Romans 14.1–12, Matthew 18.21-35
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 13th September 2026,
Austwick, Keasden
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, as it’s often called, is a fitting title, for the man in question treated his debtors heartlessly, in comparison to the merciful way that his master had first treated him.
But, given that, I sometimes say that we could also call it the Parable of the King whose Forgiveness had its Limits.
Let’s replay the tale Jesus told. The king first pitied the man who owed him, and released him from his debt. But when he later found out that that same slave had been pitiless in extracting repayments from his own debtors, the king’s mercy ran out, and ‘in anger he handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt’. Forgiving once – the king could do that. But forgiving twice – that was beyond him. [2]
And so this is a salutary tale about not one, but two, men, who found themselves unable to take on board Jesus’ teaching about how often we should forgive: ‘Not seven times,’ he told Peter, ‘but, I tell you, seventy-seven times,’ in other words, countless times. Forgive without limit, Jesus teaches, forgive every time, whether that’s practically, as in this story, forgiving monetary debts, or whether it’s forgiving those who have hurt you emotionally, maybe, spiritually. Whatever the circumstances, make it your practice to always be ready to set free those who are in debt to you.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I can sympathise with the king in this story. I can imagine that if I was in his position I might feel the same sense of injustice that the king felt about his forgiven servant’s misdemeanours. I’m sure it would play on my mind if someone who couldn’t repay me and I’d let them off, then came back and did the same thing again: wouldn’t it make me feel like a pushover, being willing to forgive this debtor over and over again? Or is that just a cross I’d have to bear?
May God give us strength to forgive those who trespass against us; God grant us wisdom to learn how to forgive over and over again and to know ourselves uplifted, not diminished, in so doing.
May God help us through hearing the testimonies of those who have survived being terribly wronged, by showing grace towards those who have wronged them.
Forgiveness is important in our relationships with others because, as Paul taught the Christians in Rome (in our reading today), ‘We do not live to ourselves’.
‘We do not live to ourselves,’ he said, in a passage which describes the way we judge each other, and shouldn’t. It’s all about food and the way the believers were acting around food, and it contains the memorable line, ‘The weak eat only vegetables’.
Now, as The Christian Vegetarian Association are quick to point out, this is not about denigrating vegetarians, but it is to do with the circumstances of the time in which Paul was writing. In Rome, the authorities were outlawing Jewish practices, including eating kosher meat, and kosher butchers were being arrested. So, unable to obtain kosher meat, many Jews and Jewish Christians abstained from meat altogether, rather than risk eating meat that had been offered to a pagan god.
Of course, some Gentile Christians, who had converted from the Roman religion, carried on being the meat-eaters they’d always been. And there was judgement being passed on all sides. Those who believed in eating anything accused those who ate only vegetables of being ‘weak in faith’. Those who abstained from meat accused the meat-eaters of being heretical. Hurtful words were hurled – these self-inflicted bruises to the body of the community spread and spread. Paul, concerned about differences on diet dividing the church, was not justifying meat-eating per se, but teaching that no-one should condemn those who had different beliefs and practices in this or any other part of life. [3]
‘We do not live to ourselves’, Paul said. We live to others. We live in community with others, and for that community to thrive we need to find ways to live healthily together. Forgiveness plays its part in that; the more we generate a forgiving spirit in our relationships the less room there is for a spirit of accusation and judgmentalism.
‘We do not live to ourselves’, Paul said. We live to the Lord. We are constantly in God’s hand, and God’s heart and mind, and the less we pass judgement on our brothers and sisters, then the better becomes our relationship with God; the better our relationship with God, then the more we are able to live well with others.
God help us to truly know in our hearts that he forgives us not seven times, but seventy times seven, for all our jealousy and bickering, our accusation and judgmentalism.
Each time our hearts accept that God forgives us freely and always, then we are more ready than before to put all such harmful things aside, and to enjoy playing our part in letting God and community thrive.
Notes
[1] This talk draws on previous sermons, Reprieved debtor, ruthless creditor: a tale of forgiveness in finance, Keasden, 2020, The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving, or ‘What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed?’, Somerset, 2014, and Even now in Palestine, imagine a debt-free world, Somerset, 2017.
[2] William R. Herzog II, ‘What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed? The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant’, Chapter 8 in Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, pp.131-149.
[3] Christian Vegetarian Association, Honoring God’s Creation – Replies
From Christian Vegetarian Association (CVA). Accessed 8 September 2026.
