SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, SEPT 13TH 2026
THE REV RICHARD BURDEN
That is one gnarly piece of scripture. And it needs to be read along with the rest of Matthew. Because as an isolated chunk, it has been misused and weaponized to coerce and re-traumatize people for centuries. I’m not even sure that the original parable was ever intended for public consumption. All of chapter 18 in Matthew is an “indoor” conversation between Jesus and his closest students…the ones who have been with him the longest…The ones he’s prepping to accompany him to Jerusalem to directly confront the Roman domination system…In other words, these are not people who just strolled into church on a lovely fall day after a summer break.
This is part of an intensive training program. It’s the same conversation where he tells them to cut off hands, and gouge out eyes if they offend…It’s the one where he picks up a child and puts it in the midst of them and says this is “the greatest” among you, and don’t you dare despise any of them.
He’s taught them to pray “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” and he’s just reemphasized that what we bind on earth is bound in heaven and what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven, and that’s when he drops this parable (and it is a parable NOT an allegory) to challenge them into perceiving (not necessarily understanding, but perceiving) what all of this is pointing towards.
So we might conclude that we may not be the right audience for this specific teaching…But then again…this is what we have been given this week, so …maybe we are. Just remember: Jesus never once tells a victim that they must forgive their abuser.
So, let’s get into it. What kind of God is portrayed here? Is God someone who tortures? Who keeps strict accounts of who has forgiven whom and how many times? If you read it allegorically (and Matthew certainly does, and I bet some of you have heard it preached that way) God is the king, the first slave has this outrageously huge debt, the second slave has a tiny debt, and the moral of the story is what? Forgive or God will send you to the bad place? Um…Anyone else have issues with that? If God is this king…who forgives at first but then reneges on that and resorts to torture…Isn’t God just like Caesar?…and then how does that fit with literally everything else Jesus says about who God is and how God acts?
That’s why it’s not an allegory; it’s a parable…and parables never have neat and tidy answers (if one does, then you haven’t actually gotten to the heart of the parable yet). And in this parable…God is never mentioned. Jesus tells a story about a king. It’s Matthew (who really wants all of the parables to be allegories) who adds this line about the heavenly father. All Jesus says is that we’re supposed to compare the kingdom of heaven with this whole story…the king, the two debtors, and how they behave towards one another…in other words the question really is: how the divine realm functions vs. how the machinery of this kingdom works.
It’s easy to get confused, because, torture…and debt-slavery are familiar to us. They were familiar to the disciples. That’s how empires work…That’s what happens whenever we start replacing our own inherent, inviolate, God-imprinted value and worth with the transitory, passing, ephemeral coin of the realm…When we start valuing the things that bear Caesar’s graven image, more than the beings that bear God’s ineffable image. And when that happens…when the rapacious pursuit of wealth, and the panicky grabs for power start to flood the system…then grace, and mercy and empathy stop circulating.
There’s another set of characters in the story, that I admit I’ve never paid a lot of attention to. The fellow slaves of the second debtor…who witness this gross violation of mercy…they see the first debtor with his hands around their fellow slave’s throat. They see him hauled off and they are “greatly distressed.” Fair enough, I would be too…but then what? They go file a complaint with the tyrant…and guess what? the system operates completely predictably. Mercy is revoked, and the punishments are meted out.
So here’s the question this parable is forcing me to sit with: what else could they have done? Honestly…not much. They were enslaved after all. Even a whiff of defiance would have gotten them hauled off too. So my question isn’t about them. It’s about us, because we are not them. We have protections they didn’t have…options they didn’t have…and we have keys that they were never given. To bind on earth. To loose on earth.
Parables should always force us to look at ourselves. What do when someone gets seized…Would we take up a collection to pay the debt? Would we put our bodies on the line? Would we…could we… do anything other than what they did; see it happen…get distressed…and report it to the authorities, knowing full well how the system will react?
If comparison is the point, but all I can see when I read this parable is a familiar world of fickle rulers and domination systems…that doesn’t mean I should conclude that the kingdom of heaven is just like it…instead, I should be asking…If the Reign of God is not like this…then what is it like?
This parable will never answer that question. But maybe it is a way to see our world more clearly…it’s not hard to find someone with a hand around their throat or a boot on their neck. Maybe this parable (like a lot of the ones we’ll be hearing over the next several weeks) doesn’t describe God’s reign so much as it holds mirror up to our own world so we might be shocked awake at how not like God’s realm it is.
There’s no question this parable is distressing…the world is distressing…the parable pushes us to ask whether distress and the system we have are all there is. Do we remain watchful and distressed hoping the system will somehow change itself? Or do we use the keys Christ has given us to set mercy loose to freely circulate?
“Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord, … Who turned the hard rock into a pool of water, and flint-stone into a flowing spring.” That’s God as described in this morning’s Psalm. Powerful, yes…but no tyrant. God takes what is hard and closed and stopped…and lets it go…to flow where it is most needed. Amen.