Forgive and you will be forgiven

 

SERMON BY FATHER JONATHAN E MOORE - LINK HERE

 24th Sunday of the Year 2026      

Forgive, and you will be forgiven.

I’m sometimes asked to recommend a good book for those who want to deepen their personal faith-relationship with God. My reply is generally: “Read anything about the “Our Father”. This gives an abundance of choice: hundreds, indeed it would be no exaggeration to say thousands of books have been written about the Lord’s Prayer.

What is my own favourite? It is a book nearly five hundred years old, written by a woman, Saint Teresa of Avila. She wrote in a manner which has great spiritual depth, yet is in simple language. A half of her spiritual classic “The Way of Perfection” is devoted to  a meditation on the Our Father. Unlike other authors, she did not intend her work for general publication and didn't have to worry about making it long enough to be commercial, neither did she have to include endless footnotes and cross-references. It was written simply, and simply written  for members of her own community. She is short, direct to the point, and uncomplicated. She suits me very nicely, thank you! 

Central to the Our Father itself is the fifth petition: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Here are a few words from Saint Teresa:

"How greatly the Lord must value our love for another! For, having given Him our wills, we have given Him complete rights over us, and we cannot do that without love. See, then, how important it is for us to love one another and to be at peace. The good Jesus might have put everything else before our love for one another, and said: "Forgive us, Lord, because we are doing a great deal of penance, or because we are praying often, and fasting, and because we … love Thee greatly." But He has never said: "Because we would lose our lives for Thy sake"; or any of these [numerous] other things which He might have said. He simply says: "Because we forgive." Perhaps the reason He said this rather than anything else was because He knew that our fondness (for getting our own way) made mutual love the hardest virtue for us to attain, though it is the virtue dearest to His Father."  (“The Way of Perfection" by St. Teresa of Avila, my own précis)

Jesus illustrated His teaching on forgiveness in the parable we heard today, the story of the Unforgiving Servant. It speaks of an age when many people laboured under the burden of debt, to our own age where crippling debt is a reality to so very many people - truly a parable for today.

Unless we understand the sums of money Jesus speaks about, the powerful story loses its full impact. A Denarius was a day’s wage for a working man. Based on the present minimum wage, this would represent £104. A Talent was a gold or silver coin worth 6,000 denarii, so today’s value would be £60,000. The servant owed his master ten thousand talents, so we are talking of a debt of 600,000,000 pounds! This incredibly vast amount shows the dreadful situation the man had found himself in. In those days, and indeed right into the nineteenth century, there were Debtors’ Prisons, where someone who couldn't repay their creditors was confined until the debt was paid. In effect, unless the debtor had wealthy friends or relations, he would be there for good. Charles Dickens spent part of his childhood in the Marshalsea Gaol in London, where his father was imprisoned for debt. 

“Give me time, and I will repay you” the servant pleaded. It would have taken him two years, saving every penny he earned, to pay just one talent back. He would have needed 20,000 years to repay the whole debt - give him time? I think not! The debtor is faced with a life sentence, unless his master is generous enough to write the debt off. What kind of businessman would be rich enough, or maybe fool enough, to write off a debt so large? No man on earth would do so, but, says Jesus, this master is like no other man on earth because he is an image of our merciful Father God. Incredibly, the servant is let off his debt. 

How did he react to the master’s generosity? What was the man thinking as he left his master’s office? Did he feel unfathomable gratitude and love for this unbelievable blessing, or did he congratulate himself for “getting round the old man”, and think how very clever he had been?

I rather think the latter, because Jesus goes on to tell us that the man immediately meets a fellow servant who is in his debt. The sum involved is not inconsiderable - £10,000 in fact. So how does he treat his own debtor? Far from imitating his loving and merciful master, he proceeds to assault the other man, and then have him thrown into jail! 

When the master hears of this, he reconsiders his earlier decision to let him off his own debt. Refusal to forgive so much, much less than he had been forgiven rebounds on his own head, and he finds himself facing a life sentence. 

I'm sure many of you read Charles Kingsley’s “Water Babies” when you were little. Do you remember the two old ladies who visited Tom? There was a nice one, “Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-done-by”, and a much less pleasant one, “Mrs Be-done-by-as-you-did”. The Unforgiving Servant, it would be true to say, refuses to treat others the way he would like them to treat him, and so, sadly, is treated just as he treated others.

Generation by generation, Christ teaches us this simple lesson. We ask God to forgive us as we ourselves forgive. Those who learn to forgive others are in fact opening themselves to the infinite mercy of God. Those who slam shut the door of compassion and mercy to others will find themselves on the wrong side of the same door in the world to come!