This year, at Messy Church, we are going to be thinking, with the children and young people who attend, about the things we do and say in church. At this afternoon’s session, we will be thinking about the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught us and that his followers have been teaching one another and repeating in hundreds of different languages, across hundreds of different countries, for over 2000 years.
At the centre of that prayer lies the idea of forgiveness. ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’: I wonder how many times each of us here today has prayed those words? And I wonder how often we have paused to consider how those words might be connected to the rest of the prayer that Jesus taught us. If we do stop to think about it, I think that the Lord’s Prayer makes it clear that forgiveness lies at the very heart of our faith, because it is in the hard daily work of seeking forgiveness and forgiving others that we strive to bring God’s kingdom to life, on earth as in heaven; it is by acknowledging our need for forgiveness, our propensity to mess things up, that we try to avoid being led into temptation, and to allow God to deliver us from evil. Forgiving and seeking forgiveness, in other words, is kingdom work; it is part and parcel of following Jesus.
And the story that we have just heard in our Gospel reading illustrates this very clearly. It has been prompted by Peter, who has come to Jesus with a question. ‘So, Lord’, Peter has asked Jesus, ‘if someone wrongs me, how many times should I forgive them?’. So… what do you think? How many times should we forgive someone who does something to annoy or hurt us? What if they keep on doing it? Do we have to keep on forgiving? Twice, three times… seven times?
Well, you might be surprised at what Jesus says to Peter when he asks if he should forgive someone as many as seven times. ‘Why stop at seven?’, Jesus replies. ‘Why not seventy-seven, or even – as some translations have it – seventy times seven?’ We are meant, Jesus tells us, to just keep on forgiving; to forgive for as long as it takes; to forgive and to forgive and to forgive until we simply lose count.
But I wonder if Peter had something quite specific in mind when he asked Jesus whether he should forgive someone as many as seven times? Let’s think for a moment about that number. Right at the start of the Bible we find the story of how God created the world and everything in it – light and darkness, the sun and moon and stars, the land and sea, the birds and fish and animals and people. We are told that God worked for six days and then, on the seventh day, God rested, and that day came to be known as the Sabbath, a day of rest.
And because of this story of God resting on the seventh day, the number seven came to be seen as a particularly significant number in Jewish thought. One of the most important ways in which this was expressed was in the idea of the ‘Sabbath year’. Jewish Law prescribed that Jews should work on their land for six years, and then leave the land fallow to rest and recuperate for the seventh year. The land was to get a rest, in just the same way that God rested on the seventh day of Creation. Not only this, but after seven-times-seven years (that is, every fiftieth year) there was to be a year of Jubilee, a year in which all debts should be entirely written off, slaves should be freed, and all property returned to its original owner. In our reading from the Old Testament this morning we heard how God saved the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. God set his people free, and promised them their own land in order for them to be able to live and prosper and flourish in it… but not in order that one person might become rich at the expense of another, not in order that one person might ever again enslave another or profit from another’s labour without repaying them. The Jubilee was intended as a new beginning – almost like going back through the waters of the Red Sea all over again. It was meant as a corrective to greed and corruption, a complete ‘reset’, a new start for society.
I wonder, then, whether the thought of the Jubilee year is in the back of Peter’s mind when he asks Jesus his question about forgiveness. ‘What?’, he seems to be saying, ‘You want us to treat every year – every day – like a Jubilee year, a seventh (or seven-times-seventh) year, a fresh start, again and again and again?’ And in response, Jesus tells his story.
A king decides to bring his accounts up to date with his servants. Maybe, then, that king is preparing for a Jubilee year. Maybe he wants to settle all his accounts with his slaves before releasing them. We don’t know for sure, but we certainly see the king showing compassion as he forgives the debt and frees the slave, even though his debt is enormous – the equivalent of millions of pounds! The king embraces the Jubilee ideal of returning society to a state of equality where no human being is worth any more or less than another. But the slave himself? Well, he doesn’t seem to get it at all. He has been freed. He is fine. Never mind anyone else. He uses his new-found freedom for his own selfish ends, and fails to repay the mercy shown to him with mercy and forgiveness of his own. Although his fellow-slave owes him a trivial amount compared to the amount that the king has just forgiven him, he insists on repayment… only to end up in prison, presumably with plenty of time – maybe until the next Jubilee – to think about what he should have done…
The moral of this story seems simple: forgive, forgive, forgive… whoever you are and however big or small the debt or injury, be prepared to forgive it. But I wonder if perhaps there isn’t a bit more to this story, if we look beneath the surface. The contrast, in this story, it seems to me, is not just between the king who forgives and the slave who does not, but between the king who, by forgiving, seeks to change the world (to ‘settle accounts’ on a grand scale) and the slave who selfishly seeks only to change his own lot in life.
And this brings us back to where we started: to the Lord’s Prayer and the importance of forgiving the sins of others and seeking forgiveness for our own sins as kingdom virtues. The story reminds us that there is a deep connection between ‘thy kingdom come’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses’. It reminds us that forgiveness – sought for ourselves and given to others – has potentially massive repercussions. It is more than just personal; forgiveness has the potential to change the world, to make the world a better place.
When Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he teaches them to say ‘Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’. When he tells them his stories, he often starts, as he does in today’s story, by saying ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like this…’. We could do worse than to listen carefully to his stories, and then to pray his prayer, and to do everything we possibly can to make the world we live in a bit more like the one he described for us.