Last week’s gospel passage ended with that lovely saying of Jesus: where two or three are gathered in my name I shall be there with them. These are such consoling words that it made Peter think hard about the significance of what he had heard Jesus telling them. Having thought he perceived something truly mind blowing. That in their dealings with each other they should always understand that they are not alone. That in the very heart of all they do and say within their relationships they must realise and grasp the reality of Jesus’ presence. That is such a startling, eye opening realisation, that it changes everything and most significantly it changes the way we respond to the concept of forgiveness and once more we are presented with that difference between God’s way and man’s way.
Peter can envisage it up to a certain degree but not beyond. Jesus however once more gently reprimands him - not seven but seventy-seven (or as some translations say seven times seventy-seven). In other words, if your forgives comes from the heart then it is limitless in its effect. You only have to go back to the Sermon on the Mount to see where these thoughts originate. Blessed are the merciful for they shall have mercy shown them; no limits attached. Remember too in the prayer which Jesus teaches us, we are to pray forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, again no limits attached. The parable which Jesus relates in today’s gospel points out the great gulf between they way we live out our lives with all its limits and restrictions, and the way which the limitless God calls us to live out our lives. The vast difference between what the man in the parable owed and was forgiven, and what he was owed and refused to forgive is phenomenal and yet this is the deficit of love which we often fail to comprehend. The love of God for us is vast and available to us yet we can be so callous in our reception of it, refusing to acknowledge its capacity to warm and open our own hardened frozen hearts.
It is in our reception of Jesus that the thaw can begin to change our attitude. In him coming to us in word and sacrament we begin to find within ourselves and those around us the basis for what our lives are about. To understand that we are loved so overwhelmingly must make us change. In seeing the world as his dwelling and in finding him in all things and all persons around us, we are moved from an inward, selfish and limited motivation towards an outward and selfless manifestation in which what matters is the presence of his limitless love, as the life giving and life endorsing reality.
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