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Sermon: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 11th September 2011
St Aidan's Anglican Church West Epping 8:30 am
Readings: Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-14; Matthew 18:21-35
In the understanding of salvation history, Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea is moment when Israel became a people and, more particularly, God’s people. Just as the Passover gives them a new identity as the people who practice this ceremony, so the memory of the Red Sea incident binds them together as the people for whom God acted in this decisive way at a critical moment. Some historians have suggested that the slaves who escaped from Egypt were not particularly closely related in either ethnicity or custom. If we accept some degree of fact in the tales of the relationship of the people made up the tribes of Israel, there is no doubt that the Red Sea experience gave the people a sense of shared identity and purpose above and beyond a tribal memory of distant shared parentage.
The central feature of this experience is the way God’s action bursts into a situation that is clearly, by any earthly definition, hopeless, and transforms it into a situation of hope. There is no way humanly imaginable that the Israelites, pinned at the seashore, can survive the attack of the Egyptian forces: they do not have the numbers, the weapons, the resources, the strategy. In short, they do not have any of the things ordinary human action would require to hope to survive. Their liberation, therefore, is not in any way to be taken as their own accomplishment. This is God’s doing, and God’s alone. As Moses says to the people just a few verses before this reading begins, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still”. The Israelites’ new identity realized in this experience, therefore, is to be the people for whom God has acted in this liberating way.
Yet even with the story’s emphasis placed so squarely on God’s action, it is not without its element of human action. God instructs Moses to stretch out his hand over the sea, and it is by that signal that the sea retreats for the people and then returns to drown the pursuers. Even an action so far beyond human ability as God’s movement of the sea for the people’s escape must be actively shown in some intentional human gesture.
The image illustrates how the acting out of God’s plans which constitutes the world around us, both the purposes we recognize and the purposes that are beyond our understanding, is everywhere always already moving toward liberation and peace and mutual well being for all creatures. We become conscious participants in that acting out of God’s plans when we use such aims in our actions, no matter how small. In this way we live into an identity as the people for whom and in whom God acts in decisive ways in hopeful transformation toward the liberation of the world.
This mornings Gospel reading continues the theme of forgiveness in the church, picking up from last week’s account of Jesus’ procedure for settling disputes. In Matthew’s gospel, the parable of the unforgiving servant is presented as Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question about how often he should forgive. The parable is therefore a model for church members to follow. Just as the servant was forgiven by the king and therefore should forgive his fellow servant, so should all Christians, forgiven their sins by God, forgive their fellow believers for offenses committed within the believing community. Important to this role as a model for copying is the parable’s sense of proportion. Given the immense debt forgiven the servant, the small debt owed by the fellow servant should seem insignificant and, in fact, very easy for the servant to forgive.
In the same way, we are encouraged to understand that the immensity of God’s forgiveness of our sins should make any sin believers might commit against each other insignificant by comparison and therefore easy to forgive. The larger forgiveness by God creates an environment in which the smaller forgiveness’s between Christians are encouraged and empowered. In this sense, the forgiveness shown is much more than a kind of moral quid pro quo. “I have given so much you should give the same!”
In the parable, the king’s act of forgiveness does not simply clear the ledger of the servant. This act creates a new relationship between them. The debt was about to destroy the relationship, insofar as the king was prepared to sell the servant and his family, effectively removing him from all further relationship with the king and the king’s household. The act of forgiveness restores the servant to relationship, and more than that, creates a new level of relationship that should be characterized by a degree of personal generosity between them and, indeed, within the entire household.
This suggests that God’s forgiveness of sins is not to be understood as simply “getting us off the hook” of punishment, but is in fact the creation of a new relationship of personal generosity in our own relationships. In the parable, the servant stands in this new relationship but does not consciously choose to enact it, and that leads to his ultimate punishment. By contrast, we who hear the parable are invited to be conscious of the generosity of God and to bear witness to it by embodying that characteristic in our own relationships. In this way Peter’s question is answered. We should forgive as we have been forgiven by God.
This parable can also speak to a larger issue, beyond the particular context of Peter’s question and church order. Jesus’ image of the king forgiving the servant’s debt speaks to the whole theology of atonement. I believe that parable gives a way around the traditional “penal substitution” theory of atonement. Penal substitution is the notion that God’s justice demanded punishment for sin, and that punishment was borne by Jesus on our behalf, before God’s mercy could effect forgiveness for the rest of humanity. How could God be so internally divided as to demand punishment before being able to forgive? How could forgiveness that depends on punishment really count as forgiveness at all? I believe that this parable answers those questions in a notion of atonement that is altogether different.
Seeing the debt as a barrier between himself and the servant, the king in the parable simply removes the barrier. He does not arrange for the servant to pay the debt gradually, as it were in instalments. He does not arrange for someone else, such as his son the prince, to pay the debt on behalf of the servant. He just cancels the debt, he makes up for what is missing out of his own generosity, he forgives and thus restores relationship.
If this is indeed what “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to”, as Jesus introduces the parable, then it invites reflection on the whole theology of atonement. In this understanding, God does not demand payment, not even payment from Jesus, as the condition of restoration of relationship. God acts out of God’s own generosity to forgive sin, to overcome barriers to relationship, to restore unity. And, if that is how God acts, then it is in turn how God calls believers to act. Forgiveness comes forth, not out of fear of punishment, nor even out a sense of one’s own unworthiness before the great sacrifice made on one’s behalf, but out of a deep sense of gratitude to divine generosity and a sincere desire to embody such generosity in one’s own human acts.
This interpretation of the atonement is a far more empowering of free and joyful relationships than the traditional penal substitution theory, as well as far more in keeping with Jesus’ own teaching.
This sermon based upon material found at www.processandfaith.org/resources/lectionary-commentary/yeara/2011-09-11/proper-19a prepared by Paul S. Nancarrow