Matthew 18:21-35 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Sunday, September 13, 2026 “Forgive From the Heart”
Is it ever easy to forgive someone? Sure it is. It’s easy to forgive someone when they do something that hurts you, but not too badly. That probably means they do something only once. Their hurtful behavior is different from how they normally treat you. You might even know something about what’s going on in their lives at the time that makes their different behavior even more understandable. So maybe the situation is something like this: your friend is very busy and tired and frustrated and forgets to pick you up when they said they would. You’ve got a long history with this friend who has helped you out in lots of situations. The friend seems genuinely sorry for causing you trouble. It’s easy to forgive. You might even say to that person, “It’s OK. It’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it.” That’s not always how things go, though. Sometimes it gets really difficult to forgive someone. It feels like this person keeps doing the same thing, over and over again. And you’ve had conversations. And you’ve expressed your disappointment. And you’ve begged them to understand how much it hurts you when they act that way. And still, they do it again. It gets harder and harder to forgive, no matter how many times they say “I’m sorry.” Or maybe it’s not the frequency that makes things difficult, but the severity. Someone’s wrong cost you a lot. It was extremely painful. It felt like a complete betrayal. You know as well as I do that this could describe many situations. It’s hard to forgive. As you heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus once told a story about forgiveness that may be especially useful for when we find ourselves having a hard time forgiving others. And he makes his desire for his people very clear. He wants us to forgive from the heart. Let’s think about the story for a bit. Jesus told many stories like this, stories with spiritual applications that we call parables. And he told interesting stories, stories people could relate to and understand. But that doesn’t mean that all his stories were realistic. In this story he tells about a servant who owed his master the king a huge debt. And that debt is actually so huge it seems ridiculous if you really think about it. How would a servant come to have such a huge debt to the king? To give you an idea, walk through just a little bit of math. A denarius was a day’s wage for a laborer, and a talent was 6,000 of those. So 10,000 talents would equal what you would earn working for sixty million days (or well over 160,000 years). Values for money fluctuate over time with inflation and so forth, but we’re talking about billions of dollars in debt. Again, how would a servant ever get to the point of owing that much? The extravagance of this part of the story really drives home the meaning. It’s clear that as Jesus talks about the debt between this servant and the king, he’s talking about the debt of sin that we have accumulated before God. And the reality is that any number we could put on that would be too small. God’s expectations, his requirements for spending eternity with him, are for people to be sinless. So every sin we commit is like a debt we owe. How many sins do we commit? How many sins have you committed already today? Already during this worship service? In your lifetime if you could add them all up? It’s not hard to imagine that our debt would be in the billions of dollars, a figure we can barely comprehend. Or to put it another way, what we owe to God is that we fear, love, and trust in him perfectly all the time. I’m not sure I could even explain what it means to do that perfectly for even a moment. The story that Jesus tells is an exaggeration from an earthly perspective. As far as the lesson it teaches, it’s no exaggeration at all. It’s also no exaggeration what the king does. The servant is helpless. All he can do is throw himself at the mercy of the king. And incredibly, the king has mercy and forgives every bit of his debt. It’s gone. Wiped out. He does not need to worry about any of it. And that is exactly how God’s mercy forgives our sins. The king could have sold the servant and his whole family to get some money. He could have thrown him in jail. He could have tortured him. He could have placed all sorts of demand and conditions on the forgiveness of the debt. He did none of those things that the servant had perhaps earned or deserved.
People today tend to think that God would be unfair to punish people with something like hell or even to let bad things happen in their lives. The reality is that our debt of sin to God is so immense that even the worst punishment we can think of wouldn’t make a dent in paying it off. We deserve God’s wrath and anger. There’s a reason that many of our worship services start with an admission of guilt, a confession of our sins. All we can do is throw ourselves at the mercy of God. We have nothing to give and nothing to offer. And God through his spokesperson turns to us and says, “I forgive it all. There’s nothing you need to do. In fact, I’ve done it all for you.” If only the story ended there. The story didn’t end there. The servant who had the ridiculous debt wiped out left the king’s court and found a fellow servant. His fellow servant had a real debt he owed to the man: one hundred denarii. Remember that’s our laborer’s wage for one day times 100. How much is 100 days’ work worth? If we suppose a day is worth $100, this would be $10,000. That at least gives us an idea. It’s significant. It’s a real debt, but it is not even in the same ballpark as the first debt. Everyone hearing the story and everyone in the story expected that the servant would forgive the debt of his fellow servant just as the king had forgiven his debt. Of course, he did not. He threw the man in prison. He had a right to. The man owed the debt. But the contrast between the king’s mercy and the servant’s lack of mercy is incredible. And that difference was so incredible that the king was enraged. The servant was no longer free to do as he pleased. He was handed over to the jailers. He would suffer the consequences of his debt and his unmerciful actions. And Jesus warns his disciples. He warns us. Don’t be like that. And in this parable, Jesus uncovers what is so ugly about our unwillingness to forgive. He shows us the problem that we face when we find it hard to forgive others. What makes it hard to forgive? Is it the hurt we feel? Is it the repeated sinning when someone does the same thing to us over and over and never seems to learn? All of that may play a role. But what most powerfully stands in the way of our forgiving others is not recognizing the amazing gift of his mercy God gives when he forgives us. We have the billions of dollars that we owe. No way to pay it back. And Jesus stepped in and paid everything back for us. We owe nothing. How dare we go and demand payment from someone who owes us a real debt perhaps, but a tiny one in comparison! That’s the context in which Jesus shared this parable. Peter asked how many times he was to forgive his brother. And he offered what he thought might be a generous answer: how about seven times? Seven would have been a generous answer for many. There were teachers and teachings that suggested people ought to forgive someone up to three times for the same offense. Peter was offering double that. But he still thought there needed to be a limit. Jesus told him that there was no limit. The seventy-seven times Jesus countered with did not mean that was a limit. It meant that Peter was nowhere close to understanding mercy and forgiveness. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. And that could sound like putting a condition on forgiveness. As long as we forgive others, then God should forgive us. But that’s not actually the order in which things happen. God’s mercy comes first. God’s forgiveness is for us to receive. And then we get to be generous with mercy just as God has been to us. Forgiveness is for us to give to others. Not seven times but seventy-seven. As many times as it takes. Is it ever hard to forgive others? Sure it is. There are times that people hurt us deeply and repeatedly. And those times don’t call for us to dismiss them with “That’s OK” or “Don’t worry about it.” Instead, we can mercifully say, “I forgive you.” Only one thing moves us to forgive from the heart. That is recognizing just how much God’s mercy means to us. It means recognizing the massive debt we owe and the relatively small debt that others owe to us. When we recognize and remember this, how could we do anything less than forgive others? How could we do anything less than forgive from the heart?
The Text: Matthew 18:21–35 (EHV) 21Then Peter came up and asked Jesus, “Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother when he
sins against me? As many as seven times?” 22Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you as many as seventy-seven times. 23For this
reason the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24When he began to settle them, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25Because the man was not able to pay the debt, his master ordered that he be sold, along with his wife, children, and all that he owned to repay the debt. 26“Then the servant fell down on his knees in front of him, saying, ‘Master, be patient with me, and
I will pay you everything!’ 27The master of that servant had pity on him, released him, and forgave him the debt. 28“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred
denarii. He grabbed him and began choking him, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ 29“So his fellow servant fell down and begged him, saying, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you
back!’ 30But he refused. Instead he went off and threw the man into prison until he could pay back what he owed. 31“When his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were very distressed. They went and
reported to their master everything that had taken place. 32“Then his master called him in and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt
when you begged me to. 33Should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you?’ 34His master was angry and handed him over to the jailers until he could pay back everything he owed. 35“This is what my heavenly Father will also do to you unless each one of you forgives his brother
from his heart.”