24th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2026

The concluding words of this morning’s Gospel reading:

“In anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart”.

Those of you who were here last Sunday will recall that Fr Jonathan preached on both that day’s Gospel and today’s. I was tempted to begin this morning by saying “As the Vicar said last week”, but in the event I have resisted that temptation!

Instead I want to begin by recalling a children’s book, a mid-Victorian fairy tale, that I remember reading as a small boy. It is, I think, no longer popular, in part because it is the kind of moral tale that is rather out of fashion, in part because it is typically Victorian saccharine piety in nature, and in part because the author, though an Anglican clergyman, would today be regarded as unacceptably racist.

The book in question is The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. It tells of Tom, a little boy whose life is spent climbing up inside chimneys as a sweep’s assistant and who is chased from a grand house and falls into a river. There he becomes a “water baby” (no doubt referencing the waters of baptism and redemption) and his moral education begins. He is taught that he should do things he does not like if they are the right things to do. A clue in the text is the name of two of the fairies involved – Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. Having become a moral being Tom shows practical forgiveness by going to the help of his cruel old master – who has himself also drowned – so that he too can be redeemed.

In this rather fanciful tale we find a clear reference to what is often called the “Golden Rule”, the principle by which we are enjoined to treat others as we would expect to be treated ourselves, to love our fellow human beings as much as we love ourselves, a principle which is underpinned by the forgiveness of perceived offences.

Jesus taught that the two great commandments are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”, he tells us. And again, in teaching his disciples how to pray, he gives us the words we still use day by day: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”.

It is easy to imagine that this is a new teaching, unique to our Lord and his followers, but our Old Testament reading this morning shows us that this is not the case. The Book of Sirach is not one of the universally accepted canonical books of the Bible, but rather a part of the Apocrypha. However we may regard its status, though, it is indisputable that it was composed a good two centuries before the life of Christ, and it contains just the same set of principles as we find in our Lord’s teaching. “Forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray”.

Indeed these complementary strands of teaching – love for our neighbour and forgiveness of another’s offences – stretch way back into the earliest days of the Old Testament account. In the 19th chapter of Leviticus we find these words: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord”. Moreover this is expanded later in the same chapter: “When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am Yahweh your God”. And in the 15th chapter of the Book of Numbers: “The community is to have the same rules for you and for the foreigner residing among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the foreigner shall be the same before the LORD”.

Nor are these principles peculiar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition in which we stand. Every great world religion has a version of the Golden Rule at its heart.

It almost goes without saying, then, that if we are to be faithful as Christians, faithful to the commands of Almighty God and faithful to the teachings of Jesus, we must take care to treat others as we would expect to be treated ourselves, we must love others as we love ourselves, and we must exercise forgiveness towards all without limit. Peter asks our Lord if he should forgive others as often as seven times and the Lord’s reply is that he must forgive seventy times seven – in other words times without limit. For peace and harmony to grow we must love infinitely and forgive infinitely.

The trouble is, of course, that we don’t.

We are called, as practising Christians, to examine our consciences as a matter of routine. Each of us should reflect on the ways, both large and small, in which we fail to love and forgive others, in which we somehow discriminate between ourselves and those who, to use an expression coined by Margaret Thatcher (whom I never thought I would quote in a sermon!), are “not one of us”. Yet it is precisely in relation to those who are not “one of us” that we need to take extra care in our loving and forgiving. When we do not do so there can be none of the true peace and harmony that God demands and expects of his children.

And if this were not bad enough at our own individual level, how much worse when we look nationally and internationally. It takes only the briefest glimpse of the news day by day to discover how failure to love, or even respect, and failure to forgive has led us to live in a world riven by hatred, violence and intimidation, all too often committed by people who claim that they are Christians or faithful members of another religion. They will face a hard judgement in the next life, I suspect. This evil is played out both within and between nations every day and runs counter to any hope for peace.

Let me turn to another book, a rather more serious one this time than the one with which I began. It is a book entitled “Pardon and Peace”, written by Nicholas Frayling. I knew Nick Frayling when he was the Dean of Chichester, but before that he was the Rector of Liverpool, a city whose rich mix of population includes a large number of Roman Catholics and people of Irish descent. While he was the city Rector he spent a good deal of time in conversation, both in Liverpool and in Northern Ireland, with individuals and groups on both sides of the sectarian divide. As a result of these conversations he was firmly of the opinion that only expressions of heartfelt contrition for all that had gone before, only forgiveness for the offences of the past, could bring peace to the troubled and divided community of Northern Ireland. Pardon and Peace.

In 1985, while Nicholas Frayling was still the Rector of Liverpool, there was scheduled to be a European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus. It was to take place in Belgium at the Heysel Stadium, whose name became associated with one of the worst and most deadly disasters in football history. In its aftermath Nicholas Frayling travelled to Turin, the home of Juventus, and offered an apology to the people of Turin from the people of Liverpool. The authorities in Turin were surprised by this apology and wondered why he was offering it, as the terrible events were not his fault. His answer was simple. Someone had to apologise in order to start the process of forgiveness and reconciliation. Pardon and Peace.

Given the state of the world today, the state of the world’s nations and the state of our own souls, there is a desperate need for the process of apology, forgiveness and reconciliation, the Pardon and Peace that is at the very heart of the Golden Rule, at the heart of the Gospel.

Isn’t it about time that we started?