Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 18:21-35
September13, 2026
The servant with the 10,000 talents. He owed lifetimes of debt….lifetimes! We think Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, well this servant in the parable was the most indebted in the world. According to the research, the man owed about 160,000 years of labor or 15 billion dollars. One person, 15 billion or 160,000 years in debt to this merciful king.
Most all of us have debt of some sort. We feel its weight every time we have to write a check or go online to pay the monthly payment. About 45% of churches in the United States carry debt or mortgages, and many of them, especially the smaller churches, feel the pressure every month when that payment comes due.
Sometimes your debt is your fault on account of choices you’ve made, whether good or bad. Sometimes your debt is someone else’s fault, debt you end up paying for that someone else may have created. Sometimes debt is just a required responsibility of living in a civilized society such as with taxes or wheel fees or whatever.
Regardless, debt is a weight on the shoulder and often an anchor tied to the ancle.
When a debt is paid off, the mortgage discharged, or when debt is canceled or forgiven, such as when my college and seminary loans were forgiven, it is a wonderful, wonderful experience.
But debt cancelation or discharge doesn’t happen all that often in our lives. We wish it did; we wish some rich tycoon would walk up to our front door and hand us a check and say, “Use this to pay off your mortgage and other debts, on me,” but it doesn’t happen.
Would you be willing, if given the opportunity, to go to the bank and fall to the floor and plead for release from your debt? I’d suggest to you that most people aren’t that desperate, or at least they don’t show their desperation in how they hold themselves because of their pride.
But here, in the parable, we have a man who knew his debt and figured out in his head that he would never be able to pay off 160,000 years of debt that he himself accrued. Of course, we have to ask the question, what in heaven’s name did he do with 160,000 years of debt, 10,000 talents? He must have lived in a palace – he had servants so yeah, he certainly lived high on the debt hog at least for part of his life.
But then we also have to ask a question or two about the king. Were his accounting practices that bad; did his accountants not properly handle the books that he would allow this servant to receive 10,000 talents knowing he’d likely never be able to pay it back?
The setup to this parable is amazing. It’s out of this world; it’s completely impossible, and yet it drives our Lord’s point home, which we will arrive at soon.
And consider the Old Testament reading from Genesis 50. Father Jacob had died, and the 11 brothers who mistreated Joseph in their youth; who threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery, they thought the chickens were coming home to roost. They thought Joseph, now that daddy was dead, would finally take out his just vengeance upon them.
They probably felt like the servant in the parable, helpless, scared, unsure and completely empty of pride. I mean, it was years before, almost 25 years before Jacob’s death that his brothers sold Joseph over, and he had already forgiven them, and yet their hearts grew heavy and they remembered their misdeeds from years before, and they went to Joseph and pleaded for mercy.
For Joseph, their past hatred toward him was probably not even on his mind. He had forgiven them and moved on; he gave the whole family the land of Goshen and protected them and provided for them abundantly during the famine. What possessed them to think that he would take out justice against them after all this time?
And he didn’t. He reminded them that he had forgiven them and assured them that they would be abundantly provided for.
We don’t know much more about what went on in Goshen beyond that, not until Exodus, which starts generations later. But in the parable, we discover that the king, who gave years of money to the servant, 160,000 years to be precise, just forgives it all, snap of a finger, and all the debt is gone.
Now, at first the king was going to throw him and his family in prison, more like a labor camp, until he was able to pay off all that debt, but that would barely scratch the surface of the debt he owed even if his wife and children also worked their whole lives. And the servant knows it too and he pleads – the only thing he can do – he pleads for patience.
The king knows that all the patience in the universe won’t help this debtor, I mean 10,000 talents cannot be paid back, not even close. And so, the king forgives all his debt and sends the servant on his way to live his life, and what’s amazing is that everything the servant acquired with that debt is his to keep, whatever that might have been.
Now, when you pay off your mortgage, you celebrate that. When your student loans are paid off, you break out the champagne. When that credit card is finally paid and closed, you go and have a fancy dinner at that high class restaurant (and pay for it on the other credit card), right?
But not this servant. Instead, he goes to one of his servants who owes him 100 denarii or about 3 ½ months’ wages, easily paid back in short order, and chokes him and demands he make payment, and when the servant pleads with him for time, he throws the servant in prison.
He was no Joseph.
He was no Joseph, and Jesus is no mincer of words. Jesus says what needs to be said, not only to those who stand at a distance, but even those whom He calls close friends, brothers, and comrades. As the king did to the wicked servant who refused to forgive even small debts, so too will the heavenly father do to any of you who refuse to forgive your brother from your heart. The words of Jesus.
You have to wonder what this wicked servant thought as he was summoned back to the king’s presence. But I bet he wasn’t expecting to be thrown in prison for 160,000 lifetimes.
What do you think, when you refuse to forgive your brother in Christ from your heart; your sister in Christ from your heart; your pastor from your heart; your parent, your child, your blood brother or sister, your coworker, your classmate…from your heart, do you think, when the King of heaven calls you to account, He’ll say nothing?
And what is forgiveness? That’s the real question; that’s the question Peter should have asked. What is forgiveness? Well, the word in Greek is ἀφίημι, and means to forgive, to set aside, to omit, to send away or to let go, to abandon. It means to take something that you hold between you and your brother and drop it, let it go.
That’s forgiveness. To take the debt that someone owes you – the debt of when a person sins against you – and not require payback for it, to even forget it ever happened.
We LOVE it when the Lord forgives us and when others forgive us, but we do not love to forgive. To forgive someone means to not hold something against him, which means we are powerless to use his sins against him. It makes us feel weak because it puts us on the same level playing field as everyone else.
So, on the one hand, sinfulness is the prideful attempt to try and be like God and follow our own word, our own commands, our own wills rather than to humbly trust and abide in the Lord’s Word. But on the other hand, a lack of forgiveness is when we try to be like God before others, before those who sin against us. And on both counts, we are nothing like God. And on both counts the only just response from our heavenly Father is the eternal prison.
I think the other issue with forgiveness – both the matter of forgiving and the need to be forgiven by others – is this nature of taking things personally. And I think, in our culture today, people take things WAY too personally. Everything is considered an attack, an affront to me and my identity, what I’ve decided I am and what value I’ve assigned myself. And so, to question a person’s self-identity is to question the very core, the ultimate authority that gives them purpose and their worldview.
We go into defense mode and there is NEVER a spirit of forgiveness when in defense mode.
This is why it is important that we do not spend our days thinking and worrying about our standing before others or our self-identity. Instead, we must think about the only King whose words matter – Christ the King, the words of the Lord of heaven and earth, before whom we will each stand and give an account on the Last Day.
Before God, each of us owns millions of lifetimes of debt because of our sins. We can’t repay it; we can’t work it off by our good works. We can’t hope to lay a feather on a scale and expect our misdeeds to be lighter than that feather.
We have broken our Lord’s commands. How many idols have we made for ourselves using the very gifts and blessings He freely gives. He provides for us with abundance, and we build an idol of stone or wood or time or world priority, with no concern as to how it hurts us, hurts our kids, does great disservice to those around us, how we squander His generosity toward us.
And yet He forgives us all the more. Surely the heavenly accountants would go to God and say, “Wait a second here, for You are giving away too much to these people who don’t seem to appreciate what you do for them…”, but the Lord doesn’t stop. His forgiveness flows like blood and water, and it never stops, not for a second. We often squander it and trample on it as if His forgiveness is worthless, but God knows His Word and He knows the power of His Word, that it brings life and salvation and hope, and so He keeps pouring it down.
And we who receive it, who repent of our sins, who stop making His blessings into worldly idols and chasing after worldly ambitions, who He calls by name into His restful and peaceful pasture, we also learn by the Spirit of God to forgive others because our debt was so great and He was and continues to be so gracious to forgive us.
It’s harder for us because we still suffer from temptation and these bodies are broken and deep within us is a dark nature, but thanks be to Christ, the Spirit of the same renews us daily, drawing us back to our baptisms, drawing us to the body and blood, to the Word of God, to the very vine of Christ from which we drink for life and strength and faith.
So, forgive we must, not so that we might be forgiven, but because we ARE forgiven, and because forgiveness of sins is the cornerstone of this church, even as Christ who died and rose again is our cornerstone.
And we must also remember that a true, godly church that forgives is also a church that disciplines. The office of the keys, the binding and loosing keys, are the tools of forgiveness for the church. They don’t keep forgiveness from the penitent but open wide the door to the tree of life, and at the same time they do not squander forgiveness as a type of cheap grace thing to the impenitent. They call sinners to repent, to stop eating of the tree forbidden by the Lord, and they call the penitent to the tree of life and forgiveness and salvation instead in this new Garden of Eden called the church.
The threat still remains – repent of your sins and forgive the sins of others – but the promise for those who flee to the cross for the King’s mercy is mercy in abundance.
The Psalm for today says, “bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is in me, bless His holy name!” Why? Because it is He “who forgives all your iniquity, who redeems your life from the pit, and who does not deal with us according to our sins,” but with steadfast love removes our sins and transgressions from us. Amen.
