Delivered on Tuesday 06 September 2011 in St George's Chapel

Genesis 50:15-21; Matthew 18:21-35

If you were to ask Thomas Aquinas, the prolific medieval theologian, what is meant by forgiveness, he might answer 'Sin is said to be forgiven us when God is reconciled to us'.[1] If you were to ask Wolfhart Pannenberg, perhaps the most rational of the huge brigade of twentieth century German theologians, he might answer 'the forgiveness of sins is the negative expression for faith's communion with God'.[2] Both are good answers; both are technically sound answers. Yet, when Peter approaches Jesus to ask about forgiveness, the answer Jesus gives is not technical, in fact his answer takes the form of a story. As the book of Genesis comes to end there is yet another exploration of forgiveness, and as with all forty-nine previous chapters, the fiftieth continues to deliver theology by way of telling a story. From a biblical point of view there is nothing second rate about communicating faith, belief, life and the universe, in the form of narrative, in the shape of a story.

In a recent Sunday supplement article I read an article that argued for our paying more attention to those novels that take God seriously. The author was a self-proclaimed atheist but had become tired of the rather fundamentalist attacks on religion from the pens of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Is it not possible, he asked, to listen more attentively to what good storytellers have to say about those questions that go right down to the depths of our being? Why not indeed?

Such books are, as you know, great in number, so where to start? Perhaps the most famous opening line in British literature is this: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'[3] Almost certainly the most famous opening line in American literature is this: 'Call me Ishmael'. With this untypically terse introduction we sail on the reading voyage that is Moby Dick. It is a gorilla of a book: powerful, energetic, huge. It is not a story about one thing, but a story about many things, not least God and human beings, revenge and forgiveness.

Herman Melville published the book in 1851. It was not his first book but it was one of his most unpopular. Melville had become fascinated with Emerson's desire both to see the birth of an indigenous American literature, (some literature that Americans could truly call their own), and the accompanying wisdom of such American authors that would them the right to be called prophets. It is no surprise then, that in attempting to fulfill Emerson's expectations Melville had to break new ground, it is equally unsurprising that early readers found the book almost unreadable.

That the book is American to the core is beyond doubt. The protagonists are ordinary folk, from various corners of the earth, whose understanding of the democratic vision is bright and unrestrained. That the book is prophetic is more debatable. Certainly it is philosophical and unashamedly theological. Moreover, it is rich in metaphor and allegory. All is not what it appears at first sight.

On the one hand we have the great white whale, Moby Dick. Described sometimes in the language of legend, sometimes granted divine quality, sometimes understood as an image of the human soul. Melville tells us that the whale is older than history itself, and I quote: the whale 'swam the seas before the continents broke water. He once swam over the site of the Tuileries and Windsor Castle and the Kremlin'. The whale is a complex creature described from many angles and understood in many different and conflicting snapshots.

On the other hand we have Ahab. Ishmael narrates the story, but the larger than life Shakespearean character at the centre of the piece is Ahab, the captain of the whaling ship. He is, we are told, 'ungodly but godlike'. As captain he exercises a kind of godlike authority but his mission of revenge is ungodly. He has lost his leg to the infamous Moby Dick and he now sees the whale as nothing more and nothing less than the very incarnation of evil. Starbuck, the first mate - who incidentally gave his name to the well-known coffee house chain - tries to persuade Ahab that it is shameful to see an innocent and wronged creature as sinful, but Ahab is not moved. As Ishmael tells us 'He placed upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down'.

Ahab's preoccupation with destroying the whale takes over his life. His ship often comes in contact with other ships and the crews intermingle. Most of the men are garrulous and glad of new company, not Ahab; he has but one question: 'Hast seen the whale'? Melville compares his one-eyed view of the world with the whale's vision, seeing with eyes on each side of its head, and each eye working independently, yielding a rich field of sight. Limiting preoccupation versus grand-scale openness.

This question of sight and seeing is tightly drawn in a chapter entitled The Doubloon. The coin is nailed to a mast on the ship. Ahab looks at the coin and he sees a sign of the coming storm. Starbuck looks at the coin; being rather more pious he sees the Trinity. Another shipmate sees the coin as part of the astrological signs. Yet another looks and makes a simple calculation, this doubloon could purchase me nine hundred and sixty cigars. It is the cabin boy Pip who sums up this little episode in these words: 'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look'. All three persons, in singular and plural: there are so many ways to look at the same thing. And what could be said of the doubloon could be said many times over about Moby Dick.

For in another chapter - and this will be my last direct reference - entitled The Whiteness of the Whale, Ishmael guides us into a meditation on the colour white. The colour white, like the doubloon, can also seen in many different ways: it is the white of innocence, the white of aesthetics, the white of Coleridge's albatross or conscience, the white of terror, the white of hope, the white of resurrection (to name but a few). But really white is colourless - it is the erasure of meaning; it points to the absence of pattern; it leads us into a world where everything looks the same and we are lost. Too much thinking, Melville would have us believe, leads us to an empty world. Ahab has overthought the whale and as a consequence he has emptied his world of meaning. There is no mention of forgiveness, for he is consumed with vengeance. He is left empty. Empty.

Melville's colossal novel goes a long way towards fulfilling Emerson's dreams. It goes a long way towards meeting the demands of the Sunday supplement writer. It goes a long way towards unraveling the deepest human questions by way of narrative, of story. For all that, this is not a book with a single message; like the doubloon, it can be seen in many ways. One way of getting into this expansive novel is to think of it as a warning against over analysis, a kind of prophetic call to heed the limits of human thinking. It is not that thinking is bad in itself, nor is it to say that the writing of Aquinas or Pannenberg is a waste of time, of course not. Thinking is instructive and in the case of Aquinas and Pannenberg quite brilliant, setting out an analysis of our talk about God in a systematic and serious manner. But - and this is rather a big but - there are times when such analysis does not foot the bill, does not meet our deepest need. At those times it is not so much reason we require as imagination, the capacity to see through independent eyes, the ability to take a whale-like view of the situation.

The one-eyed analysis of the recent London riots - that they were result of moral breakdown, or the direct impact of penal collapse - is misplaced and simplistic. Things are usually more nuanced, more subtle. This is especially true of the events of 9/11. If ever there was a happening that begged imagination rather than reason, this was it. There are no answers; there are only explorations. It is precisely at such moments as these that we need our master storytellers to help us explore where God might have been in the midst of the terrible terror, to encourage us to imagine a refreshed image of humanity forged in the fires of destruction.

As you are well aware there are many novels already written about 9/11. One need only think of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland or Ian McEwan's Saturday, good books both. They are not, however, theological. Perhaps such a book remains to be written. For the moment, we could look to Melville and his Moby Dick or perhaps Marilynne Robinson and her Gilead as hills of testimony. Testimony to the art of storytelling, with its many-sided open exploration of the being of the God and its imaginative mining of our memory, our deepest anxieties, our soiled aspirations. The art of storytelling that takes us down into the depths of soul so that we might rise again remade, open to those new possibilities that just might help bring about the kingdom of God.