Sept. 13, 2026

I speak to you in the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Today’s Gospel story centers us on the spiritual practice of forgiveness.  Sometimes forgiveness is simple.  We bump into someone, and we say “excuse me”, and the other person says something along the lines of “don’t worry about it”. 

But other times, forgiveness is a lot harder.  All of us have had the experience of someone deeply wounding us.  Something has happened that’s painful, and will stay with us for a long time.  And we struggle in those moments to think about what forgiveness might look like, or how we might ever be able to offer it.

So today, I want to spend a few minutes thinking theologically about forgiveness.  What is Jesus saying today that forgiveness is?  And why is forgiveness important for our spiritual lives?

Maybe the best place to start is by saying what forgiveness is not.  Forgiveness does not demand that we say the hurtful behavior was okay, or to pretend that we weren’t hurt by it.  And importantly, forgiveness does not demand the restoration of relationship with the person who has harmed us.  Reconciliation – mending a relationship – requires forgiveness.  But forgiveness does not require reconciliation.

This is actually very dangerous.  Because the argument – “if you forgive me, you’ll let me back into your life” – is something abusers of every stripe use to manipulate those they are abusing, in an attempt to continue that abuse.  Forgiveness creates the conditions for reconciliation, but it does not require us to give up the boundaries that keep us safe.

So if forgiveness isn’t about renewed relationship or pretending nothing happened, how should we think about it?  Jesus’ parable today frames it in terms of debt.  The Greek word in today’s Gospel that we translate as “forgive” is associated with the idea of giving up a debt by not demanding payment.  And that’s a helpful way to think about it, because the payment we usually demand for the pain that someone’s sinfulness has caused us is usually driven by revenge, or spite, or punishment.

Forgiveness offers us a choice.  To continue through a vicious cycle of hurt and hate, or to break that by entering into a virtuous circle of love.

But honestly, everything I’ve said could have come straight out of a secular self-help book.  Being a good person by forgiving.  Jesus’ teaching today takes us a step farther – to demonstrate how forgiveness is an essential spiritual practice.  And to get at that, I want to retell his parable using more modern language – so that we can better understand just how unbelievable Jesus’ story really is.

The kingdom of heaven is like what happened when a business owner checked in with his accounts receivable managers.  And he met with one manager who told him that some vendors he worked with, most of whom had gone out of business, owed the company $4 billion.  The business owner threatened to take all his assets as repayment.  The manager pleaded with him – I will get you the money – just please have patience with me.  And moved by pity, the business owner wiped the books clean and took the loss.

“But then the accounts receivable manager went to the warehouse, where he ran across a forklift driver who owed him $1,000.  The manager grabbed the man by the shoulders, shouting “pay me what you owe”.  And when the forklift driver asked for a month to save up and gather the money, the manager instead took him to court and a judge ordered that money be withheld from this man’s meager paycheck until the debt was paid.

The other employees, who saw what happened, went to the business owner with their concerns.  The business owner summoned the manager for another meeting, and when he arrived the police were there.  “You jerk”, the business owner said.  “I wiped away the $4 billion you owed me because you pleaded for mercy.  Shouldn’t you have shown a little mercy to someone who owes you $1,000?”  So in his anger he pressed charges, and the manager was sent to prison to work for $10 a day until the debt was paid.

When we hear the story this way, we realize how outrageously unbelievable Jesus meant it to be.  No business owner in his right mind would let a manager run up billions of dollars in debt.  It would be far more than the owner or the business were even worth.  The idea that the manager could repay the debt is also over-the-top ridiculous – whatever the owner seizes from him would be decimal dust compared to what the manager owes him, and the manager’s offer to pay over time is equally as crazy.  And the idea that the business owner would straight up forgive a $4 debt is absurd.

This is a crazy, unbelievable story.

But the craziest, most unbelievable part, is that the manager walked out of the owner’s office – that the servant walked out of the king’s throne room – no different than when he or she walked in. 

The servant’s great failure isn’t simply that he refused to forgive one person.  His great failure is that nothing about him changed after receiving unimaginable mercy.  In his parable, Jesus is asking how someone could receive forgiveness worth hundreds of thousands of years of labor and leave unchanged.

What the servant has missed is the intersection here between grace – God’s unearned love and favor – and gratitude.  This is at the heart of Reformed theologian John Calvin’s theological vision – that gratitude and thankfulness are the proper human responses to God’s gift of grace.

And this is so important – because this is what transforms forgiveness from something we do because it’s “the right thing to do” or because it’s “good for us” into a spiritual practice.  We forgive because it is an essential form of gratitude.  And gratitude opens what opens us up to deeper relationship with the God whose essence is abundant love, mercy, and grace.

If being forgiven by God does not transform us into people whose first impulse is to forgive others – to wipe away their debts as our debts have been wiped away – then our capacity to grow in kindness and love as disciples of Jesus will always be stunted.

The kingdom of God is like what happens when a king unimaginably forgives an impossibly huge debt.  God has called you into the king’s throne room.  You have had your debt wiped away.  So who will you be?  Will you be the unchanged servant?  Or will you walk out a different person, transformed by your encounter with God?

My friends, walk out believing the unbelievable.  Go into the world knowing that God’s unending grace and love and forgiveness have changed you, and go with you.  And as you revel in that grace, practice your gratitude by imitating God’s forgiveness – however imperfectly –with your own.

Amen.