Trinity 16

Trinity 16 2023

 

Jonah 3.10 – end of 4, Matthew 20.1-16

 

Today’s readings were both great stories, but puzzling stories too. From the Old Testament we heard part of the story of Jonah, which is mostly famous because of the whale in the middle of it, or big fish, to be more accurate to the original Hebrew. But that’s only one episode, and it all leads up to the passage we heard today, the very end of the tale – the only book in the Bible which ends with a question, as it happens.

 

The story of Jonah was probably originally an oral folk tale – it has that sort of flavour to it – but whoever wrote it down in the form we have it now, probably several centuries later than the time it was set in, crafted it very carefully to convey a thought-provoking and challenging message, in that final question which God asks Jonah  “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?”.

 

God had sent Jonah to preach to the people of Nineveh, th capital city of the brutal Assyrian Empire, but he had initially refused. The Assyrians were the Israelite’s worst nightmare. They’d conquered Israel and treated its people with great brutality. It was easy to understand why Jonah, an Israelite, didn’t want to go there. For a start, he was terrified of the Assyrians. They weren’t likely to take kindly to being told what to do by the likes of him. But if he was worried about what might happen if they didn’t repent, he was even more worried about what might happen if they did. He knew his God. He knew he had a regrettable tendency to love people who didn’t, by his reckoning, deserve to be loved. He knew that if they repented God would forgive them, and he didn’t want that to happen.

 

So he tried to run away from God’s call, on a ship heading as far from Nineveh as possible. But Jonah ended up being thrown into the sea, and that’s where the whale came in, rescuing him from drowning by swallowing him whole. When the whale spewed him out onto the shore, Jonah gave in, and went to Nineveh after all, though against his better judgement, and with a very heavy heart.  

 

Reluctantly, he began to preach to the Ninevites, and everyone repented, in true folkloric style – in sackcloth and ashes, fasting from food and drink, everyone from the king right down to the donkeys and cattle. And God forgives them.

 

A happy ending? Not for Jonah. He was furious. How dare God forgive his enemies, people who have hurt and oppressed Jonah’s people? But for God it was clear cut – the Ninevites were just as much his children as the Israelites. He couldn’t help loving them and wanting the best for them. He loved them because they needed his love, not because they had earned it or deserved it. As soon as they turn back to him he was standing ready to meet them.

 

In the Gospels Jesus tells a story with the same message. A vineyard owner hires workers – some are hired in the morning and work all day; some are hired at the last minute. Yet each is paid the same. In the Greek it is a denarius, and the significance of that is that a denarius was the daily wage for a labourer. It wasn’t riches, but it was enough. If you had a denarius in your pocket at the end of the day you had what you needed to feed your family and live with reasonable dignity. In modern parlance we would call it a living wage. Those who have worked through the heat of the day are scandalised. How can the owner think this is fair? But his point is that this it is his money, and he hasn’t done them out of anything by hiring these other workers. They have what they need – that precious denarius - it’s no skin off their noses if he gives the others the same. They have families to feed too. If he wants to provide a living wage to as many people as he can, what is that to them?

 

But they can’t cope with that, and most people probably instinctively sympathise, as Jesus knew they would. He is being deliberately provocative here, touching that sore spot in most of us which equates financial reward with personal value. If you are paid more, you are worth more, so if someone beneath you on the professional ladder gets an increase, you should too.

 

Of course, this raises all sorts of interesting questions about the way we think about pay, and material things more generally, and those are worth pondering. In effect this employer is providing a Universal Basic Income for his workers, a living wage, still an idea that many find hard to get their heads around today. But you could argue that, as an idea, it went right back to the story of the Exodus from Egypt, when God had provided manna in the wilderness for the people to eat, which they could gather each day, but only enough for that day – any more would go mouldy.

 

 I’m sure Jesus expected his hearers, steeped in those Old Testament stories, to pick up the resonances. But I don’t think he was just talking about money and food here. He is talking about the love of God, just as the writer of the book of Jonah was.

 

When things get tough, it’s easy to succumb to mean-minded attitudes to others. If we think there is a scarcity of something our human tendency is to ration it, and that means deciding who deserves it and who doesn’t.  But these Bible stories tell us that  God’s love doesn’t need to be rationed, even if we could do so. God can love whoever God wants to love, even brutal Ninevites, or the sinners Jesus was often berated for keeping company with – it won’t mean there is any less love available for anyone else.

 

“You get what you deserve” is a deeply ingrained human belief. We want it to be true, because it makes us feel in control, convincing us that we can earn God’s blessing if we work hard enough or do the right thing, whatever that might be. It makes sense to us on an instinctive level. But the wonderful truth of the Gospel is that it doesn’t make sense to God. He looks at us – all of us, the good, the bad, the rich, the poor, the hard-working rule-keepers and the hapless, Jonnie-come-latelies who turn up at the last minute, grubby and chaotic – and simply sees us all as his children, made in his image, his children, hungry and thirsty, his children, alone or afraid, his children, weighed down with guilt. And seeing our need, he meets it.

 

The key to Jesus’ story, the key to the story of Jonah, the key to understanding the Bible’s message about God generally, is that denarius, the freely given, undeserved gift of God which we sometimes call grace. “Give us this day our daily bread”, we pray – not me, but us, all of us. We pray it not only so that our stomachs may be full, but that our hearts and souls might have what they hunger for as well. God calls us to hold out our hands for what we need, and be thankful for it, and to make sure that we are not getting in the way of others receiving it either.

Amen

Trinity 15: Forgiveness

 

Gen 50.15-21, Matthew 18.21-35

 

There aren’t that many Bible stories that seem to be really familiar to people who don’t come to church these days. Even those who do come to church are often a bit hazy. The birth of Jesus, Noah’s Ark, perhaps – but the story we heard part of in our first reading often lurks at least on the edge of people’s consciousness, and that’s mainly thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s the tail end of the story of Joseph, of technicolour dreamcoat fame, and his highly dysfunctional family.

 

Joseph is the favourite of his father’s twelve sons – the special coat he gives him is a sign of that. It turns out to be a very unwise gift. Infuriated by the way their father treats Joseph, his jealous brothers sell him into slavery, telling his father that he’s been killed by wild animals. They present him with that dreamcoat, torn and bloodied, as proof. But many years later, to their horror, they come face to face with Joseph in Egypt where they have come to try to find food during a famine. Far from sinking into obscurity, or being worked to death as slave he has, by the help of God, risen to become Pharaoh’s right hand man, the controller of the food supplies that they are hoping to buy.

 

They don’t recognise Joseph at first. He eventually reveals himself to them, but only after he has made them bring his beloved younger brother Benjamin down to Egypt, so Joseph knows he is safe. After all, if they had tried to dispose of one brother, who is to say they won’t do the same to another one too? The revelation that this Egyptian big wig is Joseph terrifies them, but much to their surprise he welcomes and forgives them.  

 

It seems like a happy ending, but there’s a sting in the tail, and the passage we heard today reveals it. Even after that initial reunion, the wounds still run deep in Joseph’s brothers. It is hard carrying around such a load of guilt, their awful shared secret, year after year, decade after decade. Surely, sooner or later, Joseph will want to even the score and get his own back? When Jacob, their father, dies, all those old anxieties resurface.  

 

Joseph’s brothers insist that Jacob had told them on his deathbed to tell Joseph to forgive them – these were his last words, and last words matter. In fact, if you look at the text you find that this wasn’t so at all. It is another bit of manoeuvring from this manipulative bunch of men. They can’t believe that they have been forgiven, that they are safe. Their fear gets in the way. They know that they wouldn’t have forgiven themselves if they’d been in Joseph’s place, but Joseph names their fear and reassures them “Have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones. In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.”

 

Forgiveness is rarely straightforward. It often takes a long time, and it doesn’t necessarily look the way we think it will – a slate wiped clean, a happy ending. As I said last week, love – and the forgiveness that is a part of love – doesn’t mean that we should put ourselves, or others, in harm’s way. Joseph doesn’t forgive his brothers until Benjamin has been brought to him – he needs to know he is safe. Forgiving someone doesn’t necessarily mean we have to be close to them. Nor does it mean we will suddenly feel all warm towards them. Forgiveness isn’t an emotion. It is an action, a decision, a commitment.  

 

Genuine forgiveness sets others free, rather than shackling them to us emotionally, and therefore sets us free to. It allows them to grow and change, and we can then grow and change to. Forgiveness means not letting what went wrong between us define the rest of our lives – or theirs. 

 

It’s much easier to say it than to do it, of course, and it’s especially hard to give others that space to grow and to be, if we have never experienced that for ourselves.

 

Through all the terrible ups and downs of his life, Joseph has learned to trust in the generous love of God – he’s had to, because he hasn’t had the power to help himself. He’s discovered that God is with him wherever he is, even in a prison cell, with his life in danger. He knows he is safe in God’s hands, and that enables him to be generous with his brothers, in a way they can’t even imagine.

 

Generosity is an essential part of forgiveness – a word with “give” right there in the middle of it. But we can’t give what we haven’t received, and Joseph’s brothers don’t ever seem to have known – or let themselves know - what it feels like to be securely loved. They grasp and manipulate, as if it is all down to them to ensure their place in the world. The play games – often very dangerous ones. They are constantly calculating the odds instead of trusting and being open.

 

There’s an attempt at calculation going on in the Gospel reading too.  “How many times should I forgive?” asks Peter.” Seven times?” “No, seventy-seven times”, says Jesus. Some translations read “seventy times seven”. Either way, the point is that the number is too big to keep track of – if you tried, you’d soon find you couldn’t remember whether this was the 37^th or 38^th time you’d forgiven, and you’d have to go back to the beginning and start again. “So” - Jesus is saying “ don’t try to keep track - Just be generous to one another, as God is generous to you.”

 

The story he tells is an exploration of that. When we forgive, it’s like cancelling a debt we have come to realise is unpayable. If someone has hurt us, there is no way they can wind back time and unhurt us again. Words that have been said can’t be unsaid. When someone cuts us, there is always going to be a scar, however well it heals. However much we punish others, that won’t change. When the king in the story Jesus tells forgives the first man’s debt, which is unimaginably huge, he knows is a cost to him. He has lost that money – a lot of money – and he’ll never get it back. But he decides that the future is more important than the past.

 

The tragedy is that the man he’s forgiven doesn’t understand or value the gift he has been given. Perhaps he tells himself that it’s his own cleverness that has persuaded the king; thinking like that puts him back in control of the situation, which, in reality, he isn’t. Maybe throwing his weight around with the fellow slave who owes him money – a far smaller amount than he did – helps him bolster his sense of power again after the humiliation of having to plead for his life.  But the king is not impressed, and the result is that he is rearrested, and after all, condemned to be tortured “until the debt is paid” which will be never, since it is so huge. I don’t think we need to take this literally as a picture of God – parables aren’t meant to be read like that – but it reminds us of what happens when resentment, fear and lack of trust take hold of us. We suffer just as much, if not more, than the person we have failed to forgive.  

 

The stories we have heard today are tough ones to get our heads around.  They challenge us to forgive, but also, and perhaps more importantly they challenge us to ask ourselves whether we know that we have been forgiven, whether we are loved and secure.

 

They challenge us to step out of the world of “don’t get mad, get even”, and to accept that some debts are unpayable, including ours, and that we, like Joseph, need to learn to draw on the inexhaustible love of God, so that we can find the healing and the hope he wants for us and share that with those around us too.

Amen

Trinity 14

 

Romans 13.8-10, Matthew 18.15-20

 

When I was in my late teens I had a Saturday job in Littlewoods cafe, clearing tables. It was hard, dirty work, and the mess people left behind them was sometimes phenomenal. I don’t think I will ever forget the smell of plates of cold steak pie mixed with fag ash from the ciggies people had stubbed out in their leftovers – it was back in the days when you could smoke in cafes. The whole experience left me with a lasting admiration for people who clean up after others full-time, long-term, and who are so often unnoticed and unappreciated. If that’s you, whatever they pay you, it isn’t enough.

 

But the pay, of course, was the point. The one and only real joy of the job was clocking off at the end of the day – literally stamping my card in the time clock as we did back then, and collecting my wages in a small brown envelope. I’d done my bit. No one could expect any more of me – I didn’t have to scrape one more plate, wipe one more table. I could go home, put the uniform in the washing machine, have a shower and forget about it all. I’d kept my side of the contract, fulfilled my obligations, and the money in the small brown envelope – meagre though it was – confirmed that.

 

Human beings are contractually minded people. We don’t like being in debt to others, feeling obliged to them. It’s not just about work, but also about things like gift-giving and doing favours for one another. It’s embarrassing if someone gives you an expensive Christmas present when all you’ve got for them is a pair of socks. It’s much easier to ask someone to help us if we feel they “owe us one” because we’ve helped them out in the past. You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.

 

St Paul says “Owe no one anything except to love one another”, in our first reading. It’s part of his letter to the Christian community in Rome, and it comes straight after a passage where he’s been talking about the importance of fulfilling civic obligations, paying taxes, keeping the law, respecting lawful government. The Early Christians sometimes thought that  since they were citizens of the Kingdom of God, they could ignore their responsibilities as citizens of Rome, or Athens, or wherever they happened to live. Paul disagreed. They were honour bound to pay their dues to their society, to play their part.  That’s what he means when he says they should “owe no one anything”. They have obligations which they should discharge.

 

But there was one debt, he said, that could never be paid in full, one obligation that was never discharged, which they would always be owing, and that was the obligation to love one another. Love wasn’t about contracts, he was telling them. It wasn’t a matter of mutual back-scratching. It wasn’t something people could earn or deserve, or that they could ever consider they had done enough of.

How many people is it reasonable for us to care about and treat kindly? Can we say “I’ll be loving towards the first ten people I meet today, but after that, I can do what I want” Can we claim that our contract only says we have to love people between 9 and 5, with Bank Holiday Mondays off? No. Paul is telling us that the calling to love others never ends, just as God’s love for us never ends.  

 

That’s a challenging thought, and it’s important to be clear about what it means. It doesn’t mean behaving like a doormat or ignoring things that need confronting. If we love someone we take them seriously. We care about what they do. If we see something that concerns us, of course we should speak up, even if that means conflict. It doesn’t mean staying around people who are hurting or abusing us, either. Sometimes we need to remove ourselves from people for our own safety, and if that’s the case we should do so.  But we are still called to regard them as children of God, made in his image, however deeply buried that image seems to be. We’re not given licence to write anyone off, to say they don’t matter. It can sometimes be a struggle to work out what love looks like in relationships that have gone wrong, but that’s the struggle we’re called to. We may not be part of their future, or they ours – and that may be the best thing, for them and for us, but that doesn’t mean that they are beyond the love of God.

 

In today’s Gospel reading we can see how that might work out in practice. It’s not a hard and fast guide, but it points us to the basic attitude we should have to one another.  If someone sins against you – does something wrong, says something mean – first point it out to them privately, if you can. Sometimes that’s all it takes to repair the damage. If that doesn’t work, take someone else. If that doesn’t work, you may need to go to a bigger group, to have others arbitrate. If that doesn’t work, Jesus says “let that person be to you as a Gentile or a tax-collector”. That last bit sounds a bit grim, until we remember how Jesus actually treated Gentiles and tax-collectors. While many in his society cut them off, and wouldn’t mix with them, he welcomed them to come and follow him. The door was open, if they wanted to walk through it.

 

What we do and what we say matters, the reading tells us. Our words and actions change people’s lives - for better or for worse - in ways we may never be aware of. We have more power than we think. We can bind people, tying them up in knots of resentment and anger, constantly going over old hurts. Or we can loose them from those bonds, recognising the hurt they have caused, but letting them, and ourselves, move on to new things. They might change and grow; they might not, but we have set them free to live their own lives, and that sets us free in the process. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. That’s why we need God’s help, which is just what the end of the reading promises.  

 

Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them, says Jesus. Those words are often used in the context of worship – God is there even if there aren’t many people – but it takes on a different meaning altogether when we read it in this context. Jesus isn’t just present where two or three are praying together in peace and harmony; he is also there when two or three are fighting like cats and dogs, struggling to come to some agreement. He is present to help us see through our differences to the image of God in each of us.

 

Owe no one anything, except to love. Love isn’t a contract; it’s a limitless gift, given to us by God. He is like a father, who welcomes back the prodigal son who has wasted the money he’s been given, with generosity that seemed ridiculous to those around him, and no guarantee that the son won’t go and do the same all over again. He is like a shepherd, who leaves 99 sheep in the wilderness to look for the one that is lost, or a woman who throws a party for her friends when she finds the coin she’s lost, even though the party probably cost as much as the coin was worth. The Gospels tell us that unlike  money, time and energy, there’s no danger that the love of God will run out, and this is the love that is his gift to us. We don’t need to ration it. It grows in the giving, so we can share it generously with anyone who needs it, and if we do so, we will find that there is always more than we can ask or imagine still to draw on.

Amen