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| God cancels our spiritual debts—why do we still hold them for ourselves and others? |
Proper 18, Year A
©2026 The Rev. Seth Olson
This sermon was delivered on the 16th Sunday after Pentecost at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover, AL. A video of the sermon may be found here.
Holy God, may my words be your words, and when my words are not your words, may your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.
Last Sunday, Jesus gave us some remarkably concrete instructions about what to do when relationships break. If someone sins against you, Jesus says, go to them. Tell the truth. Listen. Try to regain one another. And if that does not work, widen the circle. The goal was never punishment; the goal was restoration.
And apparently Peter has been thinking about this, because today, almost before Jesus has finished speaking, Peter raises his hand and asks the question lurking underneath all of it: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Seven! Peter probably thinks he is being extraordinarily generous. And Jesus says, essentially: Peter, you are still counting.
Before we go any further, though, I want to say clearly what Jesus is not saying. Forgiveness is not denial, and forgiveness does not require us to pretend that something did not hurt. Forgiveness is not necessarily reconciliation, and reconciliation does not automatically mean restored trust, restored access, or returning to a relationship that remains unsafe. In fact, this whole conversation began last week with Jesus telling us to name the harm and seek repair.
So this is not a command to remain in the path of someone who is actively hurting you. This is a conversation growing out of Jesus’ teaching about reconciliation in community: sin has been named, truth has been spoken, and the possibility of repair is before us. Peter wants to know what happens then. How long do I have to keep doing this? When have I forgiven enough?
Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” and that number may be pointing us all the way back to Genesis. There, Lamech boasts, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” Lamech imagines a world in which violence compounds: you hurt me, I hurt you more; you take something from me, I take more from you. Every offense accumulates interest, and vengeance multiplies seventy-sevenfold.
Jesus takes that same number and turns it upside down. What if mercy multiplied like that? What if forgiveness became as relentless as revenge? What if, instead of endlessly escalating what people owe us, the people of God became known for interrupting the cycle?
Then Jesus tells a story about a servant who owes a king ten thousand talents, and the number is intentionally ridiculous. One talent was roughly six thousand daily wages, which means ten thousand talents comes to around sixty million days’ wages. Using a modern comparison of roughly $185 for a day’s work, we are talking about something in the neighborhood of eleven billion dollars. This servant does not have a repayment problem; he has an impossible problem.
And just to feel the difference between a million and a billion: one million seconds is about eleven and a half days, while one billion seconds is almost thirty-two years. That is the scale Jesus is playing with. There is no payment plan, no refinancing, no side hustle, no clever budgeting that fixes this. And yet the king simply wipes the debt away.
The servant walks out carrying something he could never have purchased for himself: freedom. Then almost immediately, he finds another servant who owes him one hundred denarii, about one hundred days’ wages. Using the same modern comparison, that is roughly $18,500. That is real money; Jesus is not pretending that the second debt is meaningless.
But compare $18,500 to eleven billion dollars, and the tragedy becomes obvious. The first servant has received a completely new life, but he immediately goes back to living according to the old rules. He grabs the other servant by the throat and says, “Pay what you owe me.” Mercy has happened to him without becoming a way of life within him.
And I think that is the heart of Jesus’ warning. The servant’s failure is not simply that he is stingy; his failure is that he has been liberated without learning how to live as a liberated person. He has been released from an impossible debt, yet when he gains power over somebody else, he recreates the very system from which he has just been freed. He has been liberated, but he keeps living like Pharaoh.
And suddenly our Exodus reading belongs right here. Israel stands at the sea with slavery behind them, Pharaoh behind them, and an entire system of domination, fear, violence, and bondage behind them. God makes a way where there was no way, and they walk through the sea into freedom. But Exodus is not merely the story of people being liberated fromsomething; the rest of the story asks whether they can learn to live as people liberated for something.
Can people who were slaves learn not to enslave? Can people who lived beneath domination learn another way of being together? Can people who have been set free become people who make freedom possible for others? That is one of the great questions running through Exodus, and I think it is the question Jesus places before Peter as well.
Because God’s forgiveness is not simply the cancellation of a heavenly balance sheet. God’s mercy invites us into an entirely different way of being human: a life in which we do not have to keep every ledger forever, a life in which vengeance does not multiply seventy-sevenfold, a life in which another person's debt does not have to become our prison too. We are not merely forgiven people; we are being formed into a forgiving people.
That does not mean forgetting, abandoning wisdom, or ignoring boundaries. It does not mean automatically trusting someone because they say, “I'm sorry,” and it certainly does not mean surrendering ourselves again to someone determined to harm us. But when repair really is possible, Jesus asks whether we can imagine something beyond repayment, something beyond “You hurt me, so now you owe me until I decide you have suffered enough.”
Paul says something similar today when he asks, “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” Ultimately, Paul reminds us, we all stand before the same Lord. We are fellow servants living on mercy. None of us stands before God as the one who managed to settle the account.
So perhaps there is a very concrete practice to carry with us this week. When someone who has hurt you genuinely comes seeking repair, tell the truth about the debt; do not minimize it, and keep whatever boundaries wisdom requires. But then ask yourself: What would freedom look like here—not only for me, but for them?
Maybe freedom means that you stop bringing up the old failure every time there is a new disagreement. Maybe it means refusing to keep someone permanently reduced to the worst thing they have done. Maybe it means no longer recruiting other people to help you collect a debt that has already been confessed. And maybe, where trust can responsibly grow again, it means opening a door that punishment would prefer to keep shut.
Because this is what liberated people do. People whom God has brought through the sea do not build another Egypt on the opposite shore. People whose impossible debt has been released do not spend their lives tightening their hands around everyone who owes them something. People who have been set free by Christ become, by the grace of God, people through whom others discover freedom too.
So yes: receive the mercy of God. Walk out of the prison. Cross the sea. Live as someone who is free.
And then, beloved, go make freedom possible for somebody else.
Amen.
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