the Bible seriously. Or maybe you think that you know already what the parables mean – they’re so familiar, and you’ve been told hundreds of times what they mean. Or maybe you think it’s my job to tell you – that’s what I get paid for after all, so why should you try to figure it out? Or perhaps you want to find someone else to tell you what to think – reach for a book or ask Google.But I’m serious – this really is your job. It is the job of everyone who considers themselves Christian to dig deep into Scripture, because it is through Scripture that we get to know God, get to know Jesus. How can we have a relationship with Jesus if we don’t spend time with him? If we don’t listen – really listen – to what he has to say to us? So no, I’m not going to tell you what these parables mean. Instead, I’m going to ask you to spend time thinking about what God is saying to you – to you alone – in this scripture this week. Get the Bible out. Sit quietly. Pray, and ask God to help you hear. Read the passage, then sit and think about it. Pray some more. Live in the parables – imagine you are there, kneading the dough, sorting the fish, uncovering the treasure, buying the pearl. Maybe look to see if you can find things these parables all have in common, or try to find something different in each parable, some unique way in which each one describes the kingdom of God.Do whatever works to keep you thinking about the parables. But above all, spend time praying and listening. Wait confidently for some insight as you hold the parables in your mind. Read. Pray. Re-read. Enjoy being with God as you read and think and dwell in God’s Word.We call it the Word of God for a reason. Listen. God is waiting. Amen.
