11th Sunday of Matthew
Scripture: Matthew 18:23–35
Oops!
My wife and I have a set of fine china at home, but we’ve fallen into a trap. Because this is the fine china, we don’t want to break anything. So we’ve resorted to leaving it in the cupboard.
By doing this, it’s true that we’ve accomplished our goal of not breaking any of it. But it hasn’t lived up to its purpose: dishes to be enjoyed.
When we bought them at an antique shop in Hinckley, just before we were married, we envisioned using them to welcome guests to our table, to enhance the presentation of a meal, to show our guests that they were valued, honored, welcomed in our home.
And yet, there the dishes sit … in a dark cupboard. They’re in specially made storage cases, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re doing us no good and not living up to what they were made for.
Presvytera and I bought our china ourselves, but often it’s gifted to a couple. And when china is gifted and left unused, it’s worse. China isn’t cheap. When it sits in a cupboard, there’s a nagging sense that you aren’t honoring the person who gave it to you. It was meant to be used, and, when it isn’t, the money spent on you feels wasted.
Ugh!
China is just an object. But it’s a useful image for today’s Gospel.
Jesus tells us of a king who forgave the debt of one of his servants. He gifted him something far more precious than china: freedom.
Imagine what that meant in the ancient world. In today’s dollars, the debt forgiven was something like $4.5 billion. We’re not talking pennies. We’re talking about a debt so large it could never, ever be repaid. And the king simply let it go.
We don’t know what the servant was planning to do with that freedom. Maybe he wanted to grow his business. Maybe he wanted to provide for his family, or invest in his community (what the ancient world would have called a “liturgy,” a work done on behalf of others). Whatever he was planning, imagine the stress and anxiety that disappeared the instant he heard the king’s words: your debt is forgiven.
But there was a catch. Having received such mercy, he was expected to extend it. Like china meant to be brought out for guests, this gift of forgiveness was meant to be poured out on someone else.
But the servant didn’t do this. Instead, he found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii — somewhere around $10,000 in today’s money — and he choked the man and had him thrown into prison.
Here is someone who had just been handed $4.5 billion, furious that he hadn’t been repaid $10,000. He dishonored the gift. He dishonored the king.
Aha!
As with all parables, this points to something spiritual. We’re not really talking about money. We’re talking about forgiveness.
In the Lord’s Prayer we pray: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We ask God to forgive us the way we forgive others. The parable flips this around and reminds us: God has already forgiven us, before we ever asked. To honor that gift, it falls to us to pass it on.
It’s almost circular: the more we grasp how much we’ve been forgiven, the more freely we forgive, and the more freely we forgive, the more we come to know how much we’ve been forgiven. This is a gift that keeps giving, unless we hoard it. Unless we leave it in the cupboard.
As Americans, we tend to think of forgiveness as a legal transaction: God erases our record, so we’re spared the punishment. Debt in, debt out. That’s a very Western, very courtroom way of thinking about sin. But it’s not quite how the New Testament, or the Church Fathers, talk about it.
Sin, biblically, means “missing the mark.” Sin is what happens when we stray from the path of becoming who we were created to be. And when we stray, we don’t stay the same. We’re changed by the wandering, usually for the worse. Step off the path, and you find yourself walking through thorns. Every wrong step scratches deeper. As we get lost, we become less than fully human.
Whee!
So if sin isn’t a mark against our record, then forgiveness can’t just be erasing the record and calling it finished. Forgiveness is healing.
Seen through this lens, the king was like a physician canceling a debt so his servant is free to walk again. Sin, in other words, is a wound, not a crime; salvation is therapy, not acquittal. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick puts it simply: God doesn’t primarily reckon with us; He heals us. The debt is forgiven so we can get up, get out of the thorns, and walk the path again.
This is why the parable is such good news, and why it stings so much when the servant fails to pass it on. The king had invited the servant back into full humanity, the way a doctor doesn’t just forgive your unpaid bill, but wants you well. And the wellness only continues if it moves.
So, when the servant threw the man indebted to him into prison, the servant was walking straight back into the thorns he’d just been pulled out of.
That’s what makes forgiveness so important for us. Paying forgiveness forward is the continuation of our own healing, the continuation of our own salvation, our own path towards theosis.
Yeah!
So … the china.
The china that Presvytera and I bought was never about keeping the dishes safe in the cupboard. It was about the table, the guests, the welcome. And its value is in being used, not stored.
The king didn’t forgive $4.5 billion so his servant could sit on it, admire it, keep it safe in a cupboard somewhere. He forgave it so his servant could live differently: freer, lighter, and generous with others the way the king had been generous with him.
And neither has God forgiven us so we can tuck that mercy away and feel relieved. He has healed us so we can walk the path again. And the very sign that the healing is real is whether we’re willing to extend it. Every person who owes us something this week, whether it’s an apology never given, a hurt never addressed, or a hundred small denarii of grievance, is an invitation to bring the china out of the cupboard.
We have been forgiven $4.5 billion. Brothers and sisters, what’s stopping us from forgiving $100?
Let’s use the good china.
Amen.