A Sermon on Matthew 18 delivered at St. Barnabas on the Desert, Scottsdale, AZ

Week by week, the lectionary hands us readings that can feel almost random. But that randomness is a gift. It interrupts our self-preoccupation. It invites us into a conversation guided not by our own priorities, but by the Spirit’s — and that conversation always turns out to be surprisingly timely.

I’m speaking this morning as a relative newcomer among you. And I want to take advantage of my being new to speak plainly. I know I’ve entered this community in the relatively early stage of a leadership transition. I know how leadership transitions can be tough on everyone. The comforting familiarity of a known past is running up against the uncertainty of a future still being written. Entrenched ways of doing things are meeting a real desire for something fresh.

In forty years of ministry, I’ve learned this pattern well. Communities say, sincerely, that they want change. And at the very same time, they fear it and resist it. That tension produces anxiety. Old grievances — things that have been simmering quietly under the surface — erupt with unexpected force. Tensions lead to factions forming. And factions, sooner or later, become identified with individuals. Individuals now become convenient scapegoats for the community’s fear and the victims of allegations of blame.

So at a moment like this, I think we’re wise to listen — carefully, sensitively — for what the Holy Spirit is trying to say to us as we work through this process. And this morning, that conversation comes to us from the concluding verses of Matthew, chapter 18.

Matthew’s Discourse on the Church

Now, we’ve been sitting with Matthew 18 for several weeks. Matthew 18 is sometimes called Jesus’ “discourse on the church” — his teaching on how believers are meant to treat one another, growing out of the great commandment: love one another as I have loved you.

And let’s be honest about what that love means. It doesn’t mean liking everyone, nor universal agreement. The kind of love Jesus means has plenty of room for expressions of difference. Love, as Jesus means it, is a commitment to treating other people with the same respect and patience we hope they’ll show us. If we’re honest, in Church life, as in many other forms of community, this commitment is honored more in the breach than in the observance. But it remains the one thing that’s supposed to mark us out as followers of Jesus.

Chapter 18 covers a lot of ground. Humility, instead of jockeying for status. Warnings against causing others to stumble — against the kind of careless talk that breeds misunderstanding and conflict. It gives us the Parable of the Lost Sheep, that image of a God whose care is universal and yet somehow, impossibly, personal — no one too small, too insignificant, to matter.

And by the time Matthew is writing this down — late in the first century — those little house churches that Paul once wrote letters to have grown up. They’ve become sizable communities. And with growth comes friction. So Matthew hands his community something practical: a process for working through conflict.

It starts small — a private conversation, one person to another. And notice what it’s not: it’s not what we’d call triangulation today. That’s when you have a problem with someone, and instead of talking to them, you talk about them to someone else. It feels safer. It is, in fact, the surest way to make a solvable problem insoluble. So when someone comes to you to complain about someone else, simply listen and then ask, “Have you spoken to x about this?” Then reserve further judgment on the veracity of what you are being told, remembering that there are always two sides to every story, and you are being told one side for a reason that may not seem obvious to you at the time.

If the private conversation between the two parties to a conflict doesn’t lead to reconciliation, Matthew says, seek wider counsel. But together — both parties, side by side, not one person recruiting allies against the other.

And only as an absolute last resort does it go to the leaders of the community. Even then, the goal isn’t punishment. The goal is restoration. It’s an appeal to what we might call the community’s common mind.

At every stage of that process, prayer holds it together — “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Prayer is the form of conversation that binds rather than divides.

Underneath it all runs one thread: humility, care for the vulnerable, restorative discipline, and radical forgiveness. Those are the marks of a Christian community.

The Parable

Which brings us to today and the final verses of chapter 18. The Parable of the Unforgiving Steward. And it asks us to sit with something uncomfortable: the connection between the forgiveness we receive and the forgiveness we give. Or, as this story shows us — the forgiveness we withhold.

Jesus has just spent this whole chapter establishing forgiveness as boundless. Limitless. And now he brings it home with a story — because that’s what Jesus does. Every parable takes something ordinary, something familiar, and drives it toward a conclusion nobody sees coming. Like a scorpion, his parables have a sting in the tail. You relax into the familiar shape of the story, and then — it stings you.

Here’s the shape of this one. There’s a steward — a man in a position of real trust, managing his master’s estate, and quietly skimming profit for himself along the way. Then the master comes home unexpectedly and demands an accounting. And the steward is caught out. He owes ten thousand talents.

Now, let’s just pause on that number, because Jesus is not being subtle. A talent was a unit of weight for silver or gold — about 75 pounds. Silver today trades around $67 an ounce. Do that math on 10,000 talents of silver, each talent 75 pounds, and you’re looking at $703 million,500, thousand dollars. And if — as was more typical for a debt this size — we’re talking gold, at today’s price of around $4,500.00 an ounce, you’re closer to a cool $47 billion dollars.

This is an absurd number. It’s meant to be. Jesus is not describing a realistic debt. He’s describing a debt no human being could ever repay, not in ten lifetimes. And the master forgives it. All of it. Gone. Slate wiped clean.

And then — this is the sting — the steward walks straight out of that encounter and runs into a fellow servant. Someone far beneath him. Who owes him a hundred denarii — about a hundred days’ wages. A real debt, but a human-sized one. And when that servant begs for mercy — using, by the way, almost the exact same words the steward himself had just used — the steward has him thrown into debtor’s prison.

If you feel outrage rising in you right now, good. That’s the point. Imagine what it did to the people listening to Jesus tell this story for the first time.

Word gets back to the master. And we know how Matthew likes to end these things — Matthew has more than a streak of the old fire-and-brimstone preacher in him. Many of his parables close with the unrepentant cast into outer darkness, to a chorus of weeping, gnashing of teeth. This one is no exception.

What This Asks of Us

Now here’s the hard question this parable leaves us with. Is forgiveness conditional? Can something freely given also be freely taken back?

How do we square that with the God we actually preach — the God revealed in Jesus, whose love is gratuitous? Freely given. Completely undeserved. Unconditional?

Here’s how I understand it. The forgiveness we receive and the forgiveness we give are not two separate things. They’re two sides of one transaction. To be forgiven requires that we forgive.

“Forgive us our trespasses” does not mean “give us a free pass, God.” It means our claim on God’s forgiveness is bound up with our willingness to extend that same forgiveness to the people who wrong us.

And here’s a small but important detail. The King James Version uses the word “trespass” in the Lord’s Prayer. Most modern translations render it simply as “sin.” But something gets lost in that translation. To trespass is a specific kind of sin — it means to encroach. To cross a line. To end up somewhere — morally, if not legally — we had no right to be.

Forgive us, Lord, when we encroach on others, as we are bound to forgive others when they encroach on us. God’s forgiveness is tied to our willingness to forgive.

And forgiveness does something remarkable when we let it. It opens up room to reframe our story. To tell a bigger, richer version of who we are — one with more room for growth, more room to become who we actually long to be.

Bringing It Home

I began this morning by naming the conversations moving through this community right now, and setting them inside this season of leadership transition we’re in together. I said that to help us understand something: the tension between our desire for change and our fear-driven resistance to change is real. It’s not a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s what transition feels like.

And I want to be honest with you — forgiveness is never easy. Forgiveness is not forgetting. The hurt is real. The anger and frustration is real. And I’m not asking anyone to paper over that with sentiment. But we have to work through those feelings, rather than letting them settle in and become the story that defines us — a smaller, harder, more closed-off version of who this community can be.

My hope, in this season, is that we keep working through the anxieties that a time like this stirs up. They will be painful sometimes. But they should never be a surprise.

And in a time such as this, it’s worth going back — again and again if we need to — to Matthew 18. Not as an old text, but as a timely word. Offered, right now, with the kind of timing only the Spirit seems to manage.

Amen.