Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
6^th of September 2026

Matthew 18:21-35
Romans 14:1-12

‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’

Today’s Gospel reading ends with an unforgiving slave being tortured for the rest of his life because of a debt he is unable to pay, and Jesus warning his disciples that the same would happen to them if they did not truly forgive each other. Sometimes the Jesus portrayed in the gospels is the absolute opposite of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ Maybe Jesus knew that his first disciples and all those who followed them, right down to us, here, today, would need this exaggeration to get the point.

As I said last week, the fourth of Jesus’ five discourses in the Gospel according to Matthew is made up entirely of teachings about life in the church. Last week we were given instructions on what to do if another member of the Body of Christ sins against us, and I said that the context of those instructions was two parables about forgiveness. Today we hear the second of those parables, the frankly terrifying story of the unforgiving slave.

Jesus tells Peter, the church’s rock, that he must forgive another member of the church who sins against him ‘seventy-seven times.’ Since seven is the number of perfection, Peter is being told that he must forgive perfectly. Jesus is also reversing the brutal threat of Lamech in the book of Genesis: ‘I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’ (Genesis 4:24) Peter is being told to be the anti-Lamech.

To reinforce this, Jesus tells a parable full of wild overstatements. A debt of ten thousand talents would be one hundred million times the daily wage, and no slave could ever hope to repay it. In contrast, the sum owed by another slave to the unforgiving one, one hundred denarii, could be repaid by a hard-working slave, and it would make sense for the first slave to allow the second slave time to earn it. One message of this parable is that we cannot make any restitution when we sin against God, because God needs nothing from us. The king’s extraordinary forgiveness of the debt, God’s forgiveness of us, is utterly unearned. Just as a slave cannot repay a debt of ten thousand talents, we cannot earn the right relationship with God that Paul’s Letter to the Romans repeatedly reminds his readers is a gift from Christ.

On the other hand, we can offer and accept restitution to and from our fellow human beings and, having ourselves received the overwhelming grace of God’s forgiveness, we should be ready to do so. In today’s reading from his Letter to the church in Rome, Paul reminds us that as members of the church we are all fellow slaves in the service of the one Lord. It is not up to us to judge each other; judgement belongs to God. If we are struggling to forgive our fellow slaves the paltry one hundred denarii they owe us, struggling perhaps to forgive their ‘quarrelling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder’ (2 Corinthians 12:20), we can always console ourselves with the thought that they will one day be judged by the only just judge. As Paul said earlier in this letter: ‘Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.”’ (Romans 12:19)

Of course, the trouble with imagining those who have sinned against us experiencing the wrath of God is that we know that ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:38-39) and that this is as true for our enemies, for those who sin against us, as it is for us. Today’s gospel story may end with a slave imprisoned and tortured, but Christianity is all about love and forgiveness.

In previous sermons I have argued that what Christianity is not about is positive thinking; that Jesus is not a life coach; and that we do not come to church to develop into our best selves, but to worship God. But maybe Jesus knew what psychologists are now proving: forgiveness is good for us.

I have been fascinated by the Global Flourishing Study, launched in 2021, that looks at different aspects of well-being over time in twenty-two countries. In a recent analysis using data from the Global Flourishing Study, psychologists examined whether people who reported being more forgiving reported better well-being a year later than those who said they rarely or never forgave. They found that those who reported that they were forgiving people had somewhat higher well-being when asked a year later about things like their mental health, purpose in life, relationship satisfaction, and hope. This confirms what decades of previous research had found.

Some of the detailed findings of this analysis enthral me. There are definite differences between countries on forgivingness: an average of twenty-five per cent of people in all twenty-two countries report rarely or never forgiving those who hurt them, but the percentage in individual countries ranges from eight per cent of people being unforgiving in Nigeria to fifty-nine per cent of people being unforgiving in Türkiye. (Do not sin against the Turkish!) In fact, all five of the African countries in the study, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, were ranked in the top six most forgiving nations. The other country in the top six was Indonesia, and Australia was the seventh most forgiving country by self-report. As a nation, we are more forgiving than countries including the USA, the UK, India, Israel, Hong Kong and Japan, so yay us. The groups of people that rated themselves as the most forgiving across the most countries included those aged eighty or older (thirteen countries), women (twelve countries), those who had been widowed (sixteen countries), those who are retired (eleven countries), those who attend religious services more than once a week (eighteen countries), and those with sixteen or more years of education (fifteen countries). Looking at the demographics of this congregation, I expect that you are all very forgiving.

The connection between forgivingness and well-being is stronger for psychological and social well-being than for physical well-being; forgiveness is not a magic pill that will make you healthy and wealthy. And in a tiny proportion of cases, forgivingness was associated with negative outcomes: those who rated themselves as more forgiving in China and Poland were also more likely to have discriminatory attitudes towards others; those who rated themselves as more forgiving in the Philippines were more likely to still experience distress at past trauma than other Filipinos; those who rated themselves as more forgiving in the United States smoked more than other Americans; and those who rated themselves as more forgiving in Sweden were less likely to own a home than other Swedes, although in all these cases the association was very small.

Despite all this intriguing work, we do not forgive to promote our own well-being. As I have probably said too many times, forgiveness is at the heart of Christianity. Christians are those who believe that our sins have been forgiven, and as we have been forgiven, so we are to forgive others. Every time we pray in the words Jesus taught his disciples, we ask God to forgive our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. Christianity does not pretend that forgiveness is easy; Dietrich Bonhoeffer described forgiving others as ‘the Christlike suffering which it is the Christian’s duty to bear,’[1] but it still says that, just as the unforgiving slave should have been able to have mercy on his fellow slave because the king had had mercy on him, so we can forgive one another because we have been forgiven. My favourite theologian on forgiveness, Miroslav Volf, writes, ‘We who have been embraced by the outstretched arms of the crucified God open our arms even for the enemies.’[2]

Too often we do not forgive because we believe forgiveness means denying the harm done to us and reconciling with those who have hurt us. But reconciliation is separate from forgiveness, and it cannot take place until the truth is said and justice done, and maybe not even then. Forgiving may eventually also lead to forgetting but, Volf writes, in cases of genocide or military occupation or clerical sexual abuse forgetting would be dangerous this side of the eschaton: ‘as long as the Messiah has not come in glory, for the sake of the victims, we must keep alive the memory of their suffering; we must know it, we must remember it, and we must say it out loud for all to hear.’[3] Forgiveness does not mean pretending that evil did not happen.

Today’s passage from Paul’s Letter includes words often quoted at funerals that may come from an early Christian hymn: ‘We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.’ This is the context in which Jesus demands that we forgive our brother or sister from our heart seventy-seven times. Nothing that is done to us can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord and, as the author of the First Letter of John writes, ‘Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.’ (1 John 4:11) One way we can demonstrate that love is through forgiveness. So let us try it – and see whether well-being follows. Amen.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 2001), 45.

[2] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 131.

[3] Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 139.