Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
17^th of September 2023

Exodus 14:19-31
Matthew 18: 21-35

Today we are anticipating the twenty-first of September, the International Day of Prayer for Peace, inaugurated by the World Council of Churches in 2004. This week is also the World Council of Churches’ Week of Peace in Palestine and Israel, in which Christians are asked to promote a just peace in Palestine and Israel. We are joining with millions of others in Australia and across the world in praying for peace throughout the world. The lectionary, rather than offering any of the many descriptions of peace the Scriptures contain, has instead given us the death of the Egyptian army as they chase the escaping Israelites across the sea. While today’s story begins with the Lord keeping the armies of Egypt and Israel separate with a pillar of fire and cloud, it quickly moves on to the Lord using Moses to divide the sea so that the people of Israel can walk across it dry-shod; clogging the wheels of the Egyptian chariots; and again using Moses to return the sea to its normal depth: ‘As the Egyptians fled before it, the LORD tossed the Egyptians into the sea. The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.’

There is peace of a sort at the end of the encounter; the people of Israel are no longer threatened by the Egyptian army. But it reminds me of the Roman historian Tacitus quoting the Scottish Calgacus on the Roman Empire: ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. And the one making the desert, wiping out the entire army of Pharoah, is ‘the Lord’. As with last week’s story of the murder of the Egyptian firstborn we are left asking whether we are expected to worship a murderous God.

To repeat what I said last week, of course we do not worship a genocidal god. We are reading a story, thousands of years old, that reminds us that peace is not merely the absence of conflict. (Nor, despite the delightful picture book I just read, is it about personal quiet time.) When I was a university student one of the rallying cries of the Student Christian Movement was ‘no peace without justice’. I may even have had that on a t-shirt. The story of the Exodus, with all its anger and death, reminds us that the God of the Bible is never neutral or indifferent and that God’s vengeance reflects God’s zeal for justice. We do not need to believe in a god who kills off the entire Egyptian army to believe that God cares about injustice and that God’s peace, shalom, must include justice.

Today’s reading from the Gospel according to Matthew is much more eirenic, at least until we are told that an unforgiving slave is going to be tortured for the rest of his life and Jesus says, ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ Maybe Jesus knew that those of us who belong to the church need exaggeration to get the point. The fourth of Jesus’ five discourses in the Gospel according to Matthew is made up entirely of teachings about life in ‘the church’, ekklesia in Greek. We had previously heard that the ekklesia was going to be built on the rock that was Peter, ‘and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it’. (Matthew 16:18) This second and last time the word is used in the Gospel Jesus’ focus is on the difficulties of church life, not the ekklesia’s strength. This should not be a surprise. The church is not a family in which people are held together by ties of blood or marriage. Nor is it a friendship group, in which people are held together by mutual affection and shared history, although friendships can be forged within it. Neither is it a social club in which people are held together by common interests. The church is the Body of Christ, and the only thing that holds us together is our relationship with Christ. Since Christ calls weird and strange people, full of faults and failings and sins that need to be forgiven, it is no wonder conflict sometimes occurs.

Jesus tells Peter, the church’s rock, that he must forgive another member of the church who sins against him ‘seventy-seven times’. Since seven is the number of perfection, Peter is being told that he must forgive perfectly. To reinforce this, Jesus tells a parable full of wild overstatements. A debt of ten thousand talents would be one hundred million times the daily wage, and no slave would ever be able to repay it. In contrast, the sum owed by another slave to the unforgiving one, one hundred denarii, could be repaid by a hard-working slave, and it would make sense for the first slave to allow the second time to make it. Jesus is pointing out that we cannot make any restitution when we sin against God, because God needs nothing from us. The king’s extraordinary forgiveness of the debt, God’s forgiveness of us, is utterly unearned. On the other hand, we can offer and accept restitution to and from our fellow human beings. Having ourselves received the overwhelming grace of God’s forgiveness, we should be ready to do so.

I have said before that forgiveness is at the heart of Christianity. Christians are those who believe that our sins have been forgiven, and as we have been forgiven so we are to forgive others. Every time we pray in the words Jesus taught his disciples we ask God to forgive our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. Christianity does not pretend that forgiveness is easy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described forgiving others as ‘the Christlike suffering which it is the Christian’s duty to bear,’[1] but it does teach that such forgiveness is necessary. Just as the unforgiving slave should have been able to have mercy on his fellow slave, as the king had had mercy on him, so we can forgive one another because we have been forgiven. As one of my favourite theologians on forgiveness, Miroslav Volf writes, ‘We who have been embraced by the outstretched arms of the crucified God open our arms even for the enemies.’[2]

But, as always when I preach about forgiveness, I want to warn about forgiveness that is offered too easily. We know only too well that throughout history the church has demanded that victims forgive their abusers, even if those abusers continue to abuse. While Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that Christianity demanded forgiveness, he also condemned cheap grace: ‘the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.’[3] Bonhoeffer encouraged members of his illegal, anti-Nazi, theological seminary to make their confession to each other because he was aware of the dangers of self-forgiveness: ‘Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? [If we find it easier to confess to God] we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution.’[4]

Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. Volf argues that forgiveness cannot simply assuage a perpetrator’s remorseful anguish without changing them and righting the wrongs they have committed, and that reconciliation cannot take place until the truth is said and justice done. Forgiving may eventually also lead to forgetting, but in cases of genocide or military occupation or clerical sexual abuse that would be dangerous this side of the eschaton, the second coming of Christ: ‘as long as the Messiah has not come in glory, for the sake of the victims, we must keep alive the memory of their suffering; we must know it, we must remember it, and we must say it out loud for all to hear.’[5] Forgiveness does not mean pretending that evil did not happen.

Today’s reading demands that we forgive another member of the church perfectly, but it also follows last week’s teaching about the series of steps to take in the case of conflict. Last week we heard that if another member of the church sins against us we are first to talk with them privately; then, if that first private conversation does not lead to reconciliation, we are to take one or two other members of the church along with us and seek reconciliation again in their presence. If even that does not work the final stage is ‘to tell it all to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.’ (Matthew 18:17) In the case of serious sin, when the person refuses to repent and be reconciled, at the decision of the whole community they are to be excluded. Jesus’ demand that we forgive another church member who sins against us must be balanced by his teaching that such forgiveness can include the exclusion of the sinner if they refuse to repent. Imagine what a difference it would have made in cases of clerical sexual abuse if the church had followed this biblical process.

What does the statement that anyone who doesn’t listen to the decision of the whole church is to be ‘as a Gentile and a tax-collector’ mean? Two things. It is a sentence of exclusion. Matthew’s community was made up of Jewish Christians, who would have lived lives separately from non-Jews and collaborators. But the Gospel according to Matthew is named after the man whom Jesus called to follow him while Matthew was sitting at a tax booth. It ends with the great commandment to go and make disciples of all nations – to go, that is, to the Gentiles. The Gospel according to Matthew makes it very clear that Jesus was not prepared to abandon Gentiles and tax-collectors as second-class citizens. If the church is to treat the people it excludes like Gentiles and tax collectors, we are to relate to them the way Jesus did; to offer them acceptance and forgiveness, to seek to win them again and draw them back into our community.

At the beginning of the Reflection, I quoted the SCM slogan, no peace without justice! and I do believe that. But I want to end by saying that there can be no true peace, no shalom, without forgiveness. We may not be able to forgive perfectly until Christ returns at the eschaton, but we can at least try to practice forgiveness, recognising how much we ourselves have been forgiven. We are, after all, members of the ekklesia, the Body of Christ. We are not to behave like a wicked slave.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 2001), 45.

[2] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 131.

[3] Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship, 4.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (London: SCM Press, 1954), 90-1.

[5] Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 139.