How many times must I forgive?

The Unmerciful Servant, John Millais

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th March 2026

We have just heard Jesus tell us a story about forgiving debts (Matthew 18:21-35).

The king has lent 10,000 talents to a slave. It is an unimaginably large sum - in today’s money well over €1billion. The slave cannot repay it, so the king threatens to make him bankrupt – to sell him, his family and all his possessions to recover what he can. But when the slave appeals for mercy, the king responds mercifully. He forgives him the debt and lets him go free.

But slave #1 has lent 100 denarii to another slave - a more modest sum, equivalent to roughly 100 days wages, say €10,000. As slave #1 leaves the king’s presence, he sees slave #2, grabs him by the throat and demands to be repaid. He ignores slave #2’s pleas for time to pay and has him thrown into the debtors’ prison.

When the king hears about it, he is furious. He calls slave #1 to him and says, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?’

We can all see slave #1 is a nasty piece of work. How unjust it is for someone who has been forgiven such an unimaginably large debt to force another to pay a modest one!

But of course the story isn’t really about forgiving debts.

The context of is that Peter has come to Jesus to ask, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’  To which Jesus replies, ‘Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times’.

Now, the Rabbis believed that God would only forgive a sinner three times, based on an obscure text from the prophet Amos. So, as nobody could be more merciful than God, no one should be obliged to forgive another more than three times. ‘Three strikes and you’re out’, as it were.

Peter went beyond that to suggest seven. Perhaps he hoped that Jesus would commend his greater mercy. But in his response Jesus teaches Peter and the other disciples – and through them us – that there should be no limit to our mercy toward our neighbour.

Jesus tells the story to explain why this is so. He concludes it saying, ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ God’s mercy, Jesus is saying, is without limit. God forgives each one of us an unimaginably large amount of wrong. Therefore, God expects us to forgive whatever modest wrongs other people have done to us. And if we don’t, we will forfeit God’s forgiveness ourselves. After all, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’.

The story is about the forgiveness of sins, not about the forgiveness of debts. Disciples of Jesus must forgive people who do them wrong. Otherwise they will not receive God’s forgiveness for the wrongs they themselves do.

It can be very difficult to forgive wrongs done to us by another, even if that person says they are sorry, and shows contrition. If we find ourselves in that situation, if we find ourselves unable to forgive someone who has wronged us, we should pray for the grace to be able to forgive from the heart, because followers of Jesus should imitate God’s mercy, which is without limit.

The Samaritan woman and Jesus at Jacob's well

The Water of Life Discourse, Angelika Kauffmann, 17th–18th century

Today’s Gospel reading (John 4:5-42), about the Samaritan woman at the well, is a beautifully vivid story, isn’t it? It could almost be a film script.

To begin to understand it we need to know something about the Samaritans and their relationship to Jews in the NT period, Jews like Jesus and his disciples.

Samaritans and Jews saw each other as outsiders, and they lived apart. These two peoples shared so much: the same land, the same God, and the same Torah – the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. But they saw each other as having different religions. To Jews the Samaritans were ritually unclean – they contaminated anything they touched. Samaritans, on the other hand, believed they had preserved the true Israelite religion, which the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon had perverted. The Jews worshipped God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans worshipped God on Mount Gerizim. As they still do, for a small Samaritan community has persisted through centuries of persecution in the land of Palestine.

But Jesus consistently tried to break down the barriers between Jews and Samaritans. For example, the Good Samaritan is not a stranger but is the very best example of a good neighbour (Luke 10: 29-37). And among the Ten Lepers who Jesus healed, only the Samaritan returns to give thanks, and Jesus praises this “foreigner” for his faith (Luke 17: 11-19).

In the story, the disciples do something surprising.

They go into the city of Sychar to buy food. But this is no ordinary city – this is a Samaritan city. Any food they might buy from Samaritans is going to be unclean according to Jewish ritual standards.

While the Disciples are in Sychar, Jesus sits down at nearby Jacob’s Well, and begins talking with a Samaritan woman who has come to the well for water. ‘Give me a drink’, he says. She is intrigued, ‘How is it’, she replies, ‘that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’. She is surprised Jesus would accept a drink from her, as she knew Jews would consider it unclean.

Their conversation is a model for how we should respond to outsiders in our midst, whether they are foreigners or people of a different religion or culture. It is a real dialogue, involving both speaking and listening – speaking with the expectation of being heard, and listening honestly to what the other is saying, rather than listening to what our prejudices tell us they ought to say. And it is tinged with humour.

They speak about water. Jesus says, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ And the woman replies with wit, ‘Sir, give me this water … so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

And they speak about their different faiths. The woman says, ‘I have no husband’, and Jesus laughingly replies, ‘You are right … for you have had five husbands’ – no doubt a reference to the five books of the Torah. The woman says, ‘Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain’ – Mount Gerizim – ‘but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem’. To which Jesus replies, ‘The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’

For Jesus it does not matter where or how you worship God, so long as you do so in spirit and in truth.

When the Disciples arrive back, they are shocked to find Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman.

They are filled with questions, but they cannot bring themselves to ask them. Their silence reflects their inability to reach out to the stranger.

But their failure and their prejudices are shown in another way: the woman gives Jesus water as she and Christ talk, but they fail to join in the conversation about faith and about life.

They are still unable to articulate their faith, but the woman recognises Christ as a Prophet. They made no contact with the people in Sychar, but she rushes back to tell the people there about Jesus. No one in the city was brought to Jesus by the disciples, but many Samaritans listened to what the woman had to say, and they came to believe that Jesus is truly the Saviour of the world.

Jesus was thirsty, he asked the Samaritan woman for water, and she gave it to him.

But in return she received much more from Jesus: he gave her the ‘living water’ which became in her ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’. She believed in Jesus, and because of her many Samaritans came to believe in him.

‘I am thirsty’, is the fifth of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross on Good Friday, and in response he is given wine with bitter hyssop (John 19:28-30). Many people have compared the thirst of Christ on the Cross with his request to the Samaritan woman, ‘Give me a drink’, and the promise that follows, ‘Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’.

In expressing his thirst out loud in that cry from the cross, Christ shows his humanity and his humility. In expressing such a basic need, he shows his solidarity with all those people who are in need, living or dying, healthy or sick, great or small, and who in humility are forced to ask for a cup of water.

In his thirst on the Cross, I think the dying Christ seeks something much more than water or vinegar. He thirsts for a new humanity to be formed and shaped through his incarnation, life and passion, death, resurrection and ascension. His thirst is for our salvation.

So, let us give thanks for the openness and trust of the Samaritan woman.

And let us pray that Christ will give us, as he gave her, ‘living water’ which will become in us ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’:

O God, the fountain of life,
to a humanity parched with thirst
you offer the living water that springs from the Rock,
our Saviour Jesus Christ:
stir up within your people the gift of your Spirit,
that we may profess our faith with freshness
and announce with joy the wonder of your love.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen

‘How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!’

Reflection on Psalm 84 at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th February 2026

And it is lovely, isn’t it, to be here in Killodiernan church for Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator this morning.

This little rural church is very special for those of us who are part of its accustomed congregation. We come to it Sunday by Sunday – or at least on the 2^nd & 4^th Sundays a month when services are scheduled. It is special because here we find blessings.

Here we meet up with our friends and neighbours as we gather for the service, passing on the news. We sit in our accustomed pews, and remember those who have gone before us.

Here we listen to the Word in scripture, and hear it preached. And when words bore us, we look through the windows, contemplating the trees as they change, season by season.

Here we are led in prayer for our needs and the needs of the world, and we sing together.

Here we greet our neighbours in the Peace. We eat with them the bread which earth has given, and drink the wine - fruit of the vine - which human hands have made. In the great sacramental mystery, we do so in remembrance of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose body and blood it signifies.

Here, after the service, we stand and talk - and if the weather is clement, we linger outside to admire God’s handiwork in the everchanging sward of wildflowers in the graveyard.

‘Here (our) heart and (our) flesh rejoice in the living God’, as the psalmist says.

The psalmist declares: ‘The sparrow has found her a house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young: at your altars, O Lord of hosts.’

Bats use the roof space of Killodiernan Church as a maternity roost in summertime. If you are passing at dusk one evening, do stop and watch them as they start to emerge. It is a magical sight, even better if you have a bat-detector to listen to them.

We must not think that God can ever be constrained to a building, for all the delight we take in our churches, and for all the encounters we have with God in them. God is present everywhere, all the time.  God’s altars are to be found everywhere.

It is part of our identity as members and friends of the Community to travel on pilgrimage away from our home place, to discover different altars in the company of other people, to share the gifts of their stories, and then return home changed, as the Wise Men were.

Much of the time, in our busyness, we do not feel God’s presence, nor notice his altars. But God and his altars are all around us. All we need to do is to stop rushing and still our racing thoughts for a moment. Then we can feel God’s presence and see his altars.

It may be when we pause our work for a cuppa. It may be when we hear the Angelus bell. It may be when we look up to see a magnificent view, or look down to identify a tiny flower. It may be when we sit down to a meal prepared with care and love.

We ought to practice seeking out such moments, focus our attention on being a doorkeeper in God’s house, which is the universe all around us, spending time in the loving presence of our God.

Then with the Psalmist we can sing, ‘Blessed are (we) who dwell in your house: (we) will always be praising you’.

 

Care for Creation

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, Fresco in the Sistine Chapel

 Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 8th February 2026, the 2nd before Lent

It's lovely to hear the stately language of the Genesis Ch 1. But I doubt anyone here today truly believes that God created the universe in 6 days!

Through the patient work of scientists, studying the natural world and building on their predecessors’ discoveries, we now know so much more about creation than the authors of Genesis ever could.

The universe began in an explosion of energy some 13 billion years ago. Our planet Earth was formed from the dust of exploding stars some 4 billion years ago, and the first life appeared soon after. There are at least 10 million distinct life forms on earth today. All are related, descending from a common ancestor. And life on earth has been just as diverse for 100s of millions of years.

Today’s 1^st Reading from the first chapter of Genesis (1:1-2:3) is obsolete as a description of creation – it is a myth. To be taken seriously today Christians must engage with the language of science to talk about creation. Evolution is the way that God has created the diversity of life we see today. God has been at work creating it over geological aeons, he is doing so now, and he will continue to do so into the distant future.

But like all good myths the creation story in Genesis Ch1 encapsulates deep truths which we must not carelessly discard. 

One of these truths is that God loves biodiversity - why should he make it if he doesn’t love it? We are told that ‘God saw everything that he had made and … it was very good’. If we love God then we must seek to protect the diversity of his creation – anything we do to damage it is an offence against him.

Another of these truths is that human beings are special, made in the image of God: ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them’, says Genesis.

We alone of all the creatures on earth are blessed with intelligence – we can imagine a future, plan how to bring it about, and act to make it happen. And we alone of all the creatures on earth possess a moral sense – we can tell right from wrong, distinguish truth from lies, prefer beauty to ugliness – as God does. We call this capacity conscience. If we follow our conscience we are able to do good, to be as good as God has created us to be, and in a sense we become co-creators with him. This is what it is to be truly human. Of course we know that all too often we fail at this – we sin – but we believe God will forgive us if we truly repent and mend our ways.

We must be careful as human beings not to misunderstand our place in creation.

Genesis Ch 1 tells us, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’.

Well, the human race has certainly been fruitful and multiplied - there are now more than 8 billion people on planet Earth, and still increasing, though the annual rate is slowing. As a species we have subdued the Earth – human beings consume more resources than Earth can provide. By some estimates we are using today the resources of 1.8 Earths. The result is the ecological crises we are facing now - climate change, the degradation of natural ecosystems, and species extinction.

Too often greedy people understand the command to ‘have dominion’ over Earth’s resources as a licence to exploit, to take as much as they can, more than they need, without thought for the future. But this is wrong. It is wrong and it is sinful.

Wise farmers know they hold their land on a repairing lease for their successors. They know not to take more from the land than its fertility allows, not to overstock their farm. Wise rulers protect their lands from over-exploitation so that they may continue to flourish.

Our dominion over the earth is subject to constraints whether we like it or not. The alternative creation myth in the 2^nd chapter of Genesis forbids over-exploitation of the Earth. God takes Adam, the archetypal human being, and places him in the Garden of Eden ‘to till it and keep it’, in other words, to care for it. So must we.

We human beings have a special responsibility to care for God’s creation.

The ecological crises we face have brought the importance of this into sharp focus. In response our different Christian traditions now recognise that care for creation is a Christian imperative.

Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew called out human destruction of the natural world as a sin. The late Pope Francis in his encyclical “Laudato ‘Si, on Care for Our Common Home”, appealed for ‘a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet … a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all’. And the Church of Ireland, along with the rest of the Anglican Communion, has committed itself ‘to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth’, as a mark of its mission.

The challenge has been laid down, and now it is up to Christians of all traditions to work together, with people of goodwill from other faiths and none, to care for and cherish the Earth, the Garden of Eden that God has given us. How are we going to respond to the challenge, both as individuals and as our Nenagh Union of Parishes?

This is the context in which Jesus’s words from the 2^nd reading (Matt 6:24-33) speak to me.

Jesus says, ‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’

Our society’s single-minded pursuit of wealth in a consumer market economy is surely at the heart of the ecological crisis we face, which threatens our very civilisation. We have a choice to make: either we serve wealth – continue business as usual - and face destruction; or we serve God by changing our lifestyles to live simply without waste, protecting the environment, and generously supporting those in need.

Jesus understands very well that fear for the future is the greatest barrier to making lifestyle changes. In some of his most beautiful words, he tells his followers not to worry, because God looks after his creatures.

‘Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field … will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?’

Our heavenly Father knows what we need, and if we ‘strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness’, he will give us all that we need – just perhaps a little less than our greedy desires. Part of our striving must be to care for and cherish the good Earth God has given us, and at the same time to care for and cherish our fellow human beings.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word.

God of the living,
with all your creatures great and small
we sing your bounty and your goodness,
for in the harvest of land and ocean,
in the cycles of the seasons,
and the wonders of each creature,
you reveal your generosity.
Teach us the gratitude that dispels envy,
that we may honour each gift,
cherish your creation,
and praise you in all times and places. Amen

St Brigid, herald of new life

Published in the February 2026 Grapevine, the monthly magazine for the Nenagh Union of Parishes

I am sitting down to write on the 1^st day of February, Imbolc, traditionally the first day of Spring here in Ireland. And God’s good creation does not disappoint. Snowdrops and crocuses are spreading sheets of colour around the garden, so welcome after the short dark days of winter.

It is also the Feast Day of St Brigid of Kildare, one of our three Irish patron saints alongside St Patrick and St Columba. It is right and proper that we now celebrate her with a new and welcome springtime public holiday weekend.

St Brigid is an enigmatic figure. As a Christian saint we believe she lived about 1,500 years ago, at the cusp of the conversion of pre-Christian Ireland. We know remarkably little about her, apart from biographies filled with myth and legend written down long after her death. She shares her name with an ancient goddess in Irish mythology, associated with wisdom, poetry, healing, protection, smithing, and animal husbandry. Some scholars doubt that St Brigid ever existed as a living woman, believing pious Christians merely transferred the myhs of the goddess to an imaginary woman. But I prefer to see her as a real woman of firm and practical faith, a worthy saint to emulate.

Brigid the saintly woman was born into slavery. The early biographies name her mother as Broicsech, a slave who was christened by St Patrick, and her father as Dubhtach, a Leinster chieftain. She spent her childhood as a farm worker, churning butter, shepherding flocks, and tending crops. As she grew older, she performed miracles, including healing and feeding the poor. The King of Leinster recognised her holiness, and persuaded her father to free her from slavery. She entered the religious life and was given the powers of an abbess, broadly equivalent to a bishop. According to tradition, with seven companions she organised communal consecrated religious life for women in Ireland at her monastery at Kildare in 480AD.

This was no ordinary monastery. It was a double monastery, one for women and one for men. She recruited a man, St Conleth, to lead the men’s monastery alongside her, but she was in charge. It developed into a centre of faith and learning, with a famous school of metalwork and book illumination. For centuries Kildare was ruled by a double line of abbess-bishops and abbot-bishops.

St Brigid reminds us that women are called, just as men are, to leadership in Christ’s church. Sadly, women continue to be denied leadership roles in many churches, despite St Paul’s insight that ‘in Christ there is no male or female’. Just last December a Vatican commission ruled out the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate. In the Church of Ireland, we have been blessed in recent years to receive the ministry of women leaders as deacons, priests and bishops, including in this parish. I pray that our brothers and sisters in Christ in other traditions may soon receive the same blessings.

Let us give thanks for the example of St Brigid, and all the women of strong faith whom the Holy Spirit calls to leadership in our churches.

Christian Unity Week 2026 in the Nenagh area

The Church of Ireland Nenagh Union of Parishes is joining the Catholic Odhrán Pastoral Area to invite Christians of all traditions in the Nenagh area to an ecumenical prayer service for Christian Unity Week, in St Patrick’s Church, Puckane, on Thursday January 22^nd at 7pm. All are welcome!

The service will be based on resources prepared by the faithful of the Armenian Apostolic Church, part of the Oriental Orthodox tradition, along with their brothers and sisters of the Armenian Catholic, and Evangelical Churches. Armenia became the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion in 301AD, well before the Roman Empire’s embrace of Christianity. The resources have been distributed by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.

The title of the service, ‘Light from Light for Light’, is inspired by the Nicene Creed, whose 1700^th anniversary we commemorated last year. In it we declare Christ is ‘light from light’, and we add ‘for light’, because Christ shines God’s light into this troubled world, bringing us into loving communion with each other and with God. The service is adapted from the ‘Sunrise Service’, one of the daily prayer hours of the Armenian Church, compiled by their great 12^th century patriarch St Nersess ‘the Gracious’.

We will share the light of Christ, as the flame is passed on from the Paschal candle to candles held by the congregation, filling the church with light. And we will affirm the faith we share by saying together the Nicene creed in its original form, before the ‘filioque’ schism.

Joc Sanders from the Church of Ireland Nenagh Union says: “God surely loves the diversity of our Christian traditions, just as he loves the wonderful diversity of life he has made. We do not all need to worship in the same way, nor even hold exactly the same beliefs. But when we gather to pray together as Christians of different traditions, I believe the Spirit urges us to the unity Christ prays for, which is unity in diversity. We have much to learn from each other. We need each other to be salt and yeast to build God’s kingdom in the world.”

Echoing him, Deborah O’Driscoll, Minister for Catechetics in the Odhrán Pastoral Area, comments: “God calls us to unity, not uniformity. Each of our Christian traditions has its own gifts to share, and when we come together, we enrich one another through the love of Christ. Let us celebrate the diversity God has made and recognize that, though we may worship differently, we are one family in faith. Unity doesn’t mean thinking the same way—it means walking together in love, listening, and learning from one another as we strive to build God’s kingdom together. We are better together than apart.”

Who was Mary, the theotokos?

Mary Magnificat by Laura James

A reflection for Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13 Jan 2026

The Magnificat which we have just heard, Mary’s great song of praise, is set in the lectionary in place of a psalm for this Tuesday. I’m not sure why, but it does give us us the opprtunity to reflect on who Mary really was.

The background to the Magnificat is this. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, has travelled to a hill town to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is 6 months pregnant with John the Baptist. ‘When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb … For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord”’.

And Mary responds with the Magnificat.

Most of us, I suppose, have grown up with a rather mawkish image of Mary as meek and mild, a demure teenager who couldn’t say boo to a goose. This has been reinforced in art, and in many of our favourite hymns and carols. ‘Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head’, we sing in one hymn. ‘Mary was that mother mild’, we sing in another. Gentle Mary – mild, meek, the handmaid of the Lord, head bowed in reverence. Can’t you see her there in so many paintings, stained glass windows, and Christmas cards?

But this is not the real Mary that we meet in her own words. The Magnificat is no sweet lullaby - it is a battle cry, bold and defiant. Secure in her faith in God as her Saviour, she cries out, ‘From this day all generations will call me blessed; the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name’. She is certain that God cares for the poor, the powerless, the hungry, those with least in society, just as he cares for her: ‘The Lord has shown strength with his arm and scattered the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty’.

We short-change Mary when we idealise her as meek and mild. The real Mary was a fighter. Fierce to protect her first born son, Jesus, when she fled as a refugee with him and Joseph from the wrath of Herod. Fierce for God’s justice and righteousness to flow down upon ordinary people such as her.

This is how we should remember her. This is why we should revere her. And for this reason she is an example to us in these troubled times, when the powerful behave as if might is right and trample on the lowly.