Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity

The scene of Joseph weeping with his brothers must be one of the most moving scenes in the whole Hebrew Bible. Joseph has been thrown down a well, battered, bruised, sold into slavery, and pursued to prison before being raised to the highest rank in Egypt. By this end of the story, he is Pharaoh’s longstanding vicegerent, and his brothers have unknowingly come to him for grain amidst famine. Now, their Father is dead, and surely they fear what must have seemed almost inevitable repercussions. But Joseph wept when they spoke to him, and his brothers responded with tears, heart speaking to heart. These estranged siblings connect in a different language to that of revenge, using a totally distinctive grammar which does not rely on the need to ‘get even.’

In the first two centuries of the Christian faith, St Matthew’s Gospel is cited more than any other Gospel. This is the text which has the Beatitudes right at its centre – blessed are the merciful, the meek, the pure in heart. Mercy looms large in Matthew’s moral universe, and it pervades much of his Gospel. The popularity of this Gospel text in those early centuries is at least in part because it provides a blueprint for what Christian communities should look like and how they should behave. What are our values? What are our priorities? How do we deal with contested questions? These are areas which so many institutions, including our own, explore on a regular basis – and they don’t always seem simple to answer – but the outline of a Christian response to questions of identity, value and behaviour, is found straightforwardly in the Gospel.

In the verses immediately preceding the passage we heard read today, Jesus tells his followers something truly remarkable which is a bit of a game-changer for the way in which they should consider their life together and its habits. ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’, he says. These passages in Matthew’s gospel are about how to structure the Christian community and how to reconcile those who have fallen away from it. In his teaching, Jesus goes in a different direction from the usual language of rabbinic or philosophical instruction and shows his followers the real context of their decision-making. When they meet in Jesus’s name, he is with them, among them, in their midst. So, their judgements and their actions are to be made in the presence of Jesus, around whom the Church gathers in discernment, prayer, worship, and action.

So, when Peter comes and asks Jesus how many times he should forgive another member of the Church who sins against him, Jesus gives Peter the answer of Jubilee, echoing the establishment of the principle of the jubilee year in the book of Leviticus. Jesus is the jubilee. Jesus is the person and the act of supreme reconciliation. And if Jesus is in the midst of them whenever they are making moral and ethical judgements about who is in and who is out, who is forgiven, and how often, the answer they must give is that of jubilee. Seventy-seven times. An endless pattern of liberation and reconciliation which sets people free from patterns of their own and other peoples’ making, not as an exception but as the norm. As Joseph knew, this is the kind of reconciliation which speaks the overwhelming language of tears, because sometimes words alone simply don’t cut it.

Jesus uses a very specific construction at the end of today’s Gospel. ‘if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart’, he tells them. This an antidote to the kind of forgive-and-forget mateyness which pervades so much of our own cultural narratives about what forgiveneness actually is. Jesus’s teaching takes seriously the reality of pain, woundedness, those breaches in relationships of trust and integrity which sometimes make it feel impossible to start again when we have been hurt or wronged. The only organ which can do this is the heart – certainly not just the head or the gut alone. In the language of the bible, the heart represents the deepest level of the human psyche, where will, emotion and intellect all sit together. The heart represents our truest self. So forgiveness is a move of true agency, decision, which needs to be worked at from the deepest place in which we know our own humanity, our own frailty, our own created, gifted potential all held together.

The reason we need to learn how to behave in this way, and for that to become quite natural, is because when we are gathered together in Jesus’s name, Jesus is among us, teaching, reconciling, liberating. Jesus is a shrewd teacher in this passage from St Matthew, showing profound insight into the human condition. He understands human propensity all too well, so he knows that only the whole heart can do this work, and that both individual communities can only practice this well when they are gathered around his teaching and his example. That kind of Christian forgiveness may yet again be the distinctive thing which Christians can offer in a world which is churned up by cycles of revenge and dissonance.

It is important to point out at this stage that what Jesus is outlining here is not some sort of karma – there are plenty of situations in history and in our world today where those who routinely abuse others or preside over unjust systems appear not to suffer themselves. But today’s gospel shows us that you cannot wreak injustice and then demand justice for yourself, because the whole new world which is coming to life around Jesus is one in which communal ethics matter, and where mercy plays a foundational role. Those who live perpetrating injustice are living a kind of half-life, locked in by revenge and a need to control. Matthew’s message is that in and through Jesus it is no longer necessary to live that kind of half-life, because his moral universe is life set free. Jesus is in the midst of those marked out by his name, and it is Jesus’s resetting of those dynamics of mercy and belonging which liberates us. All final judgement belongs to God alone, and it is clear across Jesus’s teaching that those who will be forgiven are those who learned how to forgive.

The popularity of Matthew’s Gospel in those earliest centuries of the church’s life tells us just how essential this kind of vision is to establishing a commonly-held Christian moral framework. Today’s reading is designed to encourage repentance. Jesus sets out the basis of our accountability to God and to one-another. Forgiveness must mark out the community of the forgiven. We should be in no doubt about how difficult this can be, and about the power of those forces within and around us which encourage us to harbour those little resentments and temptations to revenge in ourselves and in our communities. But with Jesus in our midst, conscious of his presence and his challenge to us, our hearts, too, can learn that profound and overwhelming gift of mercy, which an elderly Joseph once taught his brothers through his tears.