Sermon: “Beyond All Calculation” Matthew 18:21-35, March 15, 2026

Scripture: Matthew 18:21-35

Preacher: Ryan Slifka

Sermon: “Beyond All Calculation”

“Then Peter came to Jesus,” begins today’s scripture. “Then Peter came to Jesus, and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?”

Today’s scripture begins with Peter, Jesus’ right-hand man asking a perfectly legitimate question. Peter asks it in relation to somebody else in the church–suggesting that the church is not the sin-free paradise anyone has pretended it to be. But the question also applies to any of us who have been seriously wronged by anyone anywhere. The question being this: what are the limits of forgiveness?

On one hand it’s practical, it’s quantitative. Like, how many times do I forgive? What’s the transgression limit before I cut this person out for good? But it’s also qualitative. Like how bad do things have to be before I put up my hand and say “no.”? Forgiving this would be too far. “What are the limits of forgiveness?” Where’s the ceiling when it comes to pardon?

Before Jesus answers Peter ventures his own guess: “As many as seven times?” he asks. “How about seven?”

This is another one of those instances where we are so steeped in centuries of Christian culture, we have this idea that forgiveness–full stop–is always a good thing to do. But “seven times” is pretty generous.

Why? Because forgiveness is hard. Big things, let alone little things. Think of someone you’ve clashed with at work, school, church. Your spouse! That thing they just keep forgetting to do, no matter how many times you’ve reminded them. And that’s just laundry. Like it’s one thing to forgive somebody of something once, twice, three times. But four, five, six, seven?

“Seven times” is a generous proposal when it comes to forgiveness. Both scripturally, and practically.

And, you know, If it were up to me, I’d give Peter more than a passing grade. But Jesus slaps him with an F.

“Seven times?” Jesus replies. “Not seven. Try seventy-seven times.” Not just seven times. But seventy-seven times.

Peter’s off by seventy. To be clear, though, when Jesus says “seventy-seven” he’s not saying once you tick off seventy-seven on your spreadsheet you can finally say “that one was final!” No.

One commentator with the perfect scholarly name of Eugene Boring, puts it like this: That this isn’t about math, but it’s about, he says, “the nature of forgiveness. It’s about the nature of forgiveness. Whoever counts, he says, has not forgiven at all, but is only biding his or her time. The kind of forgiveness called for is beyond all calculation.”

How many times should we forgive a person who wrongs us? How many apologies should we receive before we finally give ‘em the gears? Jesus’ answer? How high can you count? What are the limits of forgiveness? The answer is none. Because the kind of forgiveness Jesus calls for is beyond all calculation.

The answer for you and I is to keep forgiving, and forgiving, and forgiving, and forgiving. Not only until our very last breath. But with our very last breath.

It’s a difficult answer Jesus gives, this is for sure. But here’s the thing: it’s not just because it’s good for our health, which it is—studies show!

But this answer is rooted in an even deeper truth. And the truth is about God. And in order to get at this truth, Jesus tells a parable.

“The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says. “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle his accounts with his slaves.” There’s a king who, being a king, is owed money by a lot of people, including his own servants.

And one day he decides to collect, and he starts with calling his biggest debtor before the throne. The debt is massive—ten thousand talents! Which is at least fifteen years’ wages for a labourer, a year’s budget for the whole kingdom. The fact that it’s so much means it’s not his personal debt–he hasn’t lost the mortgage in a poker game. This guy has squandered public-level funds–the king’s money.

The debt is so massive that you might as well say he owes one zillion dollars. So the king orders a complete liquidation of his assets–including his wife and children. It’s so much that he couldn’t possibly pay. So he’s losing everything.

He’s so deep in debt that there’s no possible way out, so he avails himself of the only option he has left: he begs.

He falls to the floor at the throne and pleads with the king for patience. “Give me time,” he says. “And I’ll get the money, I swear.”

Now you and I know that there’s nothing the servant can do to pay it back. But there is something the king can do. “Out of pity,” it says, “out of pity, the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.” The servant owed him so much, more than the servant ever could have possibly paid. But out of compassion for the servant, the king absorbs the debt himself. And lets the servant off scott-free.

Now, you may at this point realize that Jesus is talking about money but he’s not really talking about money. He’s just doing what the scriptures often do–he uses debt as a metaphor for sin. For trespasses, transgressions. Bad Karma. And he’s talking about a king, but he’s not really talking about any old king. He’s talking about God, the only true Sovereign of creation. And he’s getting at the question we asked earlier–why forgive?

Here we’re getting at core Christian teaching. What in theology we call the doctrine of atonement. And it goes like this: we are like the servant in the parable. You and I have failed to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength, we have failed to love our neighbours as ourselves. In countless ways, we’ve run up our tab on this earth by failing to do as we ought to do. In countless ways, we have hurt each other, and failed to love each other–even those who we love and those who love us. We have taken this life, this world God has given us, and we’ve blown it. So much so that there is no way to fix the world. There is no way to make up for what we’ve done. We believe that we are so deep into the red that no amount of good deeds will ever even balance the scale. Anyone who’s ever truly hurt someone, or been truly hurt by someone gets it. Like the servant in the parable, there isn’t anything we can do to undo what we’ve done or have had done to us.

Sounds pretty bleak, I know. And it really would be, if it weren’t for God. We’re like the servant in the parable, and God’s like the king. Even though we couldn’t possibly balance our accounts, even though we couldn’t possibly repay, even though there’s nothing we could possibly do to fix the world, let alone our little corner in it, God has done so. Like the king in the parable who pardons the servant’s debt out of compassion, incurring the costs to himself, on the cross, God has paid the price for every last transgression in Jesus Christ. Think about it… every last withdrawal you’ve ever made. Leaving us, leaving you and me, spiritually solvent, totally forgiven. All that guilt, all that shame, totally unnecessary cuz it’s been wiped clean. YOU are forgiven! Like the servant, you and I—we’ve been let off scott-free.

Why? Because at the heart of the universe is a Creator so compassionate, one so in love with his creatures, that rather than seeing us drowned in our debts, he has drained his own account to save us in one great act of cosmic forgiveness. There are to be no limits to our forgiveness, because the Lord of all creation has broken the bank to forgive us. You know the old hymn? “Seeking the lost, seeking the lost/saving, redeeming at measureless cost.”

We are to forgive without calculation, because we have a God who has done so for us without calculation. Forgiven—every last sin. I’d say hallelujah right now if it weren’t Lent.

Now, you’ll have likely noticed that the parable doesn’t end there, though. In fact, our hero doesn’t fare so well in the end.

He leaves the throne room a free man, both in terms of debt and consequences, but no sooner has he turned the corner that he sees another servant who owes him a hundred denarii–three months wages, give or take. He shakes him down, “Pay up!” he says, grabbing his fellow servant by the throat. But when his fellow servant asks him for forgiveness in the exact same words that he asked the king for, he doesn’t forgive him, or even give him time to pay. He has him tossed in jail to pay it off.

So the king hears about this through the servant grapevine, has the servant brought to him, and rips into him. “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave like I had on you? Off to the dungeon with you!” he says.  And the servant, it says “is tortured until he should pay his entire debt.” And the worst part of it all is at this point Jesus interprets the whole of the parable for us, saying, “if you do nor forgive your brother or sister from your heart,” you can expect the same treatment from your heavenly Father.

Now, I must admit, I’ve always been perplexed by how this whole thing turns out. First Jesus says it’s about forgiveness beyond all calculation, and about the cost God pays to wipe our slates clean. But then the limit of forgiveness is calculated: the ceiling of our own forgiveness being the forgiveness of others. I mean, the scriptures don’t say that the Lamb of God takes away most of the sins of the world, or every sin except for that one, do they? Is any and everything forgivable except your or my stubborn inability to forgive the people who wrong us? Like, I thought this was forgiveness without calculation.

As perplexed as I have been, though, one of my favourite commentators helped me answer these questions. The late great Anglican preacher and New York Times food writer Robert Capon says that the punch line of this parable isn’t about the limits of God’s forgiveness, but an illustration of what it looks like when we refuse to let God’s forgiveness have its way with us.

He points out that the prisoner offers to pay back the debt—he doesn’t know that he’s been forgiven out of sheer mercy. He doesn’t know about the king’s pity, nor about the extravagant cost to the king. So he just returns to life as normal. And rather than being changed by this extravagant debt-cancellation, he just goes about life as usual, collecting on the debts of others, ending up in the very prison he was pardoned from. Here’s what Capon says:

“By not letting grace have its way through us, cut ourselves off from ever knowing the joy of grace in us… the only thing that can keep us out of the joy of resurrection is to join the unforgiving servant in his refusal to die.”

One writer Lewis Swedes once said that “to forgive is to set a prisoner free–and that prisoner is you.” And that’s what this parable is getting at that. It’s like having the prison cell blown open but refusing to actually step out into the sunshine. In refusing to forgive, you and I are like children who have woken up on Christmas Day to find the bike we’ve always wanted, but never actually take it outside for a ride. In refusing to forgive, you and I are denying ourselves this whole life of relief, and joy and freedom of resurrection in this life.

The issue here isn’t with God. With God, the whole sin accounting enterprise has died with Jesus on the cross! The issue is with us–that, like the unforgiving servant, we refuse to believe it. We just insist on continuing to live as tortured prisoners, rather than letting our own hatred and resentments go, rather than letting the debts we are even rightly owed–die. You’re forgiven, Jesus says. But you won’t truly believe it, or enjoy it, until you start forgiving others.

So here you and I are, standing at the open door of a prison cell, hearing Jesus say once more, you are forgiven—not conditionally, not seven times or seventy-seven, but beyond all calculation. And the only question left before us is whether we will believe it. Whether we’ll believe it, and step out into that freedom or turn back to our old legalistic ledgers. Because the hard, and beautiful truth is that forgiving others isn’t how we earn God’s mercy, but it’s how we finally trust it, how we let the cross actually count for something in our lives. How we stop clinging to debts that only keep us in chains.

So this Lent, dear friends, as we pray and repent and remember the measureless cost of grace, Jesus says that we can let go of all the resentments we rehearse, the wrongs we replay, the accounts we insist on balancing, and forgive. Forgive not because it’s easy, or deserved, but because resurrection life begins the moment we believe that grace is real enough to give away. And that we can only know the joy of being forgiven when we dare, by God’s grace, to forgive in return.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.