Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, Sept. 17, 2023

I confess to wrestling mightily with this gospel reading we have today – in many ways it shakes me to my core. It swirls around me like the winds of the hurricane which brushed passed us yesterday, threatening to push me off my feet with its hard gusts. I am turned about and troubled, for any number of reasons.

Everything about this parable is extreme, outsized, even grotesque. It defies all normal proportions. The first slave – servant, really – who is in debt to the king owes an amount of money beyond any hope of repayment. Just one talent equals twenty years of wages for the average day laborer; ten thousand talents is our equivalent of billions – billions with a “b” – of dollars. It is absurd – who would borrow that much money, and more importantly, who on earth would be able or want to lend that much, knowing that it could never be repaid? It is like a cartoon, a horror movie, a bad dream. It is so ridiculous that we cannot easily relate to it.

Every response in this parable is outsized as well – the immediate and absolute forgiveness that the lord offers to his distraught servant is astonishing, as is the shocking violence of the servant toward the one who owes him, by comparison, a piddling amount. And then, the lord, who has shown such mercy, turns around and commands the unforgiving servant to be tortured – what happened to forgiving seventy-seven times?

The most distressing and grotesque image of all comes at the end, when Jesus declares that God will do the same to us if we do not forgive others. The next time someone says to you that the God of the Hebrew bible is a god of vengeance, while the God of Jesus is a god of love, sit down with them and have a good long conversation about Matthew chapter 18. 

We should not sit comfortably with this gospel reading – there is nothing comfortable or easy about it. And that is a good thing, because it is an occasion for engaging with scripture as it should be engaged with – with diligence, with patience, and above all with humility. This parable, grotesque as it is, has something to reveal to us, and we cannot dismiss it.

I think perhaps it is the very grotesqueness of it that might be our teacher. It was meant to be Peter’s teacher, I suspect. Note how the parable doesn’t really answer or illuminate Peter’s question. It doesn’t really fit. Peter asks about numbers; Jesus’s immediate response offers a number so absurd there’s no useful comparison. And the parable he tells completely bypasses Peter’s question – it doesn’t even answer it. That should tell us something. 

What it tells us is that Peter is asking the wrong question, and more often than not, so are we. Peter assumes that it is about calculating debts and repayment, about keeping score. His question is not really a question at all; it is actually a boast. See how many times I am prepared to go the moral distance, Jesus! Peter assumes that getting the numbers right will do the trick, and that he has the capacity to get it right. There is much that Peter doesn’t understand.

Last week in his sermon, Paul reflected on the power of listening to someone whom we have sinned against, and understanding what it is like to be them when we have wronged them. That empathy is central to being in community, and is necessary for true repentance. In today’s parable we are asked to understand not what it is like to have been wronged, but what it is like to have been forgiven, beyond all conceivable limits. We are asked to imagine what it is like to have gotten ourselves into a hole so big we cannot possibly see our way out of it, and to have been lifted out of it into the blessing of new life. Not to be blamed, not to be shamed, but freed, without recrimination, released to be the person we have always dreamed of being.

I can imagine that this was the experience of Joseph’s brothers in our reading from Genesis. They had done the unthinkable – sold their brother into slavery and told their father he was dead. They are standing before Joseph for the second time, having already been forgiven and embraced once before, but fearful that now that their father Jacob has died, Joseph will change his mind and take revenge. Weeping and falling down before Joseph’s feet, they ask once again for mercy – and Joseph gives it willingly. “Have no fear,” he says, reassuring them and “speaking kindly to them.” 

What does it feel like to have done such damage to someone else and, when retribution is expected, to be welcomed with open arms, to be treated with gentleness and love? More importantly, what do we do with that feeling when faced with someone else who asks for our mercy and forgiveness? 

The first servant in Jesus’ parable knows that liberation; has himself been lifted out of an abyss when he asked for mercy. He knows what it is like – both the horror, and the miracle of deliverance. This should plant the seed of mercy in his own heart; gratitude and empathy should nourish the seed into growth. But for some reason it does not. In the split second between being shown mercy and being asked for mercy, he has forgotten what it is like to believe oneself doomed and to be brought back to life. He cannot, or will not, see the man who is in debt to him as his brother, and he cannot see the beauty in setting his brother free. He sees only his own superficial self-interest, is inebriated by the power he has over someone else.

What this tells me is that mercy given is not always mercy truly received. The gift of mercy and forgiveness, given freely and extravagantly, nevertheless does not force any kind of change on the recipient. We can let mercy pierce our souls and our hearts, and we can let it bear the fruit of mercy in us, or we can allow it to fall barren to the ground.

Where mercy takes root, there is the reign of God. Where mercy is scorned, we have already consigned ourselves to a place of suffering and torment – which is how I can live with the ending of this parable. In the story, the king hands his ungrateful servant over to torture, and Jesus warns that God will do the same to anyone who refuses to show mercy to another member of the community. But it seems to me that when we refuse to show mercy despite the enormity of mercy that we ourselves have been shown, we are already torturing ourselves. The servant who had been shown the beauty of heaven had already rejected it the moment he seized his fellow servant by the throat. When we feel the need to abuse the power we have over someone else, we have already abandoned God’s reign, and we have dragged others with us. 

Perhaps the shock and horror of this parable, of crushing debt and violent retribution, is meant to show us the people we become, and the world we create, when we abandon mercy. But when the seeds of mercy take root in us, they will bear fruit for the healing not just of ourselves and our communities, but the whole world. May it be so.