Trinity 15 2026 Kings Hill
Matthew 18.21-35
“How many times should I forgive?” asks Peter.” Seven times?” “No, seventy-seven times”, says Jesus.
If I’m honest, there are times when I just want to sit Jesus down and say “really? Is that what you mean?”
Most of us will have struggled at some point to forgive someone who has hurt us. We know it’s not straightforward, especially if they have done us serious harm. And to do it again and again? Is that even wise?
And to hear, as we do at the end of the Gospel reading that if we don’t forgive others from our heart, we will suffer endless torment, just piles on the guilt.
And it can be dangerous. Sometimes people think that they should stay in situations where they are being hurt or abused when they really need to get out because they think that’s what Christian teaching on forgiveness tells them to do.
“Really Jesus? Is this what you mean?” No, I don’t think it is.
Part of the problem is that we take these words out of context.
Jesus is speaking to his disciples here about how they should look after the communities of people they will one day be responsible for in the early Church. It was a ragbag collection of very different people – men, women, Jews, Greeks, slaves, free, rich and poor. There were bound to be tensions , times when things went wrong and people hurt each other, whether they meant to or not. That’s what groups are like.
Last Sunday you may have heard the passage immediately before this where Jesus gives advice on dealing with some of those tensions. Go and see the person who’s hurt you privately first, he says. If that doesn’t work take someone else. If that doesn’t work involve the wider group. If that doesn’t work, it may be that that person needs to be kept at a distance from the community for everyone’s safety.
This is what’s in Peter’s mind when he asks his question. “How many times can we go around that process? When does the moment come when we say, enough is enough?”
He wants a rule, a number, something he can put in a disciplinary policy. But Jesus tells him that if he tries to turn forgiveness into a calculation, he will have missed the point. That’s what Jesus rather ridiculous answer means.
Imagine trying to keep track.
“That's number thirty-five…”
“Hang on, was that thirty-five or thirty-six?”
By the time you got anywhere near seventy-seven, you would have lost count.
Peter wants to reduce the complexities of human relationships to arithmetic. Jesus wants him to think more deeply. That’s why he tells a story, a parable.
Parables, like any other story, aren’t handbooks. They don’t tell you what to do. They just invite you to step inside them and try them out for size. How would it feel if I was in that situation? Who do I empathise with? Does it remind me of my own life? How does it touch my own heart?
Most parables are rather over the top. They are meant to be, to grab our attention. In this one, the king in the story has lent his slave a ridiculous amount of money for some unfathomable reason. Ten thousand talents. It’s a huge sum. Talents, by the way, were Roman units of currency, not the ability to sing or dance. One talent was worth around 16 years wages for an ordinary labourer, so 10000 talents is one hundred and sixty thousand years wages. Like I said, the story is meant to be a bit ridiculous. This is an unpayable debt. That’s the point. The king knows he will never get this money back, and we might think that if he had any sense he wouldn’t have lent it in the first place. But he did, and now it’s gone forever. What can he do? He decides that the future is more important than the past. He cuts his losses and cancels the debt.
Imagine you were that slave. The relief!
Instead of having to pay back 160,000 years’ worth of wages, he is free.
Imagine the gratitude that he should be feeling. But the tragedy is that he doesn’t. When he meets another slave who owes him just a small amount, he refuses to show him any mercy at all.
It’s baffling. Despite all that’s happened to him, he has no compassion for this other man who is as desperate as he was, and he has him thrown into prison.
When the king hears of it, he’s not impressed and the first slave is rearrested, condemned to be tortured “until the debt is paid” which will be never, since it is so huge.
Let me be clear. This story isn’t telling us that God is like this. Parables don’t work like that. They are much more complex and subtle than that. As I said earlier, they invite us to try them out for size, to step into their world to get a better insight into our own.
This parable invites us to ask what we think forgiveness is for, how it works. In particular it reminds us that forgiveness doesn’t mean saying that the wrong that was done to us doesn’t matter, or that things can just go back to the way they were. The money the king lent, and the money the first slave lent to the second slave is gone. There is no going back. But there could have been a way of going forward, if the first slave had decided to take it. Tragically, he didn’t.
If someone has hurt us, there is no way they can wind back time and unhurt us again. Words that have been said can’t be unsaid. If someone cuts us, there is always going to be a scar, however well it heals. But this story tells us that we don’t have to stay stuck at that point, exacting continual revenge. If we do that, we end up suffering just as much as the person who hurt us – that’s what the endless torment in the story is about.
In the end, forgiveness is about freedom. It unshackles us from those who have hurt us. We find our freedom by giving them theirs. We don’t have to try to change them or rescue them. We don’t have to let them live rent-free in our heads. They are God’s children, just as we are, and we can leave them in God’s hands. What went wrong between us may not be mendable this side of the grave, but it doesn’t have to define the rest of our lives – or the rest of theirs.
You don’t need me to tell you that getting to that point isn’t always straightforward. It can be the work of a lifetime, and it can’t be hurried. But it starts, it seems to me, where Jesus’ parable started, with a stupendous act of generosity, the gift of Jessus, God’s ultimate demonstration of his love for us. The tragedy the story is that, for whatever reason, the first slave didn’t appreciate the generosity that he had received. If he had done, perhaps he wouldn’t have needed to act as he did towards his fellow slave. If we want to do better than that, we need to know first of all that we have been set free by God, that we are safe in his hands, that we don’t need to be afraid, that we can live with open hands and hearts towards others. We love, because God first loved us.
Peter wanted a formula to calculate how many times he should forgive. Instead, Jesus called him to discover what it meant to be forgiven, so that he could live with the same generosity towards others as God had showed to him, and to all of us.
Some debts are unpayable. Time can’t run backwards. We can’t undo the past. We can’t change other people. But the good news is that the future can look different from the past, by the grace of God.
Amen
