Not 7 times, but 77 times!

A self-portrait of Dürer, striking as he styslises himself on Christ. 

A self-portrait of Dürer, striking as he styslises himself on Christ. 

I feel it’s been a while since we did a more Bible focused address. The last few weeks have been very literary and poetry orientated. So, here’s an address on Matthew 18, the passages about forgiveness. It begins with Peter, who was the most senior of the disciples, asking Jesus about how many times one should forgive another member of the church. From the various accounts which mention Peter in the Bible, we’re able to build up a picture of the sort of man he was. Peter, who was formally called Simon, was a fisherman. Peter comes across as a bit foolhardy, at times a bit stubborn, says what’s on his mind, can be quick to anger; it was Peter who drew his sword and cut off the ear of one those trying to arrest Jesus in the garden of gethsemane. Peter is impulsive, brash, and as such when we hear in Matthew that he is asking Jesus about how many times it is required to forgive a member of the church - “as much as seven?” - I think we can assume that his question is not arising out of mere intellectual curiosity. He’s almost certainly asking because he’s angry with someone, and wondering if his teacher, his rabbi, really requires him to forgive completely. After all, Jesus does have a track record of subverting and reinterpreting Jewish laws and practices. Perhaps Jesus’ approach to forgiveness would be different too.

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Number seven in Jewish Scripture was symbolic of completeness, seven being the amount of days in the week.  So to say, ‘should I forgive seven times’ is not to be read literally, but rather should be taken to mean, ‘need I forgive completely?’. To which Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” It turns out that the number seventy-seven does appear one other time in the Bible, and to find it we need to go back to Genesis. Remember Genesis begins with a poetic account of God creating earth, filling the earth with life, putting fish into the sea, and animals onto the land, and then finally putting two people upon the earth: Adam and Eve. As the myth goes, Adam and Eve disobey God, and are cast out of paradise. When out of paradise, Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel, who grew up to be a shepherd, and Cain, who grew up to be a farmer. Cain was very jealous of his brother, and ultimately struck him with a stone, killing him. When, in the story, God finds out about this murder, he says Cain cannot ever be forgiven. Cain then goes off and has a few children, and they have children, and so on, and murdering people runs in their family. They’re certainly portrayed as bad people in the early chapters of Genesis. One of Cain’s great-great-grandchildren named Lamech we are told kills someone, at which point Lamech is quoted talking to one of his wives saying “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly I, seventy-seven-fold.” So, Lamech is portrayed as a really bad person. Not only a murderer, but he is also the first person in the Bible to have multiple wives, which, though this practice is tolerated later in the Bible with the likes of King Solomon and his wife for every day of the year, at this stage is understood to be a very bad thing. So, if God punished Cain seven times, meaning punished Cain ‘completely’, so, he will punish Lamech seventy-seven times, ‘Completely, Completely’. He will punish Lamech utterly and completely! He will be punished beyond what can even be conceived. Lamech is who Jesus is alluding to when he uses the expression seventy-seven. But of course, he is flipping the context, not talking about punishment, but the opposite, forgiveness. So it kind of backfires on the apostle Peter. He’s angry with some member of the church, and he asks Jesus, ‘Do I really need to forgive completely?’ to which Jesus responds, ‘No, you need to forgive utterly and completely, you need to forgive on an irrational inconceivable scale’.

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Jesus then not wanting to lose this teaching opportunity takes this idea further. Hitting as they have upon this idea of total forgiveness, he wants to say that the Kingdom of Heaven is like that. Remember, whenever Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God, he is not talking about abstract metaphysics, about realms beyond this life, he’s talking about a reality we can manifest and make real in the present. So, Jesus gives us a mini-parable, about a king expunging the debt of one of his slaves. It’s interesting I think that even though Jesus is talking about manifesting qualities of the Kingdom in the present, he’s unable to conceive of a reality without slavery. He of course doesn’t condone slavery in any way, but neither does he at any point condemn it. The institution of slavery is just so much a part of the fabric of Jesus’ world, that imagining a social progression beyond it is inconceivable to him. From Peter’s original question to this mini-parable, we can see that sinning against someone is equated to being financially indebted to someone. This word, ‘sin’, like much religious vocabulary is problematic, because the word carries so many associations for us. The word ‘sin’ is so often used to emotionally manipulate people, used by religious authorities to subscribe a particular pattern of behaviour. For our purposes here though, we can think of sin as anything which acts against relationships. In this way, we need not think of sin in grandiose terms, as disobeying the pre-ordained laws of God, but simply a breakdown of relationship between one person and another. A relational dysfunctionality between yourself and another. So what is the worst sin you can commit against another? Well it would have to be a sin which you could not take back, which you could not make amends for, which could not be forgiven. Murder ticks that box. It doesn’t matter how forgiving a victim of murder is, he or she is unable to forgive. Unless like Jesus, you get in under the wire and forgive while the murdering is taking place. Anyway, when sin is thought of in this way, as a breakdown in relationship, the comparison to debt makes a great deal of sense. A breakdown in relationship easily leads to a further breakdown in relationship, just as debt easily leads to further debt. This idea of sin being like debt is a recurring theme in the Bible. Think for example of the Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…” Or, as it is more commonly translated today, ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’. Debt is a good analogy for sin, because it’s like a swamp; people in debt accumulate more debt, interest mounts, they’re sucked down into a spiral. Having uncontrollable debt today can be a debilitating thing. There are many people in the west constantly treading water, trying not to be swallowed by their ever-mounting debt. And that’s in the West in the 21st century, where there are some failsafes in place, some support available, the option of filing for bankruptcy, etc. If you were in debt in the Roman Empire, in the first century, you were put in a work camp until you paid off your debt, or someone paid it off for you.

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So, returning to the parable, the king expunges the slave’s debt. The passage says the slave owed ‘ten thousand talents’. Now, ‘ten thousand talents’ is an astronomical amount of money, it’s a joke amount of money, it’s equivalent to saying something like ‘the store clerk owes a billion dollars’. So this reference to ‘ten thousand talents’ is performing the same rhetorical function as the number seventy-seven. Lamech is to be punished seventy-seven fold, while the slave is in ‘ten thousand talents’ worth of debt. But the King forgives the debt, and releases him. The idea here then is that when, and if, we manifest the Kingdom in the present, we create an environment of perfect freedom. We release one another from our accumulation of failings, we don’t keep a record of one another’s wrongs. That feeling you get when debt has been lifted off your shoulders is perpetually present. We feel at liberty, as if a world of possibility has been opened before us. We’re no longer walking on eggshells, worried we will offend or disappoint, we’re free to be ourselves, free to be in good relationship with one another. This is very difficult way of being in our world. We so naturally think about our relationships in transactional terms. If someone’s a bit snappy with us, we’re a bit snappy with them. If someone’s trying to play us, we’ll play them. If someone’s a little bit nice to us, we’ll be a little bit nice to them, and so on. What would it be to just let all that stuff go, and to just be lovingly present to one another.

But it’s more difficult than that. It’s a pleasure to be lovingly present to someone being lovingly present to you. It’s a lot more difficult to be lovingly present to someone being a prat. But to do that begins to interrupt the cycle, and manifesting the Kingdom is all about interrupting the cycle. By interrupting the cycle, relationally dysfunctional behaviour begins to show up as bizarre, and that is what this parable is trying to highlight. The slave, having been forgiven a billion dollars of debt, shakes down a fellow slave who owes him one hundred denarii. Now, one hundred denarii is still a sizable amount of money, but nothing compared to the ‘ten thousand talents’. It’s equivalent to, say, half a year’s average salary, so like 12/13 thousand pounds in today’s money, something like that. He came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ If we’re in the crowd listening to Jesus’ parable, we are shocked by the behaviour of the slave. Such love is shown to him, and he still has such unkind selfishness in his heart. And that’s because that is the reality of manifesting the Kingdom.  It is a slow process. It takes time to really work into people’s hearts. Habits and behaviours are not changed overnight. It takes time to confound a hurting person with love, and sometimes we are not even the appropriate person to give that love and support; it is sometimes just our calling, to forgive someone their debts and then remove them from our lives. And such a decision is never easy, it takes real discernment and reflection. Manifesting the Kingdom then is not down to an individual, it’s down to a community. A community listening and being open to the spirit moving amongst them, the spirit of love, and freedom, and compassion, and forgiveness. And the odd thing is, what a community looks like which is open to the spirit, and endeavouring to manifest the Kingdom, is almost the exact opposite (of the image that comes to mind) of the stereotypical religious community. A living community of this sort is not conforming to one way of being in the world, it’s not about uniformity, or being submissive. It’s about living, curiosity, being our own individual selves, being awakened to the vibrancy of life. Embracing one another in a community of acceptance and forgiveness, that is what we must enact together, make real together.

Amen.

Nonsense by the fire...

A story about a precocious twenty year old medical student called Tom: it starts in a small pub in the middle of Edinburgh. A pub filled with students drinking beer, having a laugh, and speaking all kinds of nonsense. It is winter, the roads outside are filled with mud, slush, and snow, it’s freezing, and the students take refuge by the fire, pints in hand, chilled out, righting the wrongs of the world.

Tom had one of those minds for figuring things out. He always had some pet theory he was going on about. Lately his subject of choice had been theology, or more precisely, debunking theology. “It’s all invented nonsense you know” he would say to his friends.

“Take Jesus, you don’t actually believe he was a miracle worker do you? They’re all tricks, and the best part is, his fisherman friends, they actually believed it! What blockheads they must have been. And don’t get me started on this doctrine of the Trinity, you know it’s not even in the Bible, not even once…” To put it mildly Mr Thomas Aikenhead was not the most tactful of individuals.

Recently a man called John Frazer, who some of Tom’s friends knew, had been put in prison simply for reading an anti-Trinitarian book. It must have panicked Tom’s friends, because they decided to turn Tom in. The year was 1697, and the punishment for railing upon, cursing or denying God was death.

Tom had no desire to die. No lofty ambition to be a martyr for a liberal religious cause, or anything like that. He really didn’t care that much. Upon imprisonment he immediately wrote a letter, renouncing all the things he had said, but the Church of Scotland was having none of it. They wanted an example to be made of him; they wanted to warn a nation overflowing with profanity of the consequences of being un-Godly.

The Edinburgh Gallows: "Many Martyrs and Covenanters died for the Protestant Faith on this spot."

The Edinburgh Gallows: "Many Martyrs and Covenanters died for the Protestant Faith on this spot."

Before he died Tom said ‘It is natural for us human beings to have a desire to find the truth, to seek it out as we might find hidden treasure.’ He was hung on the 8th January 1697. He was the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy. Mr Thomas Aikenhead did not call himself a Unitarian; The British Unitarian Association was not to come into existence for another hundred years.

In his inability to put the big questions down, in his disregard for Church authority, and in his thirst for truth beyond cost, I cannot help but admire him, and claim him as a martyr for the Unitarian cause. Perhaps unknowingly he pointed to a better world in which ideas, however brilliant or foolish, can be explored and tested, without fear of social or legal consequences. Out of his foolishness, his bolshie, playful and creative character, I think he points to a better world. A world in which friends can gather around a fire and share in truly open fellowship, share in a passion for life. Be foolish, speak nonsense, explore new ideas, dare to be different, and all the while be accepted and loved for who you are. To my mind, that’s the goal, that’s what the human spirit longs for, for true community, for The Kingdom of God, for the Kingdom of Heaven.

It’s my hope and prayer, that we can all grasp and share in this vision together, and even model it for a world so divided by ignorance and animosity. Let this place be a beacon of love to a hurting, and unheard world I pray.

Amen.


In Yeats’ poem he paints a picture of a world unravelling, a world unmooring itself from its own origins, becoming increasingly frantic, and chaotic. A world at war, a world in which genocide is common place, a world concluding.

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W. B Yeats was a mystic; he dabbled in ritualised magic, and was captivated by Irish legends. Part of his mystical perspective was the idea that history is cyclical – 2000 year loops – the birth of Christ, the subsequent unravelling, a lamenting call for salvation, surely the Second Coming is at hand!

And yet, despite the longing for Christian redemption, something more hideous comes, the beast slouching towards Bethlehem. I take Yeats’ meaning to be in this rather cryptic poem a deep pessimism. A resigned acceptance, or sense of deep uncertainty, to the terrors of the moment, ‘mere anarchy’, and the greater terrors to come. In other words, Yeats is showing us the future; there is a fork in the road, on one hand the way of the Kingdom, on the other a greatest sort of evil flourishes, and Yeats, so dismayed by the horror of his age, even the horizon is blackened for him.

Unitarians have a mixed or uneasy connection to the prayer Jesus taught us, the Lord’s Prayer. Do we tolerate it as a nod to our Free Christian heritage? Does it conjure for us baggage from a past life, where religion emotionally manipulated us? Does it, to us, represent a cosmological worldview which is quite simply wrong? Is it not perilously close to a creedal statement, chanting in unison truths which are not our truths? Does it not affirm the patriarchal order; the male is up, the woman down? Does it not paint a picture of a meek people, waiting for redemption, waiting for the Kingdom to elbow its way into our lives?

We all come to Lord’s Prayer in our own way, with our own thoughts, issues, and baggage. I think a lot of our hang-ups arise from not so much the words themselves, but rather how that prayer is understood by Christians out there.

So, let us briefly consider this prayer and its patter. And notice that in some ways it mirrors everything we do here on a Sunday morning. We start by lighting our chalice, and recognising the presence of the divine, and that means something slightly different to all of us.

Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.

The language used here is personal; parental. This may be a hurdle right from the outset, but I think the purpose, if we can look past the gender specific language, is to open our most intimate selves to the divine.

Thy Kingdom come. 
Thy will be done in earth, 
As it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us. 

We ask for the Kingdom to come. Yeats’ fork in the road, a great evil or a great good. The sudden breaking in of Christ, the second coming! It’s understandable: faced with immediate horror, we long for a magical levelling. Where there is great injustice, we dream of a great saviour.

I think most Unitarians would struggle with the idea of the clouds parting, and Jesus arriving on his white horse. When we think of the Kingdom then, do we not think of the incremental arrival of the good? Do we not think of true community, good community?

To me this is what ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ means. It’s an optimistic participation in the arrival of community without injustice, without dysfunctionality, built upon a foundation of love. Our prayer ‘Thy Kingdom come’ is a foolish prayer, because it dares an optimism which is beyond reason. It’s a prayer, not simply to be said, but to be lived. When love underpins our actions the Kingdom is present. And all the more so when love is in the character of a community. This makes the next part of the prayer all the more clear.

Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us. 

In loving community let us nourish one another, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Hold one another is good regard, and bless one another, or to put that in more Christians terms, be Christ to one another. And do not let relational dysfunctionality get the best of us. Forgive those who have hurt us, and wish them well.

And lead us not into temptation, 
But deliver us from evil.

Help us stay true to the way of love. And all this brings me back to that precocious medical student - Mr Thomas Aikenhead. Thomas Aikenhead talked about that natural desire of humanity to seek after truth in a shameless fashion, to seek for it like we seek hidden treasure, to give everything in pursuit of the pearl of great price.

The truth that Aikenhead discovered was not in any formula of words, but in a vision of friends gathered around a fire, sharing in truly open fellowship, sharing in a passion for life. Being foolish, speaking nonsense, exploring new ideas, daring to be different, and all the while being accepted and loved for who you are

Let Thy Kingdom come. Let us be a beacon of love to a hurting, and unheard world. Let us embody an expression of the way we hope the world to become. Being the change we want to see: an example of when people come together, and share their lives in love and service.

Amen.