Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sermon
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 13, 2026)
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all forever. Amen. Those of you who have been coming to church for more than a couple of weeks, or maybe even if you've only been coming to church for a couple of weeks, you know that I like to preach about love. And whether or not you've been to church at all, you might know, or I'm going to tell you, that I wrote a book about forgiveness.
So the lessons we have today, Joseph forgiving his brothers and Jesus saying to his disciples, don't forgive seven times, forgive 77 or another translation, 70 times 7 times. These lessons about forgiveness are ones that I like. Here's something I don't like so much. An image of God as a slave owning king who tortures his slave until the debt is paid. This is our parable from the Gospel of Matthew today: a servant who is forgiven and then refuses to forgive in turn. And because he refuses to give, he's punished severely.
I have to tell you, friends, that I have looked into every subtlety of Greek translation, every nuance of Greek grammar, every alternative definition of every Greek word in these verses, every possible way to weasel out of the meaning that looks true on its face. And I have to tell you, this is the verse that we have.
There are some things that I can say to put it in context. This is a parable, not a doctrine. It's meant to be a story, a relatable story to illustrate a teaching. And ancient Rome, Judea, which was occupied by Rome, was part of the Roman Empire. It was a slave-based culture. And so a relatable story might talk about slaves and kings. So I don't think this is a strong claim or meant to be a strong claim about the nature of God. It's meant to be a story that tells us something about how we ought to behave.
I can also tell you that in the ancient world, especially in ancient forms of slavery, debt and freedom went together. What slavery looked like in ancient Rome is actually more like we today might call indentured servitude. There was a price that you could pay for your freedom. And in fact, when the first slave is forgiven here, it says he's released. His debt is forgiven, and he's released. This is called a manumission fee.
And in fact, Jesus says in chapter 20 that he came to pay this fee. It's usually translated as ransom. Jesus came to give his life as a ransom for many, but the Greek word actually means this price for freedom, a way to free slaves. So because of this and because of this context, I don't think that we are meant to, and I don't think we should regard our God as a cruel slave owner. And yet we still have the ending to this parable. We still have the punishment of this unforgiving slave.
And so I sat with this this week and tried to find a way around it and I couldn't, so I just sat with it. And it got me to a place I think is meaningful or useful even if uncomfortable. First, I want to put this parable in a little bit more context because the figures that are named here, the debts that are owed, I think just sort of fly over our heads. They're ancient monetary values that have very little meaning to us. The first debtor owes the king 10,000 talents and contemporary figures that's somewhere between six and $12 billion.
There's actually something humorous about him going to his master and saying, "I just need a little more time." This is a person without the capacity to really generate income who owes, let's go with the low side, who owes $6 billion and says, "Just give me a couple more days." And the king, out of mercy, waves it off and releases him. This huge sum, this extravagant mercy. This is the foundation for everything else that happens in this parable. This is the first act, this act of extravagant mercy of the king towards the subject.
We can't ignore the ending as much as I might want to ignore the ending, but the beginning matters, and that's how it begins. An unpayable sum, forgiven, and the person released from servitude. It's just an extravagant, immense act of grace and mercy. The other debt, the one that the person who's still enslaved owes the person who was freed, is 100 denarii, which is roughly 600,000 times smaller than what the first debtor owed. In today's figure is maybe $10,000.
It's still a significant fee. I don't think that Jesus is trying to trivialize the other debt. It's significant. Something really does need to be forgiven here. It's not just, "Oh, it doesn't matter." It's something real. But when put in the context of the original gift of the starting position of this parable, even though it is significant, it fades in comparison to what the first debtor has already been forgiven. And so we have this beginning, this extravagant act of generosity, and we also still have the ending. So what do we do with that?
For that, I actually want to turn back to the lesson from the Hebrew Bible, the story of Joseph and his brothers. We have the end of that story. This is right at the end of the Book of Genesis chapter 50, and Joseph forgives his brothers. If you've read the Book of Genesis or seen the musical, you kind of know the story. Maybe Joseph is left for dead. His brothers throw him into a pit and leave him to die. Somehow, through a combination of God's grace and luck, he becomes the highest official in Egypt, the right-hand man of Pharaoh, basically a stand-in for the king.
And he's eventually brought back to his brothers. His brothers come to him, and they're all sort of reconciled. And then Jacob, their father, dies. And his brothers, knowing what they did to him, knowing that they tried to kill him or at least leave him for dead, they say- and we have this in our lesson for today- they say, "What if he still holds... I mean, I know he's been nice to us while dad was alive, but what if he still bears a grudge against us?" And in particular, this is the phrase, "What if he wants to pay us back for all the evil we did him? Why don't we tell him that our father asked him to forgive us," invoking the name of the father whom Joseph still loved to try to seek some protection.
It's actually pretty clear that Jacob never asked them to do this. They make this up. They're still kind of lying when they go to Joseph. The Hebrew text gives the impression, seems to suggest that Jacob never knew what his other sons did to Joseph. And so he couldn't tell them to ask for forgiveness because he didn't know that they'd wronged Joseph. In fact, in the rabbinical commentary on this text, the rabbis say that Joseph never told his father what his brothers did to him for fear that it would break his father's heart.
In other words, the thing that they want to ask, the reason that they want to give him to forgive them, "Our father loves us even though we wronged you. Our father loves us, so please forgive us." Jacob already knew. Excuse me, Joseph already knew, which is why Joseph never told their father what they did. He just forgave because he knew his father loved the ones who had wronged him. He just forgave. Out of love for his father, out of his love for his father who loved those wrongdoers, he just forgave. And when his brothers come and make up this lie, which he already knows is a lie and they weep, he weeps with them and deals with them kindly.
So let's go back to this difficult parable from Jesus. I think when we read through this parable, it's easy to see a couple of main figures. There's the unforgiving slave, the slave who doesn't want to forgive as he's been forgiven and then there's a king, right? But there's this other character too, the one who owns a hundred denarii; he's not just a prop in this story. He's not just a random person who's thrown in to illustrate a lesson. He's also a servant of the king. We can only assume that the king desires to show him mercy as much as he desires to show any mercy, as much as he desired to show mercy to the first debtor.
And for that reason, I think the king's fury at the end of this lesson, it's not out of a desire to punish the one, it's out of a desire to protect the other. It's because this king also cares for the other debtor because he also wants to extend mercy, wants mercy extended to this other one whom he loves that he's mad at the first. As in the case of Joseph and his brothers, the point about forgiveness, the point about mercy, is that our moral life, your moral life, isn't just about God and you. God does love you, of course, but God doesn't just love you.
God also loves the one who owes you something. God also loves the one who has wronged you, as uncomfortable as that might feel for us, especially when we've been gravely wronged. God also loves that sinner six billion times over, more than you could ever imagine. God loves that one too. This is the test of our faith: that God could love that one who hurt me that much, that God could forgive that one that many times. But if we do believe that, how could we do otherwise?
It's important to say that the first debtor is good to the king, shows repentance and bends the knee and shows gratitude, is in great relation with the king. It's his neighbor that he has trouble with and that's the thing that gets him into trouble. It doesn't matter how nice you are to God if you're cruel to God's children. I think this is what lurks in the background and in the details of this uncomfortable parable of this challenging ending. Beneath the king's flashing anger at the unforgiving slave hides his abiding mercy toward the one who is still yet to be forgiven. And this is relatable, I think, because our world today is rife with mercilessness, with unforgiveness. In fact, that's an understatement and a euphemism.
We are drowning in cruelty, friends. I've only lived about 50 years and so I don't pretend to have a wide view of history and all the possible cruelties that humans have visited upon one another. And I know they are grave and massive, but in my relatively short life, I have never seen power and Christian power in particular. I have never seen it relish cruelty and acts of cruelty as much as it does in our world today. All around us, people are shot in the street and flung into detention and dumped in unfamiliar lands, people seeking safety who are at risk and vulnerable made more vulnerable and exposed. We see beloved children of God demonized and damaged and discarded just because of how they look or how they want to look or who they are. We see them bullied and beaten and broken for failing to fit in. We see unconscionable acts of cruelty all around.
As I say most weeks that I speak from this pulpit, as I write in that book published about forgiveness, I believe our God is infinitely forgiving and loving and merciful, but having sat with this angry parable all week, I also have to believe that God hates that cruelty so much that God hates what Christians are doing, what we are doing, what Christians are allowing to be done. I don't know if there's any other way to read that last line. God hates our cruelty; God wishes for, commands, mercy.
Now, I'm a priest. I'm not a judge. I'm not a statesman. I understand that mercy may not be a prudent choice in every situation and that pie-eyed theologies might not stand up to the complex demands of what is really and truly a dangerous world. I don't want to be sentimental about mercy or pretend that sentimentality is enough in this dangerous world. But what the troubling end of this parable really insists that we reckon with, I think, is not the wrath of an unforgiving God, nor even the largesse of that God's mercy.
What Jesus, I think, really wants us to recognize is that all the people suffering cruelty at the hands of Christian power today, all those poor suffering masses at the margins of our society and at the margins of our attention, all of them, every single one of them, first and before anything else is a forgiven, favored child of God. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice, "says the Lord. I think what Jesus wants more than anything else is for us to act like that is true.