Micah 7:18-20
Psalm 32
Colossians 3:12-17
Matthew 18:21-35

1] Begin with the cross. There is nowhere else for us to begin. The cross looms everywhere in scripture. All theological understanding is rooted in it. All discipleship flows from it. It’s what we trust for our salvation. It transforms our thinking, ridding us of the mindset that characterizes the world. The cross is the only place to begin.

To begin anywhere else means that we have begun with calculating: “Should I forgive? How much should I forgive? Under what circumstances should I forgive?” Now we are calculating.

Calculation in matters that concern us fosters self-interest. We go to the bank to purchase our RSP for 2007. The interest rates are 4% for one year, 4.25% for two, and 4.5% for three. We estimate how the interest rate is going to fluctuate in the next few years, and we calculate which combination of locked-in RSP rate and time period is best — best for the bank? Of course not. Best for us. Calculation in matters that concern us fosters self-interest.

In the second place calculation is frequently a conscious cover-up for unconscious rationalization. At a conscious level I calculate whether I should forgive, how much I should forgive, whom I should forgive. But all of this is a smokescreen behind which there is, in my unconscious, a heart set on vindictiveness, a desire to even a score which has remained uneven (I think) for umpteen years, a wish to see someone who has pained me suffer a little more himself. Unconscious rationalization, like any unconscious proceeding, is a process which spares us having to admit nastiness about ourselves that we don’t want to admit, spares us having to acknowledge what we prefer to hide. Calculation is a conscious matter which cloaks an unconscious development, even as we are left thinking we are virtuous.

In the third place calculation traffics in the unrealistic. What I am prepared to forgive in others (feeling virtuous about it too) will in fact be slight, while what I expect others to forgive in me will in fact be enormous. This is unrealistic.

In the fourth place calculation both presupposes shallowness and promotes shallowness. It presupposes shallowness in that I plainly think that sin is something I can calculate or measure like sugar or flour or milk. Calculation promotes shallowness in that it confirms over and over the shallowness I began with.

We ought never to begin our understanding of forgiveness with calculation. We must begin with the cross; and more than begin with the cross, stay with the cross.

2] Nobody uses a twenty-member surgical team to clip a hangnail. No government sends out a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to sink a canoe. The air-raid warning isn’t sounded because a child’s paper glider has violated air-space.

When the twenty-member surgical team is deployed the patient’s condition is critical. When the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier puts to sea the threat it’s dealing with couldn’t be greater. When the air-raid warning is sounded destruction is imminent. And when God gives up his own Son humankind’s condition is critical, the threat facing us couldn’t be greater, and our destruction is imminent.

As often as I read scripture I am sobered to read that God’s forgiveness of you and me necessitated the death of God’s own Son. I try to fathom what this means. In trying to fathom it from the Father’s perspective I ponder the anguish of our foreparent in faith, Abraham. Abraham and Isaac. Abraham collecting the firewood, sharpening the knife, deflecting Isaac’s anxiety, trudging with leaden foot and leaden heart up the side of Mount Moriah . He and Sarah had waited years for a child, had had none, had given up expecting any. Then when everyone “just knew” that the situation was hopeless Sarah conceived. Was any child longed for more intensely or cherished more fervently? Now they have to give up this child, give him up to death.

I have been spared losing a child. I do know, however, that when a child dies the parents of that child separate 70% of the time. Wouldn’t the death of their child bring the parents closer together? The truth is, so devastating is the death of a child that calculation concerning it is useless; we can’t begin to comprehend what it’s like.

Abraham again. At the last minute the ram is provided. Abraham’s relief is inexpressible: his son doesn’t have to die. But when the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ walks his Son to Calvary there is no relief: his Son has to die. Here the Father bears in his heart the full weight of a devastation that couldn’t be greater.

Next I try to fathom what the cross means from the perspective of the Son. On the one hand I don’t minimize the physical suffering he endured for our sakes. On the other hand, countless people have endured much greater physical pain. (It took Jesus only six hours to die, remember.) It’s the dereliction that ices my bowels. What is it to be forsaken when the sum and substance of your life is unbroken intimacy with your Father? As a child I was lost only two or three times. It wasn’t a pleasant experience; in fact it was terrifying. Nonetheless, even when I was lost (and terrified) I knew that my problem was simply that I couldn’t find my parents; I never suspected for one minute that they had abandoned me. A man who is dear to me told me that when his wife left him and he knew himself bereft, forsaken by the one human being who meant more to him than all others, he turned on all the taps in the house so that he wouldn’t have to hear her driving out of the garage, driving out. Before our Lord’s Good Friday dereliction I can only fall silent in incomprehension.

3] As often as I begin with the cross I am stunned at the price God has paid — Father and Son together — for my forgiveness. In the same instant I am sobered at the depravity in me that necessitated so great a price. It’s plain that my depravity is oceans deeper than I thought, my heart-condition vastly more serious than I guessed. It’s incontrovertible that when I have trotted out all my bookish, theological definitions of sin I still haven’t grasped — will never grasp — what sin means to God.

When I was a teenager I thought our Lord to be wrong when he prayed for his murderers, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” I thought him to be wrong inasmuch as it seemed to me (at age 17) that they did know what they were doing: they were eliminating someone they didn’t like. They had to know what they were doing simply because they had plotted and schemed and conspired for months to do it. Furthermore, our Lord’s plea, “Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they are doing”, had to be self-contradictory — I thought. After all, if they didn’t know what they were doing then they didn’t need to be forgiven; they could simply be overlooked. Now that I’m old I perceive that our Lord was right. His assassins didn’t know what they were doing, ultimately; didn’t know they were crucifying the Son of God. They didn’t know that their sinnership had impelled them to do it, didn’t know that while they thought they were acting freely they were in bondage to sin more surely than the heroin sniffer is in bondage to dope. In my older age I see that our Lord was right. They can’t be excused; they can only be forgiven, since what they are doing comes out of their own disordered heart. To be sure, they don’t fully grasp what they are doing, can’t fully grasp it. But the reason they can’t grasp it is that they are blind to their own depravity. Of course they are; the worst consequence of our spiritual condition is that we are blinded to our spiritual condition. But being blinded to it doesn’t lessen our accountability for it, as the day of judgement will make plain. But why wait until then? Why not own the truth of the cross now; namely, that a cure this drastic presupposes an ailment no less drastic? A cure whose blessing is richer than we can comprehend presupposes a condition whose curse is deadlier than we can imagine.

4] Is everyone convinced that we should begin with the cross? Then everyone must agree that our understanding of forgiving ourselves and others unfolds from the cross; the light that the cross sheds will ever be the illumination by which we see everything else concerning forgiveness.

For instance, it’s the consistent testimony of the apostles that our forgiving our enemies is the measure of our closeness to God. When this truth first sank home with me I sank to the floor. Surely I could enjoy intimacy with God while enjoying the fantasy of my worst enemy going from misery to misery, misfortune to misfortune. Then in that light which the cross sheds I saw that I couldn’t. How could I claim intimacy with the One who forgives his assassins and at the same time relish ever-worsening misery for those who have not yet assassinated me? How can I say I crave being recreated in the image of the God for whom forgiving costs him everything while I make sure that my non-forgiving costs me nothing?

Two hundred and fifty years ago John Wesley wrote in his diary, “Resentment at an affront is sin, and I have been guilty of this a thousand times.” We want to say, “Resentment at an imagined affront would be sin, since it would be wrong to harbour resentment towards someone when that person had committed no real offence at all; but of course it would be entirely in order to harbour resentment at a real affront. After all, who wouldn’t?” To argue like this, however, is only to prove that we have not yet come within a country mile of the gospel. Resentment at an imagined affront wouldn’t be sin so much as it would be stupidity. Because resentment at a real affront, at a real offence, comes naturally to fallen people we think it isn’t sin. How can we ever be held accountable for something that fits us like a glove? But remember the point we lingered over a minute ago: not merely one consequence of our sinnership but the most serious consequence of it is our blindness to the fact and nature and scope of our sinnership. Then what are we to do with our resentment? Do we hold it to us ever so closely because its smouldering heat will fuel our self-pity and our self-justification? Or do we deplore it and drop it at the foot of the cross, knowing that only the purblind do anything else?

Our Lord’s parable of the unforgiving servant leaves us in no doubt or ambiguity or perplexity at all. In this parable the king forgives his servant a huge debt; the servant, newly forgiven a huge debt, turns around and refuses to forgive a fellow whatever this fellow owes him. The king is livid that the pardon the servant has received he doesn’t extend in turn. The king orders the servant shaken up until some sense is shaken into him. If the servant had refused to forgive his fellow a paltry sum, the servant would merely have looked silly. But the amount the servant is owed isn’t paltry; 100 denarii is six months’ pay. Then the servant is readily understood, isn’t he: the forgiveness required of him is huge. But the point of the parable is this: while the 100 denarii which the servant is owed is no trifling sum, it is nothing compared to the 10,000 talents ($50 million) that the king has already forgiven the servant.

That injury, that offence, that wound which you and I are to forgive is not a trifle. Were it a trifle we wouldn’t be wounded. The wound is gaping; if it were anything else we wouldn’t be sweating over forgiving it. We shall be able to forgive it only as we place it alongside what God has already forgiven in us. Please note that we are never asked to generate forgiveness of others out of our own resources; we are simply asked not to impede God’s forgiveness from flowing through us and spilling over onto others. We don’t have to generate water in order for it to irrigate what is parched and render it fruitful; all we have to do is not put a crimp in the hose. Either we don’t impede the free flow of God’s forgiveness from him through us to others, or, like the servant in the parable, we shall have to be shaken up until some sense has been shaken into us. (We must never make the mistake of thinking our Lord to be a “gentle” Jesus “meek and mild”. Gentle and mild he is not.)

5] Before the sun sets tonight we must be sure we understand what forgiveness does not mean.

(i) It does not mean that the offence we are called to forgive is slight. As we’ve already seen, it’s grievous. Were it anything but grievous we’d be talking about overlooking it instead of forgiving it — if we were even talking about it at all.

(ii) It does not mean that the offence is excused. To forgive is not to excuse. We excuse what is excusable. What is not excusable, will never be excusable, is also never excused. It can only be forgiven. The day you tell me you have forgiven me is the day I know that I am without excuse. To forgive is never a shorthand version of, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” To forgive is to say it matters unspeakably.

(iii) Forgiveness does not mean that we are suckers asking the world to victimize us again. To forgive is not to invite another assault. To forgive is not to advertise ourselves as a doormat. To be sure, there are people who are doormats, people whose self-image is so poor and whose ego-strength so diminished that they seem to invite victimization. Forgiveness, however, isn’t the last resort of the wimp who can’t do anything else in any case. Forgiveness, rather, is a display of ego-strength that couldn’t be stronger. Jesus can forgive those who slay him just because he has already said, “No one takes my life from me; I may lay it down of my own accord, but I lay it down; no one takes it from me.”

(iv) Forgiveness does not mean that the person we forgive we regard as a diamond in the rough, good-at-heart. Forgiveness means that the person we forgive we regard as depraved in heart. After all, this is what God’s forgiveness means about you and me.

(v) Forgiveness does not mean that the person we must forgive we must also trust. Many people whom we forgive we shall never be able to trust. The only people we should trust are those who show themselves trustworthy. Forgiveness does mean, however, that the person we can’t trust we shall nonetheless not hate, not abuse, not exploit; we shall not plot revenge against him or bear him any ill-will of any sort.

Remember, all that matters is that we not impede the forgiveness which God has poured upon us and which he intends to course through us and spill over out of us onto others.

6] Any discussion of forgiveness includes forgiving ourselves. Very often the person we most urgently need to forgive is ourselves. And since all forgiveness is difficult to the point of anguish, then to forgive ourselves may be the most difficult of all.

Suppose we don’t forgive ourselves; suppose we say, “I can forgive anyone at all except myself”. Then what’s going on in our own head and heart?

(i) Surely we have puffed up ourselves most arrogantly. There is terrible arrogance in saying to ourselves, “I’m the greatest sinner in the world; the champion. I can forgive others because they are only minor-league sinners compared to me. When it comes to depravity I’m the star of the major leagues.”

Not only is there a perverse arrogance underlying such an attitude, there is no little blasphemy as well. “The blood-bought pardon of God, wrought at what cost to him we can’t fathom — it isn’t effective enough for me. Where I’m concerned, God’s mercy is deficient, defective, and finally worthless.” This is blasphemy. Our forgiveness, which cost God we know not what, you and I shouldn’t be labelling a garage-sale piece of junk.

(ii) If we say we can’t forgive ourselves then we want to flagellate ourselves in order to atone for our sin. But don’t we believe the gospel? The heart of the gospel is this: atonement has already been made for us. We neither dismiss it nor add to it. We simply trust it.

Perhaps this is where we should stop today; at the cross, where we began. For it is here that we see that God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven us. And here we see that we therefore must forgive others, and forgive ourselves as well.

Victor Shepherd
Palm Sunday 2007

Deuteronomy 8:1-10
John 6:52-59

Bread

[1] When the Japanese besieged Hong Kong sixty-plus years ago and began starving the people inside the city, a British banker was found sitting on the curb with his feet in the gutter. He was dressed like a British banker: cutaway coat, Homburg hat, pin-striped trousers, grey spats. He was the picture of upper-class privilege. He had found an orange in the gutter. The orange had been stepped on several times, had been exposed to the sun, and had begun to putrefy. He was about to bite into it when a British soldier knocked it out of his hand, shouting, “Do you want to get sick?” Whereupon the banker, still sitting on the curb, hung his head and blubbered like a child.

Hunger is terrible. Hunger bends people. Hunger forces people to be what they never thought they’d become. The British banker would have given everything he owned for just one slice of bread. But there was no bread.

Bread was the all-important commodity in the ancient east. Bread? Not money? Money didn’t even exist in old, old Babylon . In lieu of currency grain was the medium of exchange. Hundreds of years later, in Hosea’s day, Hosea lurched broken-hearted to the market in order to purchase his “hooker”-wife from the clutches of the local pimp. Hosea paid part of the purchase-price in grain. Whereas in our society there are few public officials more important than the minister of finance and the president of the central bank, in the ancient world the most important public official was the one responsible for bread.

[2] Bread is one of life’s necessities. Because bread looms so large in our lives and is essential to life, we use the word “bread” metaphorically. “I’ve got to have a second job just to put bread on the table.” Everyone knows what the expression is meant to convey. When we pray, as we are taught to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”, we are asking for all of life’s necessities: bread, to be sure, but also water and clean air and safe cities and national security and effective schooling and adequate medical care. What, after all, would be the point of bread (literal) to sustain us if disease then carried us off? What would be the point of eating bread to forestall malnutrition if we then had to breathe lung-corroding air or live in lethal streets or succumb to military aggression? When we pray for daily bread we are praying for all of life’s necessities as symbolized by bread. When our Lord multiplied the loaves and healed the sick and raised the dead he wasn’t doing three different things. He was doing one thing: bringing with him that kingdom whose manifestation we long to see.

Then is bread a physical matter or a spiritual matter? To put such a question is to pose a false dichotomy. All of us at Tyndale have been schooled in the logic of the Hebrew bible, and therefore we know that to dichotomize life into the physical (or material) and the spiritual is to dichotomize life falsely. Dennis Niles, a thoughtful South Asian Christian of an earlier era, used to say, “If I lack bread – that’s a physical problem; if my neighbour lacks bread – a spiritual problem.” Since the Christian community is birthed by the Spirit of God and is concerned with spiritual matters, the Christian community is therefore concerned with material matters – which is to say, the Christian community is always concerned with bread of every kind.

[3] While we are speaking of bread metaphorically we should recall the way the older testament speaks of the bread of tears and the bread of affliction and the bread of idleness and the bread of adversity. Because bread was the staple food in the ancient world, it was eaten in huge quantities. Then as now people knew that in one sense they were what they ate. What they ate became so thoroughly a part of them that they were characterized by what they had had to swallow.

When the Hebrew bible speaks of the bread of tears or the bread of sorrow, it means that someone is so thoroughly grief-saturated she’s consumed by her grief; someone has been so thoroughly saddened that she’s characterized by her sorrow and is now identified with it.

We all know people whom adversity has devastated so thoroughly that we would say, were we living in the time of our Hebrew foreparents, that they have eaten the bread of adversity. As soon as we hear the word “adversity” we think of those people who exemplify adversity and whom we now identify with it.

We know too people who have eaten the bread of wickedness. They have become so very wicked that they are deemed to exemplify wickedness

[4] In view of the different kinds of bread that we can eat and do eat, it’s plain that we need one more kind of bread as we need nothing else: we need him who is the bread of life. We are sinners and we are sufferers. We need our Lord, and he meets us at every point of our need.

In Israel ’s 40-year trek through the wilderness there was given them a most glorious anticipation of Jesus Christ, the bread of life. They were given manna. Manna sustained them in that era when bleakness loomed wherever they looked. “Manna” is a Hebrew word meaning “What is it?” They were sustained by God’s provision, the nature of which they couldn’t explain (let alone explain away), yet whose presence and significance they couldn’t deny. “What is it?” How God sustains his people is always a mystery; that he sustains them is never in doubt. Manna appeared to be so very ordinary, yet it was extraordinary in its origin, its nature, its effectiveness.

Twelve hundred years after the wilderness episode some descendants of wilderness-survivors said to Jesus, “Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness. Moses fed his people. What can you do for us?” Jesus replied, “It wasn’t Moses who fed your foreparents; it was my Father. He gives true bread from heaven, and I, Jesus of Nazareth, am that bread. I am the bread of life, just because I am living bread. Whoever comes to me will never hunger; whoever comes to me will never perish.”

Manna was an anticipation of Jesus Christ. To say the same thing differently, Jesus Christ was the hidden truth of the manna in the wilderness. It was he who sustained the people even though they knew it not. “Now, however”, says our Lord, “you people are to know that I am God’s provision. To be sure, I appear so very ordinary as to be readily overlooked. Yet my origin, nature and effectiveness are rooted in the mystery of God. I am living bread, the bread of life; whoever comes to me from this moment neither hungers nor perishes.”

In the service of Holy Communion we eat ordinary bread, everyday bread, bread plain and simple, and yet we are fed him who is the bread of life. The bread that sustains our bodies also sustains, by God’s grace, our life in Christ as our Lord Jesus gives himself to us afresh.

Wine

[6] Not only was bread eaten at Israelite meals; wine was drunk at every meal as well. Where wine is concerned our Israelite foreparents differed from our society in two ways. On the one hand, they abhorred drunkenness, finding it disgusting, whereas we seem to find it amusing. On the other hand, Israelite people customarily drank wine at every meal. The rare exception was the highly unusual ascetic like John the Baptist. People like John who didn’t touch wine also refrained from touching much else, including soap and shampoo. They also avoided women. They lived on the fringe of society. Their witness had its place, to be sure, but it was never the witness that God had appointed his people to bear characteristically. John, it must be remembered, lived in the wilderness, dressed in animal skins, stank like a garbage can, and drank no wine. Jesus did none of this.

Again and again the Older Testament speaks of wine as God’s gift that gladdens the heart of men and women. Wine doesn’t appear to be essential to life. Bread is essential to life, but not wine. Yet wine is essential to life, said our Hebrew foreparents, just because joy is essential to life. Life in the kingdom of God is never to be bleak or drab or dull. Life must never become utilitarian only. In addition to the utilitarian there has to be a light heart and a glad countenance, a happy time and a festive mood.

Jesus, we know partied frequently. He partied so often that his enemies accused him of overdoing it. They said he ate too much and he drank too much. Whereupon he wheeled on his detractors, “John came neither eating nor drinking and you said he was demon-possessed, crazy if not wicked. I’ve come eating and drinking, and you call me a glutton and drunkard. You don’t care about God’s Kingdom. You care only about spearing those who challenge your self-righteousness and your lovelessness. That’s deplorable. But in any case I and the people who love me are going to a party. And we’re going to have a good time. You’re welcome to come to the party too. Maybe you’d rather stay home and pout. We can’t help that. But in any case you aren’t going to spoil our party.”

Wine is God’s gift that gladdens the human heart. When our Lord insists, wine cup in hand, that he is the true vine, the wine of life, he means that he is that gift of the Father who profoundly makes the human heart to sing. Whenever we drink wine, therefore – at the Lord’s Supper, at a meal, on any occasion – we are announcing once again that Jesus Christ is the one who profoundly delights and satisfies, doing for us what no one else can and imparting to us what no one can ever take away.

Since our Lord most profoundly gladdens us through the blessing of his shed blood, the apostles, together with the church after them, have associated wine with blood. In fact the church hasn’t hesitated to speak of eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood. This isn’t surprising, since Jesus himself said that he abides in us and we in him only as we drink his blood. (John 6:54)

What did he mean? What did he mean, in view of the fact that Jewish people abhor drinking blood as they abhor little else? The Torah forbids them to drink blood, and they take such precautions with kosher meat as to ensure that they don’t eat or drink blood. At the last supper, when Jesus took the cup and declared to the disciples, “This is God’s covenant with you renewed in my blood,” the one thing that his disciples never thought they were doing was literally drinking his blood. The thought of it would have sickened them.

It so happens that among the Israelite people to “shed blood” meant to murder. Murder was reprehensible. It so happens that among the Israelite people to “drink blood” meant to murder and to profit from the foul deed. While it’s dreadful to murder, it’s worse to murder and then profit from the murder.

When Jesus tells us that we are going to drink his blood, he means that our sin is going to do him in. Humankind’s sin, collapsing on him, will crush him to death. And humankind’s sin, crushing him to death, he will gladly bear and bear away for our sakes, thereby giving us life. We kill, and we profit from it. We shed blood and we drink blood. In the paradoxical mystery of God’s grace, the treachery of the human heart, culminating in murder, the murder of the Son of God; this becomes the means of our forgiveness and freedom. Let me say it again. In the paradoxical mystery of God’s grace, human treachery (the cross) becomes the means whereby human treachery is pardoned and purged. Plainly we do drink our Lord’s blood.

Then let us come to Christ’s table now, for as he invites us to drink wine with him, the fruit of the vine, he invites us to drink again that blood which we have already drunk in any case. And he invites us to eat bread with him, and therein know afresh that he, and he alone, is now and ever will be the bread of life.

Victor Shepherd
April 2007