"Do not weigh our merits, but pardon our offences,
and fill us all who share in this holy communion
with your grace and heavenly blessing;"

I have brought a pair of scales as a visual aid today, but this is not a new idea. Back in Mediaeval times when church walls would have displayed large doom paintings they often showed people being weighed in the scales of judgement. Those whose sins weighed heavy were condemned to hell. That rather crude concept of divine judgement as a weighing up of our good deeds against our sins persists to this day, though it is supported neither by the Bible nor Christian doctrine.

A major problem is that if we hope to achieve goodness by our own efforts we are doomed to failure. ‘To err is human’ – it is an inescapable part of the human condition. The more we try to do good the more we seem to fail:

Romans 7:18-24

18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

The scales seem biased in favour of sin.

Over the years religion has offered various ways to redress the balance. In the Old Testament and right up to Jesus’ day ritual sacrifices were offered (literally a holy making not a giving up of something as we use the word nowadays) – offerings of food, or animals, or (horrifically) humans. The hope was that in giving to God something which was valuable to you you would gain God’s favour. In Mediaeval times you could pay for masses to be said for your soul and you could buy indulgences – all ways of trying to balance the scales on the other side from sin.

Martin Luther took exception to all this. Besides the corruption he saw within the Church he also saw the theological dangers of this, in that practices of this kind encouraged the idea that we could earn our salvation and therefore made the motivation for all our morality and worship ultimately selfish: we help others in order to help ourselves to a place in heaven; we love God because we hope for heaven thereby.

So Luther and the Protestant reformers argued that however hard we tried we could never, by our own efforts, counter-balance our great sinfulness. We could never work our own salvation – or justify ourselves. What we needed was not to pile more weight on the other side of the scales from sin but to turn to God in faith that he would remove our sin from us, (like removing the weight from the ‘sin’ side of the scales). God’s forgiveness cannot be earned but must be given freely (grace – a free gift), so the emphasis must be not on what we can do to be saved but entirely on what God has done for us – most especially through his Son, on the cross. Christ’s sacrifice removes any need for further sacrifice – for his was a "full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world".

The words of Eucharistic Prayer C come with very little alteration from Cranmer’s 1549 prayer book (via 1662 BCP) and the reformation theological perspective is evident in the centrality of the cross and Jesus’ "precious death":

Grant that by his merits and death,
and through faith in his blood,
we and all your Church may receive forgiveness of our sins
and all other benefits of his passion.

The Protestant reformers were right to stress our need of God’s forgiveness. If we have wronged someone we cannot expect just to cancel it out by doing something right. We cannot demand, expect or earn someone’s forgiveness – it must be given freely. So we pray to God, "Do not weigh our merits but pardon our offences".

However it is the nature of protesters that they often swing to an opposite extreme. In their reaction to the idea that we could ever overcome sin by our own efforts they placed an unhelpful emphasis on our utter sinfulness. "There is no health in us…miserable offenders"(BCP confession from Morning Prayer). I cannot believe that God wants us to grovel in self-hatred like that.

Perhaps a helpful analogy might be of parents assessing their children’s behaviour at the end of the day. Would a parent really weigh up their children’s merits and offences to see if they would love them or not? Put like that the idea seems absurd. I believe the same is true of God. God loves us regardless of our merits and despite our sins. Mercifully God is not a judgemental God who weighs our merits, but a graceful God who forgives us because he loves us. We would do well to relinquish all sense the importance of our own merits (easier said than done), and – without dwelling on our sinfulness – give thanks for God’s grace – his great gift of undeserved, unearned, saving love.

Do not weigh our merits, but pardon our offences,
and fill us all who share in this holy communion
with your grace and heavenly blessing.

Amen.

A.R.T.