September 6, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.
Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?”
And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart. Matthew 18:32-35
Jesus. What gives?
This is the kind of passage that makes me want to hide my bible. God forbid some CIA agent find it and see a scriptural justification for water boarding.
“And in anger his Lord handed him over to be tortured …”
I’m searching the passage for loopholes (as W.C. Fields reportedly did when he studied the bible on his death bed). It seems an abuse of power for a king to send a flunky to the rack.
At least it seems that way by our enlightened standards, which require turning a blind eye toward Alligator Alcatraz or the inhumane foreign prisons to which America sends its immigrants, as if they were some kind of anachronistic aberration.
But kings are only human and we accept that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The unnerving part of Jesus’ intervention is that the reference to torture no sooner leaves his lips than he ups the ante:
“So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Pause for nervous laughter.
God will hand us over to be tortured if we nurse a grudge?
I do nurse grudges over past and present presidents who start unnecessary wars, and I seethe with undiluted anger at Robert McNamara who I regard as a war criminal.
My beef with McNamara is that he knew very early that the Vietnam War was unnecessary and unwinnable. But he never told LBJ.
There are thousands of monuments to the price of his silence. Years later, after McNamara finally revealed his regrets, Martha and I visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where her immigrant father once worked as a dish washer after he left Cuba. The cemetery at West Point tends to be organized by the war in which the soldiers fell, and as we passed by the graves of Vietnam veterans I became bitterly mindful of McNamara's silence. A lot of those graves were of men and women who died after 1967 -- after their Secretary of Defense had concluded the war was unnecessary and unwinnable.
Why didn't McNamara speak up? Did he feel honor-bound to be loyal to an intransigent president? What were his thoughts when the casualty figures continued to mount: 16,592 in 1968? 11,616 in 1969? 6,081 in 1970? -- all for a cause he knew to be lost from the beginning?
In his later years, Robert McNamara was eloquent in his contrition. In a 1995 memoir he declared the war had been "wrong -- terribly wrong." He spent the rest of his life trying -- futilely, it turned out -- to prevent similar American disasters.
But the terrible question hanging over McNamara's life can't be avoided: what if he had spoken up sooner? Would the timely confession by the architect of the war that he had been wrong all along have forced LBJ to halt it? Would it have given subsequent warriors, Nixon and Kissinger, sufficient pause to sue for peace? Would it have saved thousands of lives?
Tragically, we'll never know. Personally, I think a public admission by Robert McNamara in May 1967 would have been loud enough to suck the air out of public opinion and silence the bombs over Hanoi.
And that's what I can't forgive. When his voice could have thundered around the world, he chose to be silent.
But I don’t think God cares whether I forgive Bob McNamara who I never met. Unfortunately, I think God is more concerned about my attitude toward my actual neighbor – that is, the guy next door – who curses at my barking dog, or the idiot who snatches all the donuts at the coffee table, or the mad max who cuts me off at rush hour on the parkway. To each I would hurl a Carnac curse from the old Tonight Show: may a bag of pop rocks explode in your shorts.
Admittedly, that is not the kind of forgiving attitude that would convince God to send the torturer away.
We all struggle with this, and to further darken our prospects, these annoying folks are easier to forgive than the people we actually live with or cannot escape.
In this category fall rancorous ex-spouses, misanthropic bosses, languid adult children still living at home, hypercritical in-laws who think you aren’t good enough for the family, and obsequious relatives who listen to them.
In each of these cases, you might find it possible to forgive these tormenters once or twice. But they keep coming back at you with new infamies and new miseries. Dear God, how much can we take? Wouldn’t Jesus be an empathetic listener?
You: “Jesus, she drives me crazy!”
Jesus: “I know, right?”
That conversation will never happen. Jesus already had that conversation and it went like this:
Peter: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
Jesus: “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:21-22.
Actually, Jesus was condescending to Peter’s literal mind. He wasn’t suggesting we use hash marks to keep track of the number of times we forgive. A redacted version of the conversation would have the same meaning.
Peter: “Shall I ever stop forgiving someone who sins against me?”
Jesus: “No.”
This is certainly one of those utterances of Jesus that we would prefer to ignore. A lot of families have members who haven’t spoken to each other for years because of some terrible and unforgivable thing that happened. Sometimes this happens between siblings.
My grandfather and his brother hated each other and I never knew why. Those who knew didn’t talk about it or had forgotten what happened. My uncle did show up at Grandpa’s funeral because my aunt insisted on it, and to make sure there was no mistake.
Too bad for Grandpa and Uncle. They couldn’t forgive each other once, let alone 77 times. That did not portend well for their spiritual consolation when they finally met their maker.
In many bible stories, antagonism between siblings was common.
It’s no coincidence that this Gospel lesson is pared with another simmering sibling rivalry: the one that existed for decades between Joseph and his brothers. Genesis 50:15-21.
As the oldest of five siblings, I have a simple exegesis of the brotherly enmity that existed for so long: Joseph was a twit.
He was the youngest of his brothers and his father, Jacob, adored him. Joseph was somehow conceived long after Jacob had accepted erectile dysfunction as a badge of maturity, along with cataracts and unplanned flatulence. Joseph was obviously a miracle baby, and Jacob, his jaw unhinged and spittle dripping on his apron, stared at the child for hours.
That alone would have annoyed the older brothers, but Joseph made it worse. Either out of insolence or innocence, Joseph boasted of dreams that showed he ranked far above his seniors.
What a schlemiel. As an older brother, I wouldn’t necessarily approve of selling the brat into slavery. But – to quote Chris Rock – I can certainly understand it.
As it turned out, the brothers plotted to kill Joseph but, out of mercy or guilt, they sold the boy to Midianite traders for 20 shekels of silver. In a breathtaking act of sibling cruelty, the brothers killed a goat and smeared the blood of Joseph’s coat so Jacob would think the boy was dead.
The decades that followed this monumental act of sibling betrayal nursed festering resentments that would defy any possibility of reconciliation. When Jacob’s sons are forced to travel to Egypt to seek relief from a famine, they discover to their horror that little Joseph is now the king’s first minister. Not good news. The revelation was tantamount to a death sentence.
But, thousands of years before Jesus ordered aggrieved people to forgive seventy-seven times, God’s grace was powerfully manifest.
So the brothers approached Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this instruction before he died, ‘Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you.’ Now therefore please forgive the crime of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also wept, fell down before him, and said, “We are here as your slaves.” But Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.” In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them. Genesis 50:16-21.
Joseph’s forgiving response to his brothers was unexpected. If he had reacted, shall we say, normally, he would have incited a bloody fratricide like the Red Wedding scene in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.
In fact, that might have been an easier reaction for Joseph than blithely dismissing all those years of treachery and pain.
But what would have been the point of vengeance? Who would have benefitted? And how would God have been served?
The dark landscape in which we live is satiated with deceit and betrayal, reprisal and recrimination. There may be some small satisfaction in striking back, but in the end retaliation begets more scores to be settled, more pain, more alienation from God’s eternal love.
Your task, Jesus said – as exhausting as it may be – is to forgive and forgive as often as you are hurt.
The only way out of the obscene cycle of resentment and despair is to forgive the ones who hurt you most.
Seventy seven times.
And that’s only the beginning.
