INCALCULABLE DEBT—INCALCULABLE MERCY | The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost | 13 September 2026 | Matthew 18:21–35 | Paul Bieber

Matthew 18:21–35 Revised Standard Version

²¹ Peter came up and said to Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” ²² Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.

²³ “Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. ²⁴ When he began the reckoning, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents; ²⁵ and as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. ²⁶ So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ ²⁷ And out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. ²⁸ But that same servant, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ ²⁹ So his fellow servant fell down and besought him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ ³⁰ He refused and went and put him in prison till he should pay the debt. ³¹ When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. ³² Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; ³³ and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ ³⁴ And in anger his lord delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt. ³⁵ So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

also
Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:1-13
Romans 14:1-12

INCALCULABLE DEBT—INCALCULABLE MERCY

Grace, peace, and much joy to you, people of God.

Ah, forgiveness is great! To be forgiven: to have lifted from me the weight of all my self-centered and hurtful thoughts, words, and deeds; and the myriad good things I have left undone. To have an opportunity to amend my life. And to forgive: no longer carrying the burden of resentment against those who have wronged me—forgiven and forgiving: I am set free!

But, oh, forgiveness is hard! It’s much easier to talk about forgiving than actually and genuinely to forgive from the heart. I heard last Sunday the verses just before today’s Gospel, from Matthew 18. I heard that if a brother or sister—another member of the Church—sins against me, I am to go to that person: to reason with him, to rebuke without rancor but with a view toward reconciliation. Jesus lays out the whole process: first one-to-one, then with one or two others, finally bringing the matter before the whole congregation. But it’s not an easy process, especially when I’m still feeling the sting of having been wronged.

And so it is no real surprise that now Peter asks, How many times do I have to do this? Doubtless he thought himself generous in offering to engage in this process as many as seven times with the same sinner. By taking that seven times seventy, Jesus is not suggesting that 490 times is sufficient, but rather that we have to forget this whole business of counting sins and reconciliation attempts.

Then Jesus proceeds to tell a parable—a parable of the kingdom, a parable of grace, a parable of judgment. No other parable confronts us so starkly with the contrast between God’s mercy and love, and our own merciless lovelessness. It’s a parable of the kingdom; it begins: “the kingdom of heaven may be compared with a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants,” as in the harvest that concludes the agricultural parables; the drawing ashore of the net; and the last parable, the Son of Man coming in his glory to separate the sheep from the goats. In the kingdom, all the accounts will finally be set right.

When it comes to settling the accounts, though, one who owes ten thousand talents is brought before the king. This is an impossible sum ever to repay. Ten thousand was the largest unit of number, and the talent was the largest unit of currency. The servant owes an impossibly large debt to the king, beyond the biggest stack of money imaginable. The servant’s death is incalculable—as is the debt to God that I feel when I examine my mismanaged and broken life in the light of God’s goodness and generosity to me. How could that account ever be settled? How could I ever repay?

The king does not “settle the account” by canceling the debt because of the servant’s extravagant promise to repay everything someday. The king doesn’t make a penitential payment schedule. There is no bookkeeping in this parable of grace. Purely by the grace of the forgiving king, the servant leaves the throne room ready to enjoy his new life, set free and forgiven, right?

Wrong. As a debtor, the servant pleads for mercy, but as a creditor he mercilessly demands what is owed to him. He doesn’t seem really to have experienced the forgiveness he has received. He is holding on to his old life, not living the new life forgiveness gave him. This servant and God’s grace somehow passed each other like ships in the night. What about us? Do we demand from others what we think they owe us, forgetting the immensity of the debt God has forgiven us?

This is of course the question Jesus’ parable forces on us as we hear it. The fellow servants, quite rightly distressed, lay the matter before their lord. The lord, the king, hands the unforgiving servant over to the very justice he had insisted on for himself. The parable of grace quickly becomes a parable of judgment as the merciless servant’s judgment on his fellow rebounds on himself.

All of us who are called to live the values of the kingdom find ourselves in this place of both grace and judgment. St. Augustine asks, Is there anyone who is not God’s debtor? Only a person in whom no sin can be found. Is there anyone who has no one in his debt? Only one who has never suffered any wrong. Do you think there is anyone who has not in turn wronged another in some way, incurring debt? All are debtors and have others in debt to them. Accounts must be settled in some way. Just as you want to be forgiven, so someone is in need of your forgiveness.

Jesus settles all accounts by dying on the cross, granting us God’s forgiveness, undeserved, full and free. The four dimensions of the cross are the dimensions of God’s mercy: high as heaven and down to earth, as far as the East from the West.  If the horizontal channel of forgiveness is closed, the vertical channel closes as well. Christ’s death and resurrection are the reference point for our lives. We are called to die to our old sinful and sinned-against lives, to ask forgiveness of those we have offended and to grant forgiveness to those who have offended us. Unless we are willing to die to ourselves, we will miss the new life.

St. Paul drives the irony deeper. We who would sit in judgment on others do not even belong to ourselves. None of us lives to himself. We owe our very existence to God who made us. We owe our very selves to the forgiving goodness of Christ, who has already gone to the cross to take away our debt to God. We owe our future, opened by forgiveness, to the one who canceled our debt.

If I have no sense of my incalculable debt to God, if I cannot see my own sin, my part in the troubles of the world, the church, my relationships, and myself, I will be blind to the source and goal of my life, to the mercy I have received, and so unable to show mercy. But every time you freely forgive someone, you pass on a bit of the forgiveness that God has given you, although somehow you don’t have any less of it. But if you’re still seeing yourself as the one sinned against, trying to keep score of how many times you have forgiven, you haven’t really forgiven; you’re just postponing revenge.

Joseph’s brothers thought that maybe he was just postponing revenge. He had brought his famine-stricken family down to Egypt where he had risen from the slavery into which they sold him to a place second only to Pharoah. But now that their father Jacob has died, the brothers are thinking that revenge, that dish best served cold, is on Joseph’s mind. So they concoct a story: before he died, Dad said you should forgive us, please. Just to sweeten the deal, they offer to be his slaves—what a reversal! But Joseph has come to understand, through his innocent sufferings, that God writes straight with crooked lines. “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Joseph has suffered a lot of wrong but he has died to that old life and risen above the desire for revenge; closing his “account” with his brothers he freely forgives them.

In the tenement churches of Rome to which St. Paul writes his great Epistle, there are Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. In this last part of the letter, Paul writes of the way people who observe different individual practices can live in harmony. In the Lutheran Church we call questions about what Christians eat or what holy days we observe adiaphora, “indifferent things.” But we know that it is precisely the differences over these practices that can cause church members to judge each other and refuse forgiveness when they make these secondary things into primary things.

The primary thing, Paul says, is to do all that we do in honor of the Lord and to give thanks to God. All our living, and all our dying, are to the Lord. Our identity is anchored in our Lord Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection are the reference point for our lives, not our preferences and rules. Forgiveness and reconciliation are at the heart of the life of the Christian community. In the Church, in our families, throughout our lives, there is no power greater than forgiveness.

The weak in faith in Rome are an example of the poor in spirit, like Joseph’s fearful brothers or a man overwhelmed by debt. Jesus’ parable preaches to these the good news of forgiveness, sola gratia. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom. The parable teaches that the kingdom comes, a new life flows, from this forgiveness: blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. But unblessed are the unmerciful. Following Christ entails a lifelong pilgrimage of blessing as we suffer wrong and do wrong, yet still receive and give forgiveness; there is no power greater than forgiveness.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Paul Bieber, STS
E-Mail: paul.bieber@sbcglobal.net
Retired Lutheran Pastor
San Diego, California, USA