Matthew 18:23-35
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
September 13, 2026
As a gift of God’s grace, forgiveness is there for even the worst of us; but it’s a gift that stays ours only by our sharing it with others. We are forgiven in God’s grace as long as we forgive others in God’s grace.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” The negative truth that follows from that positive truth is that damned are the merciless, for they will receive no mercy. Later in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus teaches the Lord’s Prayer, He instructs us to ask God to forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors – that is, to pardon us in proportion to our pardoning others. The link between being forgiven and being forgiving is the only part of the Lord’s Prayer on which Jesus elaborates. He says, “If you forgive others, your heavenly Father will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you.”
Matthew’s Gospel records five major discourses of Jesus. Matthew 18 gives us the fourth. It focuses on how His followers are to interact. Since none of them is yet perfected, forgiveness is always a necessary practice.
What then does it mean to forgive? It isn’t pretending that no wrong was done or that we weren’t or that we’ve forgotten it happened. Nor is it starting over as if no wrong was done, since being forgiven doesn’t automatically make anyone trustworthy. To forgive is to let go of the right to hit back. We may hold the wrongdoer accountable and demand restitution, but we don’t try to get even. We don’t return harm for having been done harm. We discipline our desire for vengeance under Christ’s call to seek the welfare of even those who wrong us. Our forgiving might even involve attempting to rebuild, or to build for the first time, a good relationship with the wrongdoer.
When a significant wrong has been done us, it’s hard to forgive; and fulfilling the intention to do so completely unfolds in a long slow process with many a start and stop, triumph and relapse. I remember a man telling how, when he first learned that a teacher had sexually abused his little sister repeatedly, he wanted to track the man down and beat him with a lead pipe. Confessing to some trusted friends his desire to exact violent revenge kept him from indulging his fury and encouraged him to resolve that, even if he couldn’t feel like forgiving the man, he’d still act as if he did. So, for example, despite an occasional slip of the tongue, he quit badmouthing the man; and he started to pray for him too, albeit through gritted teeth. His conduct worked on his heart and over time diminished his bitterness, though years later he caught himself feeling happy when he heard the man had been attacked in prison and left paralyzed. For all that, that big brother to this day practices love for aman whose evil deeds he hates as much as ever.
When C.S. Lewis first became a Christian and heard how he was to hate a bad person’s action but not the bad person, the sin but not the sinner, he couldn’t imagine how that was possible. But then it occurred to him that there was one person for whom he’d been doing that all his life – himself! However much he might hate his own cowardice or greed, he went on loving himself. There’d been no difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason he so hated those sins was that he so loved the man who did them and wanted to think they didn’t define him.
Thus, we can hate a wrong deed but still care about the wrong-doer and try to help them become better.
So we are capable of it; but are we willing to do it? For caring about the wrong-doer may involve the unpleasant work of confronting them and imposing consequences for their own good – exactly what Jesus commanded His followers to do shortly before he told today’s parable!
In the parable a king checks up on his administrators (back then called a king’s “slaves”, though they were free people). He finds out one of them has embezzled three million of his dollars. Paying back the debt of all that stolen money is an impossibility for the embezzler. So, while the king could execute him, he decides instead to give him a more degrading and protracted punishment: he’ll sell the man and his family into slavery. Desperate, the man makes the unrealistic, implausible promise that, if give more time, he’ll repay his huge debt. The king, it seems on a whim, suddenly decides to be wildly magnanimous. He reverses his decision and mercifully forgives the embezzler his entire debt! Yet, the recipient of that great mercy is a miser of mercy to others! Right away he calls in a loan he’s made to someone, a loan amounting to a mere hundred bucks or so. His debtor pleads for more time, using the same words he’d used with the king – only, when he makes the promise to repay his, it is by no means an impossibility. But the pardoned embezzler won’t hear of waiting a second longer, and he throws the man into debtor’s prison. The report of his merciless hypocrisy reaches the king and infuriates him. So he throws the embezzler into debtor’s prison, and into the hands of merciless torturers.
We do well to remember that Jesus’ story here is not an allegory – that is, a made-up tale in which each detail conveys a truth. The story is instead a parable – that is, a vignette taken from real everyday life in which but one or two truths are conveyed. While the king does represent God, his character and conduct, typical of many a king in those days, does not in every instance represent how God is.
The first point this parable makes is that we, like the embezzler, owe God a debt so big we can’t repay it, so that our only hope of being free of it is in an inexplicable, unwarranted, gracious magnanimity. The second point the parable makes is that we can’t keep forgiven if we, like the embezzler, don’t forgive our debtors. We can’t hold on to God’s grace apart from passing it on.
But what if we just can’t bring ourselves to forgive someone who’s done a great wrong? Well, we depend on God’s grace to enable us to share His grace!
This fourth discourse of Jesus begins with His saying that unless we become humble like a child, we will never enter God’s kingdom. Being humble like a child means not hesitating to be utterly dependent on a kindness we have not earned and could never pay for. It means jumping on the opportunity to rely on Someone bigger than ourselves to bring about what we can’t but what we must have – in this case, the ability to forgive someone who’s done us a great wrong.
A tourist, led by a native guide, was crossing a jungle of Burma. They had to wade through a river. By the time they’d stepped out on the far bank, numerous leeches had attached to their torsos and legs. The tourist started to grab them and pull them off; but the guide stopped him, warning that doing so would leave tiny pieces of them under the skin, which would lead to a bad infection. The best way, the guide said, to get rid of leeches is to bathe in warm balsam water. Immersed in it long enough, leeches release their grip.
Gary Preston, in his book Character Forged from Conflict, notes that when someone has done us a great wrong, we can’t simply yank out the bitterness, the fury, the hatred from us. If we try, resentment will remain in us hidden under the surface. The only way to become fully free of its deadly infection and to be able to love like Jesus is to bathe in His grace. It may take a long soaking, but it will eventually give us the capacity to forgive and thereby to make forgiveness ours forever. Grace enables us to give grace – to forgive as we’ve been forgiven!
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