How many times must I forgive my brother, as many as seven times?” Both of today’s reading are about forgiveness: the cost of forgiving and, more importantly, the cost of not forgiving. In Genesis 50:15-21, Joseph’s brothers are suddenly fearful of what will happen if Joseph “pays us back in full for all the wrong we did.” When the brothers had power over Joseph they used it to their own advantage but now that Joseph has power over them he refuses to use it instead he uses his power to raise them up, to care for them. In the parable that Jesus tells in Matthew 18:21-35, the king has enormous power over his servant who owes him the equivalent of his wages for the next 150,000 years! By forgiving the debt he no longer has any power over the servant. He is free. The servant, on the other hand, cannot bear to free his fellow servant, he still wants power over him. Yet he is the one who ends his days in suffering. Forgiveness frees not just the one who is forgiven but also the one who forgives. The point of the huge numbers in the gospel reading, the 10,000 talents, the 70 x 7, is to make a mockery of the sums: if we are looking for pay-back we are missing the point. Forgiveness is not transactional, it is relational, it is the grace that restores us to one another.

Jesus promises us that when two or three are gathered in his name, he will be there with us. It is a joy to know that Christ is always present and yet it is often a struggle to get two or three people to agree about anything! Yet this is our calling. Both of our readings this week remind us that we are in it together, that what harms one harms all and what heals one heals all. Ezekiel 33:1-11 reminds God’s people that salvation is not for the individual but for all. The people of God are called to be responsible for one another. Jesus echoes this in Matthew 18:15-20, “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” We are to work for the freedom and well-being of all God’s children, the ones we get on with and the ones we disagree with.

What is in the way often IS the way. Sometimes in life what seems like the obvious path to success ends in failure; yet failure, when it comes, can leads us down unexpected new paths. In Matthew 16:21-28, Jesus yells at Peter, calling him a stumbling block: a hindrance, an obstacle. This same Peter will later be called the rock, the strong foundation on which the church will be built. No one wants to be a stumbling block for others, no one wants to trip and fall but it is when life brings us to our knees that we acknowledge how dependant we are on God and how much we have to learn. For Peter the cross is a stumbling block yet without it there is no resurrection, no new life. Jesus asks us to look at life, its successes and failures, through God’s eyes: where is the kingdom of God being revealed? What do we have to learn? What do we need to let go of before we can receive the new life that God is putting in our hands?

I love today’s gospel reading, Matthew 15:21-28, it has swearing, it has jokes, what’s not to like? It is also a painful read: here is Jesus ignoring, talking over and abusing a woman who comes to him for help because she is a foreigner of a different faith. He does, however, listen and respond to her quick-witted reply. He calls her a dog (a common insult that Jews would throw at Canaanites), he has come not to feed the dogs but the children of Israel. What she points out is that God has enough for everyone. This story is sandwiched between the two miraculous feedings (one of the 5,000 and one of the 4,000); miracles that revel in the super abundance of God’s grace. Jesus’ final response is excessive he commends her “great faith” having previously lambasted Peter’s “little faith”. As Isaiah tells his people in Isaiah 56:21-26, no one is excluded from God’s grace: the foreigner, the eunuch, those who were excluded from the Temple are included in God’s presence. Human beings are genius at excluding, we want our resources, our time, our energy spent on OUR people; the church does not have the best of records in challenging this tendency but Jesus (and Isaiah) are clear, there is more there enough for everyone: we just need to stop viewing the world through the lens of scarcity and open our eyes to the excessive, generous abundance of God’s love.

As you all know I have a special fondness for Mary, mother of our Lord. Not the perfect Mary so often depicted in Catholic iconography but the real, earthly Mary of the Orthodox Tradition in which she is presented as everywoman. Mary is not an idol, she is a role model. Our readings begin with the great cosmic battle between good and evil of Revelation 11:19-12:6,10. Here Mary is clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars yet she is also in agony and fleeing for her life. In the gospel, Luke 1:46-55, Mary is also fleeing: she is fleeing the shame, disgrace, punishment of being an unwed mother, of disappointing everyone. In both readings she finds shelter, a place to rest and reflect. And here she changes: once safe with her cousin Elizabeth (another woman who understands what it is like to be a disappointment and a disgrace) she is suddenly confident, powerful, able to see herself, not in eyes of her disapproving family and society, but in the eyes of God. She moves from despair to hope, from fear to freedom. She does this by accepting herself just as she is and honesty sharing all of herself with another. She grasps that this transformation is not just liberating for her but is liberating for all those who are cast down, ignored and oppressed. She role models for us the transforming possibilities of showing up, letting ourselves be seen (warts and all) and allowing God to use our suffering and our struggles to bring about change for us and those around us.

How can we hold onto hope in times of trouble and insecurity? The beautiful passage from Isaiah 55:1-5 speaks to a people who have witnessed the destruction of their homeland and the scattering of their people, yet it promises abundance, plenty, security. Moreover, these blessings will not come as a result of their own hard work but as free gifts from God. The prophet speaks in the present tense, this is not a vision for the distant future, this is something that is available now, even in the midst of difficulties. Four times the prophet repeats the imperative: “come”: come and see, come and eat, come and listen, come and live. The gospel echoes the call to participation: In Matthew 14:13-21, the disciples cannot envisage how they are to feed the people who have come to see and to listen. Jesus tells them to just bring whatever they have (even though they say that they have “nothing”). The feast of the loaves and fishes enjoyed by those gathered in a deserted place recalls the feeding of the people of Israel in the wilderness but what is key in this story is the leftovers. The fact that there are any leftovers is a symbol of God’s abundant provision but more than this the leftovers fill 12 baskets. The magic number 12, symbol of the people of God. We need everyone, all the scraps and left overs of humanity, to be gathered in for the kingdom to come. Our job is just to show up, bringing whatever we have, however insignificant, and God will do the rest.

How do we know good from evil? It is not an easy task. In 1 Kings 3:5-12, Solomon asks God for the gift of discernment between good and evil. The parables Jesus tells, in Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52, explore this task: Last week the parable of the wheat and the weeds warned us that we are not always best ones at judging. This week we have a similar parable about the nets of fish: all are gathered in, the good and the bad together. The other parables compare the kingdom of God to mustard seeds and leaven (yeast); whilst both tiny things that produce remarkable transformations they are also both considered dangerous and were heavily regulated under Jewish law. It was forbidden to sow mustard seed in a crop field, perhaps because the mustard seed runs amok, taking over everything, growing without boundaries, just as leaven cannot be stopped from causing fermentation and change. Why is the kingdom of God compared to these forbidden things? Perhaps to alert us to the presence of God working in very unexpected people and places. When Solomon asks for “an understanding mind” the literal translation of the Hebrew term is “a listening heart”. Again and again, we are instructed not to judge but rather to grow to understand the world as God does, with a listening heart.

It’s always all about us! We so often read the Bible, especially the parables to tell us something about us, who we are and how we should behave. Today’s readings can certainly be read in that light but actually they are all about God and what God is like. If we start with God, in whose image and likeness we are made, who we are will become clear. Isaiah 55:10-13 comes as a relief after long passages about how God’s people have made a mess a things; it promises that whatever we do, God’s purposes will still be accomplished. God’s creative Word will not return empty but, once spoken, will achieve God’s purposes. In Matthew, 13:1-9, 18-23, there is an interpretation of the parable of the sower which focuses on the kind of soil in which God’s word can take root and flourish. Yet the more important and astonishing point of the parable is that the farmer sows his seed, not just on the good soil, but everywhere: rocky, thorny, dry, the farmer doesn’t care. This God offers everyone the opportunity to thrive; this God is generous and profligate with God’s gifts. Whether the soil is rocky or thorny or good, the harvest will come and it will be a bumper crop. Our task then, is to work with God, mirroring God’s generosity and impartiality, knowing that the fruits of the harvest are in God’s hands not ours.

What kind of God do we want? Whatever it is, we are likely to have expectations disappointed at some point or other. In the gospel, Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30, Jesus lambasts the crowd: when God sends John they complain that he wails and mourns, when Christ comes, they complain that he is too joyous. God comes to us in many forms and most of them do not fit our expectations. This is not something new, Zechariah, 9:9-12, promises a God who will come on a colt not on a warhorse, brining peace, not conflict. We often want a God made in our image but such a God is unlikely to be of much use to us. If God is not what we expect, neither is following God. In the gospel Jesus explores the paradox of discipleship: a yoke that is easy, a burden that is light. When we lose our ego, our desires, our deeply held beliefs about who we are and how the world should be, we are not losing we are gaining. The life God offers us is beyond what we had hoped for.

Today’s gospel, Matthew 10:40-42, is all about welcome but also about the rewards we will receive from offering welcome. The nature of the reward depends upon the nature of the welcome.

The reward for welcoming the prophets and the righteous will be the same reward which they receive; both positive and negative, both awesome and exhausting.

Prophets, those who speak out against injustice, encounter conflict and opposition; the righteous, encounter the kingdom of God, because, of course, that is what they are working to change the world into.

The reward of welcoming “the little ones”, the least, the lowest and the over-looked, is not mentioned.

This is because they themselves ARE the reward.

The word welcome means to take and to hold, to receive and to accept as you would a gift or an honour. To truly welcome someone is to open ourselves to all that person is and all they bring, to value them, to learn from them and so to receive, from them, the presence of God their maker in our midst.