There used to be a time when I believed that I had found the perfect recipe for life. The perfect recipe is this: to have a German car, a British passport, and an Italian wife. However, since the Brexit vote 10 years ago, I have my doubts about the passport. As for my German car, it’s fine, but it’s hardly a Mercedes or a BMW. And when it comes to my Italian wife, I have no complaints there. However, coming from two different cultures, we frequently find ourselves amused and sometimes exasperated by our ingrained habits. Laura, for example, cannot understand why I eat focaccia with a knife and fork, and I fail to understand why, after 18 years together, Laura still can’t appreciate a cup of tea, let alone make one.
It is exactly these kinds of ultimately trivial cultural differences which Paul is talking about in the passage of Romans chapter 14, which we have heard this morning. He’s writing to a church composed of both Gentiles and Jews, and he’s urging them not to judge one another over different attitudes to food, celebrations of holy days, and such matters that many people take very seriously, but which are ultimately not the bottom line. Despite Paul’s warnings, down the centuries, Christians have quarrelled constantly about the outward trappings of religion: should you eat fish on Fridays, observe Lent, use set prayers, or call the person in the pulpit Father or Pastor? Or indeed, whether that person can be a woman. Paul calls those who take such matters to heart ‘weak’ and those who see through such questions as not being ultimately that important, the ‘strong’. But notice that Paul’s argument is not that we should all be able to rise above such things – not that we should all be ‘strong’; rather it is that we should welcome and respect one another, and refrain from passing judgement, whatever our opinions and beliefs.
Paul insists that each person stands before God, who alone judges us, and we should do our utmost to refrain from judging one another. As he says in verse 4, “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? His own master is the one to evaluate whether he succeeds or fails. And God’s servants will succeed, for God’s power supports them and enables them to stand.” Whenever we are tempted to judge others we are always usurping God’s role. And indeed, to do so often comes from pride or a sense of our own superiority.
If we could sum up the epistle’s message in three words – love, don’t judge – today’s gospel can be summed up in one: forgive. Jesus’s parable of the Unforgiving Servant is both comic, if you appreciate black humour, but also terrifying. The sums involved are impossible – the second servant owes the equivalent of a few months’ salary, whereas the first servant owes his master the sum of a national debt. 100 denarii is a daily wage for 100 days; the talents are 60 million times as much. But the real point is this: Jesus was aware, and expected his audience to be aware, of how much God has given us – indeed of how much God has given us and forgiven us. Unless we begin to have an idea that everything we have in life – and everything we have ever had (every blessing, every experience, every second) has come to us as a gift from God, together with the knowledge that we have squandered most of it (letting ourselves down, letting others down, letting our Creator down), we have not begun to cultivate a Christian mind-set.
But let me come back to the Epistle. This morning we are reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans for the last time, so perhaps this last message to us is one to remember and to cherish. Like the Romans, we too belong to a church community with many different cultures, many different attitudes, and no doubt many different beliefs. This is our strength and our joy. However, it could easily become easily become our stumbling block and a cause of suspicion and misunderstanding. How people dress, how people talk, and above all, our different and often unexamined attitudes, can so easily provide grounds for disagreement and offense. Let it not do so: let us learn from Christ how to live with love for one another, respecting our differences, forgiving and not judging.
Last week I finished my sermon by wishing that all of us had at least one close friend who is also a Christian. This week I would say that I wish all of us to have a friend, here in this church community, who comes from a radically different culture from our own. Now, of course, there is a natural tendency for us to feel more comfortable, with those we share the most with and easily understand. But do reach out, all of you, across superficial divisions and find the treasures and the riches that are to be found in having a brother or sister from a very different background from your own. After all, God has created each of us to be a blessing to one another.