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Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 13, 2026
Matthew 18:21-35
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Human beings are habitual scorekeepers. I’m not talking about sports, though I do have an app on my phone which updates me with the scores for the Mariners, Kraken, Seahawks, Cougars, and Aggies. I’m talking about the scorecards we keep on one another. When someone sins against us, we like to keep score. We like to keep track of who owes us an apology, who owes us a favor, who owes us restitution of one kind or another.
Our gospel reading for this morning begins with Peter keeping score. “Lord,” Peter begins, “If another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
Peter probably thought he was being generous here, and he was! Most rabbis at the time had a “three strikes, you’re out” policy. Peter upped the strike count to seven!
But Jesus took it even farther. “Not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy-seven times.”
These numbers are hard to translate and so some of your Bibles have Jesus saying seventy times seven, which, of course, would be 490 times. But however you translate it, the point is the same. Jesus is calling for an amount of forgiveness far beyond anything anybody expected.
To make this point further, Jesus tells a parable. He tells the story of a king with a slave who owed him ten thousand talents. This is an enormous sum! I saw one estimate suggest that at normal slave wages this would take 164,000 years to pay back. This is a ridiculous amount, obviously exaggerated to serve the purpose of the parable. It was humanly impossible to pay it back – which is exactly the point.
The king decided it was time to collect his ten thousand talents, and when the slave couldn’t pay, he ordered his slave to be sold, along with his wife, children, and all his possessions. The slave fell to his knees, begging the king for patience. The king then had pity on him and forgave him the entire amount. Just like that, he was free from his entire debt. It was all forgiven. He was free.
Scene two: This freed and forgiven slave leaves the palace and immediately bumps into a buddy of his who owed him a hundred denarii. This was not a small sum – about three or four months’ worth of wages – but this man who had just been set free from 164,000 years’ worth of wages, the equivalent of approximately 60 million denarii, seized him by the throat and demanded payment. And when his buddy couldn’t come up with the tiny-by-comparison 100 denarii, he had him thrown into prison.
Scene three: The king gets wind of this and is furious. He has his slave hauled back in. “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” The man’s entire debt is reinstated, and the slave is to be tortured until he repays back every last dime, presumably for 164,000 years.
Jesus concludes this parable with some alarming words: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you,” Jesus says, “if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” This parable serves as a warning – to Peter, and to us, and to all who insist on keeping count, clinging to the scorecards we hold against others, looking for throats to grab.
Does this mean that our own forgiveness from God is connected in some way to our own willingness to forgive? Well, yes and no.
We don’t want to turn this into a transaction, a tit-for-tat. It kind of sounds like that here, but that isn’t how the God we know in Christ works. We have the rest of the Bible describing God’s mercy and forgiveness and salvation as a gift, not something we earn or achieve. Remember that the first scene in the parable is of a king who is willing to forgive an amount that is humanly impossible to repay. That is who our God is! We don’t earn our forgiveness by being forgiving.
But that said, God’s forgiveness and our forgiveness of others ARE closely related. When our hands are closed in unforgiveness, they are also closed to receiving forgiveness from God. When our hands are grabbing others by the throat whenever they might owe us something, they have let go of the mercy of God. Jesus is saying that if that’s what you really want, God will “hand you over” to that way of living – and it won’t go well for you. That kind of scorekeeping is its own torture. Holding on to those grudges is its own kind of hell. It is also a sign that your heart is not holding onto the extravagant mercy that God has shown towards you.
That’s what this forgiveness really is; it is a heart issue. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean not confronting others about their sin. Just last week we heard Jesus tell us to confront them! Forgiveness does not mean ignoring problems or minimizing when you are hurt. Forgiveness does not mean approving of sin. Forgiveness doesn’t mean not holding someone accountable for their actions. It doesn’t mean you have to trust someone who has proven to be untrustworthy. It doesn’t mean returning to an abuser. It doesn’t mean being a doormat.
Forgiving someone is a matter of the heart. It is a matter of releasing the anger and the bitterness that make you want to seize someone by the throat. It is an inner disposition that lets go of any need to get even or settle scores. It is the inner act of opening your hand to fellowship if that is at all possible and releasing all animosity even if it is not. When Jesus calls us to “forgive from the heart,” he is calling us to purge the poison of unforgiveness from our hearts, which only makes us sicker and sicker the longer we hold onto it.
This can be extremely difficult in some situations. I think that’s why Jesus taught us to pray about it. In the Lord’s Prayer, he teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Here he shows us that God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others are indeed closely related to one another. Vertical forgiveness and horizontal forgiveness are inextricably related to each other. But Jesus also shows us that he knows this will be a struggle for us, and so he teaches us to pray about it. He teaches us to bring those struggles to him for his help.
And Jesus not only helps us by giving us warnings. He also helps us by giving us perspective, which is also an important aspect of this parable. In this parable, with its exaggerated figures and high drama, Jesus is helping Peter, and us, to see ourselves not merely as the perpetually aggrieved who are owed something, but as people who have our own tremendous debts. Through this wild, hyperbolic parable, Jesus is helping us to see that our sin is much greater than we often think. The debt we owe God is a much greater amount than we realize, greater than we can count. You know those running tickers which show the national debt which is constantly going up, up, up – that’s us! That’s the debt we owe to God! That’s how badly we’re in hock! It is a debt we could never pay off on our own!
But the good news is that every last bit of this debt has been forgiven for Jesus’ sake. Our gracious and merciful Lord and King has forgiven what was humanly impossible for us to ever repay. All that debt is gone. All our sin has been erased from the books. We have been forgiven and set free!
This ultimately happened not through a parable, but through the cross. On the cross, Jesus bore our unforgiveness and all the torture that comes with it. Jesus was handed over for our sin, and he willingly took it all upon himself. Instead of lashing out or seizing anyone by the throat, Jesus offered his own perfect forgiveness, saying, “Father, forgive them.” Jesus willingly paid our debt in full, saying, “It is finished.” Jesus did what was humanly impossible for us to do for ourselves. Jesus purchased us with his own precious blood in order to set us free.
So what will you do now? Are you still counting? Are you still keeping score? Are you still looking for a throat to grab?
Every one of us has someone who owes us something. Someone who hurt us. Someone who disappointed us. Someone who said something they shouldn’t have said. Someone who betrayed us. Someone who never apologized. Someone who still owes us.
Jesus doesn’t tell us that what they did to us doesn’t matter. He tells us to remember what he has done for us.
Remembering what Christ done for us is what truly changes our hearts. This doesn’t necessarily come quickly, or all at once, but returning again and again to the throne of his grace is what makes it possible for us to forgive others from the heart as we ourselves have been forgiven, until we can finally throw away those scorecards once and for all.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church