Sermon Notes — September 13, 2026
“Seventy Times Seven”
Matthew 18:21-35 (NRSVUE)
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
September 13, 2026
It was about fifteen years ago and I was a young-ish associate pastor serving in my second appointment ever. One day a parishioner approached me. She was also a good friend outside of church. She asked if we could talk. She was visibly upset and I could tell that whatever it was she needed to say to me, she was not looking forward to it. I don’t remember her exact words, but the gist was that my choice of words in my most recent sermon had hurt her. I promise I didn’t say anything racist or sexist, and I didn’t insult any person or group of people. I had just chosen some words that meant something different to me than they did to her.
I was shocked. I hadn’t even considered that what I had said was inappropriate, and no one else had mentioned it to me.
At that moment I had a choice. I could have defended myself. I could have told her that she had taken my words the wrong way. I could have told her that no one else had said anything to me about it.
But here’s what I did. I told her that I was so sorry that I had offended her. I told her that in the future I would be more careful about the words I used in a sermon. I thanked her for telling me that I had caused harm to her and to her family. And I asked her to forgive me.
And I don’t tell you this to pat myself on the back or to present myself as a moral example. I tell you this because it happened fifteen years ago, and I still carry that moment with me because her courage in confronting me and her grace in allowing me to apologize to her exemplify the way Jesus calls the church to live together in fellowship.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Remember from the last few weeks, we have been talking about what it means to follow Jesus. It means asking ourselves who we say that Jesus is, and then learning to live like Jesus so that we can lose our lives in order to find them again. Following Jesus means learning to recognize vulnerable people and treating them as Jesus would treat them. And following Jesus means that we have to grapple with the hard work of forgiveness, which I think is the most challenging of all the spiritual disciplines, because it requires the courage to confront our brothers and sisters when they harm us, and the humility to ask for forgiveness when we are the ones who have done the harm.
In today’s story that Jim read for us, Peter asks Jesus,
How many times should I forgive? As many as seven times?
That’s a good start, Jesus says, but it’s more like seventy seven times. Some translations say seventy times seven. Either way, it’s a whole lot more than Peter expects. Jesus’ answer makes it clear that confrontation and forgiveness are not things that we might happen to encounter every once in a while in our life together as the church. They are things that characterize our life together.
Jesus makes it clear that we in the church are going to harm each other and we are going to have to ask others to forgive the harm that we have done. We are going to have to do our best to forgive, and then we’re going to do it all over again. Because we are human. And we offend each other. And we say things without thinking. And we hurt people’s feelings. And we’re careless. And most of the time we don’t even mean to do harm. We don’t even know we’ve done it. And Peter’s question leads us to believe that this cycle of confrontation, confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation might start to get old. That’s why he asks
How many times?
After fifteen consecutive years of local church ministry I will tell you that I pray for the day that confrontation, confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation start to feel old – start to feel tedious. The day that those disciplines begin to feel tedious to us is the day that we will know we are starting to get it right.
More often we simply walk away. Rather than confronting each other about harm or being honest with someone that they have done something to offend us, we give up on the relationship. We say that it’s OK when it isn’t. We avoid confrontation. We forego the opportunity to fix the relationship, and when we do that, the harm–rather than being healed – the harm just continues. And that is exactly the opposite of how we are called to live together in the church.
Hold that thought, because we’re going to switch gears for a minute and talk about this parable – The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.
It’s a pretty simple story, but it could do with some explanation. The translation that we are using this morning calls the two main characters a king and a slave. A more accurate way of thinking about the “slave” is to think of him as a civil servant – he works for the king. He administers the financial affairs of part of the kingdom. Somehow, some way, this servant has mismanaged the king’s financial affairs and the king calls on the slave to pay him – to pay the king – back.
If we lived in the time and place of Jesus we would have laughed at the absurdity of this story. Jesus says that the slave owes the king ten thousand talents. Here are a few ways of thinking about ten thousand talents. It’s the equivalent of an average person working for 164,000 years with no days off. It’s a day’s wage for 100,000,000 laborers. It’s the equivalent of what all of Judea paid to Rome in taxes over the course of ten years.
In other words, there’s no way the slave could pay back what he owed. But the slave falls to his knees and begs the king –
Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.
Here’s a hint: No he won’t. He can’t. It’s impossible.
And yet the king says, “You know what. Don’t worry about it. I forgive you of your debt. You don’t owe me anything.”
And as the slave is leaving the king’s palace, he runs into one of his colleagues–a fellow civil servant, and he remembers that this fellow owes him money – the equivalent of a hundred days of labor. And having just been forgiven an unspeakably large debt, what does he do? He grabs his fellow administrator by the throat and demands that he – the fellow administrator – pay what he owes.
The fellow slave falls to his knees and uses the exact same words to beg the forgiven slave that the forgiven slave used to beg the king.
Have patience with me and I will pay you.
The only difference is that it was entirely within the realm of possibility for the fellow slave to pay what he owed. But the forgiven slave refused to have mercy and threw the fellow slave into prison until he could pay the debt.
When we look at verse 31, here’s what we see.
People are watching. A whole host of other administrators see how the forgiven slave treats the fellow slave even after the king forgave his impossible debt.
And it bothers them.
It bothers them so much that they go to the king and they tell the king how the forgiven slave treated his fellow slave, even after having received such mercy from the king.
The king calls the forgiven slave back.
You hateful slave. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow slave after I showed you such mercy?
We get the point of the story, right? God through Jesus has forgiven us of all our sin. He has shown us that he will stop at nothing to heal us and to make our relationship with him right again. And because we have been forgiven so much, we should be ready and willing to forgive others. It’s not a hard concept in theory.
So why is it so hard to do?
One commentator that I listened to this week said that because we know that forgiveness is so easy for God, we as Christians think that it should also be easy for us. But forgiveness is easy for God because that’s who God is. God is mercy and compassion. God is grace and love. God rejoices in forgiving us.
But we are not God. And forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness requires us to be vulnerable with each other. Forgiveness requires us to trust each other with our hearts. And so we think that maybe we’d just be better off to avoid the confrontation and the hard conversation.
I can’t imagine how hard it was for my friend to come to me with her heart in her hands and trust me to be tender with the pain that she brought to me. But she did. And she told me things I needed to hear. And I was grateful.
Sometimes as followers of Jesus we live under the illusion that we should never have conflict with each other. But Jesus tells this parable because the question isn’t whether we will have conflict and confrontation in the church, but how we will approach the conflict and confrontation.
The how is with humility, remembering that we forgive each other because we have been forgiven. When we don’t approach each other with humility and a sincere desire to heal the relationship then the conversation becomes an excuse to continue the cycle of harm. The how is by being careful with each other and protecting each other’s vulnerabilities whether we are the one who has been harmed or the one who has done the harm.
Around the same time that my friend came to me with the truth that I had caused harm to her, I went to a clergy colleague with a similar truth. My problem with this colleague was way more about me than it was about him, but I knew I had to have a conversation with him because I just felt more and more resentful. And so one evening, after I read a particularly difficult chapter of The Cost of Discipleship by Deitrich Bonhoeffer, I texted him and asked him if I could come to his town and have coffee with him. He agreed.
I handed him my heart and told him the truth about the way I experienced him and the harm that he had caused – he had hurt my feelings. Hear me say this again, it was far more about me and my ego than it was about him, but he kindly received what I had to say. I knew that he had no idea that he had hurt my feelings. I knew that he had never intended to hurt my feelings. But instead of being defensive, or telling me that the problem was mine – which it was – he apologized, and he asked me to forgive him.
This is the way that Jesus says that we should live together. Keeping resentment in our hearts for the sake of avoiding conflict is not the way to peace. It does not honor the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross so that we could be reconciled with God.
And before we leave the parable of the unforgiving servant, there is one other point in the story that is easy to miss. What is it that both the forgiven slave and the fellow slave ask of those who intend to exact revenge for their debts?
Patience.
Both of them say
Be patient with me.
The discipline of forgiveness and reconciliation is a discipline of patience. Sometimes forgiveness takes time. Sometimes reconciliation takes longer than we anticipated, sometimes it’s a more difficult process than we hoped for. Just as we are called to forgive as God first forgave us, so we are to be patient with one another throughout the hard and messy work of reconciliation.
There is a message that pervades our culture that strong people get even – they strike back. And now more than ever our culture needs another way. Like the other slaves who watched as the forgiven slave refused to forgive the fellow slave, people are watching. People are watching the way we live together. They are watching the way we extend grace to each other. They are watching the way we work through our conflicts with each other in love and compassion, humility and forbearance. Now more than ever the world needs the church to learn to live in true peace so that the world can learn to live in true peace.
This work of confrontation, confession, forgiveness and reconciliation is the hardest work that we will do as the church. And it is arguably the most important work that we will do as the church. It is a vulnerable, fragile, delicate way to live with one another, and it asks us to be humble, gentle, and kind. But as we learn to live this way – as we practice this way of life – we give hope to the world that it will not find anywhere else. A hope for true peace and true reconciliation.