September 13, 2026

Pentecost 16A, Lectionary 24

Matthew 18:21-35

Epiphany, Winnipeg

Great story, eh? Let’s do the math. How much did the slave owe their master? It was ten thousand talents. Now one talent is about what a labourer would get paid for fifteen years of work. So ten thousand talents was about 150,000 years’ wages. That’s what the servant owed his king. Nobody can owe that much! Nobody can pay that much. So the slave falls to his knees, and he begs and grovels and he promises to pay back a hundred and fifty-thousand years’ wages. My first thought when I heard this this week is that that king must be a pretty bad manager if he let that debt get that out of hand. But then you might also just imagine the king saying to himself, “There’s no way he’s going to pay that back. I will never see that money.” So he just says, “You don’t owe me anything. The debt’s gone.” The servant is free from having to pay back what it’s impossible to pay, and the one who could demand the debt just walks away from it and doesn’t have to play the impossible game of scrambling to get something in return. It’s just over and done.

And we see where the story goes. That same servant, forgiven so much, meets another who owes him what amounts to three months’ wages, and he shows him no mercy at all.

Jesus walks us into the tricky question of forgiveness today. And it’s important. And it’s simple. And it’s hard.

Twenty some years ago a lone young man with a gun walked into a one- room schoolhouse in an Amish community in Pennsylvania, and shot ten young schoolgirls. Five of them died, and when it was all over he took his own life too.

The response of the people who had lost their children was simple and swift: They forgave. They comforted the shooter’s father and mother; they prayed for his wife and children; they brought casseroles; they taught their own young not to hold a grudge against the man who had killed their friends. They gathered in the one who had hurt them the most, along with the ones closest to him, and together they went through everything that was hurting them.

It might not have been that simple. The urge to hate would be strong, and the desire to bask in their rightly deserved calls for justice, whatever that could look like, would seem right. But given the choice between revenge and breaking ties…or forgiving and rebuilding ties, the choice for those people was clear: To forgive. Nobody demanded it from them, and it may not have been easy, but it was clear. That community chose the healing path of forgiveness.

They could have demanded justice and some kind of payback, but no amount of revenge or payback or settlement could ease their loss or change what had happened. So they let it go, and they freed themselves from demanding what they knew they would never get. And they freed a young man’s family – or did the best that they could – from having to pay back what they could never repay.

Peter asks Jesus, “How many times should I forgive? Seven times?” And Jesus says, “Nope. Seventy-seven times.” Or, you could also translate that “Seventy times seven times,” so four hundred and ninety times. This forgiveness stuff that Jesus talks about; it’s complicated math, isn’t it? Or easy math with really big numbers.

How many times have I forgiven?” In a lifetime, how many times have I been the one to whom something is owed, or how many times have I been the one who was hurt, but I’ve said, “It’s OK, you don’t owe me anything. I forgive you?” You hurt me, you did me wrong, and I forgive you”? To be honest, I don’t know how often I’ve really needed to forgive. I’ve been lucky; I haven’t been hurt too much. Four hundred and ninety times? I’m not sure. Forty-nine? Maybe? When I’ve been hurt, have I been quick to forgive? I think not. I roll around in my righteous anger for awhile. I replay whatever the scene has been and I remember what they did to hurt me, and that always gets bigger with time. Whatever any numbers might be, I think that if there were a weigh scale involved and there was someone keeping track, I would find that the times I have not forgiven outweigh the times that I have.

It’s tricky water that Jesus leads us into today. It’s clearly not about numbers. 150,000 years’ labour, 490 times or 49 times. The numbers are impossible, but Jesus makes this really clear point that forgiveness matters so

much. He knows how grudges and hurts can tear a people or a relationship or a nation apart…or a church…

Remember that. Forgiveness is all about community. It’s all about keeping a community together and working to heal relationships that might be broken. It’s important enough that Jesus makes his point with numbers we cannot imagine or possibly keep track of…and that’s how much forgiveness matters. That’s how much God has forgiven us – with numbers that can’t be tracked – and in the same way we are called to forgive. We’ll say it again soon – forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

Maybe another question might be more to the point: “How many times have I been forgiven?” If we’re talking about the forgiveness that we began our service with today….well, let’s do the math. I’ll say I couldn’t really read until I was six, so since I couldn’t read and recite the confession in the book I was off the hook for the first six years of confessing; I wouldn’t have spoken any formal confession aloud until around then. Dad was a pastor, so I was at church every Sunday and we never skipped church when we were on vacation, so I’d probably been forgiven around fifty times a year, so I hit four hundred and ninety times some time in the middle of my sixteenth year. Multiply that by four and a bit and you’ll see that my numbers are really up there today. God didn’t stop forgiving at four hundred and ninety.

But it’s not just God who’s forgiven me. Val and I met just over forty years ago, and I’m guessing she reached that four hundred ninety times forgiving me…a few months before our first anniversary. I hope that the need has gone down since then. But still…

OK, I’m being a bit flippant: Jesus doesn’t mean to set a rule, so that we keep track and keep a spreadsheet to see how many times we should forgive or how many times we should have been forgiven. But I’m also being honest. I have received the gift of forgiveness far more times than I have given that same gift.

The numbers might keep us honest. But forgiveness isn’t about numbers and keeping score. We hear these stories of forgiveness and we’re reminded that our life in community here is rooted in the gift of forgiveness that is given to us by our God. At least half the time we begin worship with confession and forgiveness, and our communion liturgy always reminds us that these gifts we receive are for the forgiveness of sins; forgiveness that heals community. And when God forgives us, that’s it. There’s no renegotiated debt or lower interest rate. God just forgets the debt and it’s done.

This gift of forgiveness has something to do with my own and your own relationship with God… But it’s about our relationship with each other; it’s a gift we give to each other and it’s a gift that sets us free. It sets us free from holding onto debts that cannot be repaid, it sets us free from gathering up injustices, and it sets us free to get on with life with each other, it sets us free to say, “Where do we go next and what does our life look like with this clean slate and this fresh start?”

So we are given this gift of forgiveness…in abundance…and are free to give this gift freely.

It’s given to us by the One who holds no grudge against us; by the one who lives and dies and lives again for us; by the One who sets us free.