Not One Remained: Aphiēmi, the Sea, and the Unpayable Debt

Ten thousand talents. That is the number in Sunday's gospel, and most of us slide right past it, because it reads like a made-up amount. A big scary number in a story about a king.

So do the math, because the math is the joke. A talent was something like fifteen to twenty years of wages for a working man. Ten thousand of them is a hundred and fifty thousand years of labor. Jesus is not exaggerating a real debt. He is naming a number so absurd that the people listening would have laughed out loud, the way you would laugh if I told you I owed the bank four trillion dollars.

And then the king cancels it. Erases the whole thing, standing up, in the space of one sentence.

The man walks out of that room a free man. In the courtyard he finds somebody who owes him a hundred denarii, about three months' pay, and the text says he grabbed him by the throat and started choking him. Do the ratio. What had just been cancelled for him was six hundred thousand times larger than what he was choking a man over.

Three readings, one verb

Proper 19 in Year A gives us Exodus 14:19-31, Psalm 114, Romans 14:1-12 and Matthew 18:21-35. Put them side by side and the same thing is underneath all of them. Not a theme exactly. A verb. The verb is release.

Not one of them remained

Exodus 14 is the reading everybody can picture, mostly from movies. Moses, the staff, the wall of water. The movie version tends to end at the crossing, with the people arriving safely on the far shore. But read what the text actually spends its time on.

"The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained."

That is a strange thing to put in a rescue story, and it is worth being careful here, because there are real bodies on that beach and the text does not hide them. Israel stands on the far side and looks back at dead men in the surf. It is not a comfortable verse.

But notice what the sentence does to the story. It closes it. The thing that had chased that family for four hundred years is finished. The army is gone. Nobody is left to regroup, nobody is coming over the ridge in a week, there is no remnant of chariots limping home to be repaired.

And three chapters later, that same crowd, the ones who watched it happen and sang about it on the shore, is standing in the desert saying they should have stayed in Egypt, at least there was bread. Not their grandchildren. The eyewitnesses, within about a month.

The chase was over. They kept running the tape.

Psalm 114 sits right on top of this. It is a short psalm and it is almost giddy. Mountains skipping like rams. And then it turns around and talks to the sea like a kid talking to a dog that just ran off: "What ailed you, O sea, that you fled?" You only mock a thing you are completely certain is dead. Nobody taunts a bear that is still in the yard.

The same sentence, twice

Read the courtyard scene slowly and there is a detail in it that is easy to miss for years.

The first slave, on his knees in front of the king, says this: "Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything." Then he goes out, finds the man who owes him three months' pay, gets him by the throat, and that man falls down and says: "Have patience with me, and I will pay you."

It is the same sentence. Word for word, minus one word.

He heard his own prayer come back at him in another man's mouth, from the ground, in the same posture he had been in maybe ten minutes earlier, and he did not recognize it. That is the horror of the story, and it is not cruelty. He may not have been a cruel man at all. He was a man who could not feel the size of what had happened to him. The number was too big to land, so he went back to the only accounting he understood, which was the small one, the one where he was owed.

And look at how it ends, because we tend to skip it. The king hands him over to the jailers until he should pay his debt. Until he pays back a hundred and fifty thousand years, which is to say never. He wanted the books open. He gets the books open.

Servants of another

Romans 14 looks like it wandered in from a different sermon. It is about food, and about calendars. Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Some judge one day to be better than another. It reads like church housekeeping from a world that is gone.

But look at what Paul does with it, because he does not settle the argument. He has the authority to rule on it, both sides would accept the ruling, and he refuses to give one. Instead: "Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall."

Servants of another. Paul is saying you are standing there running an audit on somebody who does not work for you. You have appointed yourself to a job that was never yours.

He is not a relativist and he is not saying nothing matters. Two sentences later he says every knee will bow and every one of us will give an account. He believes in the reckoning completely. What he is saying is that you are not at the desk. There is a judgment seat in Romans 14 and it has exactly one chair in it, and you are not sitting in it. You are in the line with everybody else.

Where seventy-seven comes from

Peter's question at the top of the gospel is the giveaway. "How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" He thinks he is being generous. The going rabbinic teaching was three. He doubles it and adds one.

But the tell is not the number. It is that he is counting at all. You only count if the account is still open. Seven times means somewhere in Peter's head there is a page with somebody's name at the top and six tally marks under it.

Then Jesus answers with seventy-seven, and that number is a quotation. It comes from Genesis 4. Lamech, five generations after Cain, standing in front of his wives, bragging: "I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold."

Seventy-seven is the revenge number. It is the oldest boast in the Bible, the first song anybody sings in scripture, and it is a song about payback with interest. Jesus takes it and hands it back inside out. Same number, opposite direction. The measure of how far vengeance would run becomes the measure of how far forgiveness runs.

He is not setting a higher quota. He is taking the counter out of your hand, because the counter was never a tool for keeping the peace. It was Lamech's.

The warning at the end

The parable does end with a warning, and it is worth not pretending otherwise. "So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

That sounds like God changing his mind. Read it with the verb instead. Forgiveness is a hand opening. A hand that stays closed cannot hand anything over, and it cannot receive anything either. The man in the story did not get his pardon revoked because the king got moody. He got it revoked because he walked out of that room and demonstrated that he had never actually taken it. You cannot hold a receipt and a gift in the same fist.

Two things to try before Sunday

First, name the thing you are still holding. Not the big one. The small one you would be embarrassed to admit still has any weight, because it has been years and it was minor and you should be over it. The big grievances we know about. It is the filed ones that quietly change the temperature of a room.

Second, ask whose ledger it is. That is the Romans 14 question and it may be the most useful sentence in the three readings. Before you carry a verdict about somebody around for another week: do they work for you? Is this yours to keep? Almost always the answer is no. They stand or fall before somebody else.

Here is the thing about a hand that has been closed a long time. It does not open on willpower. It opens when you finally believe the water already came back over the chariots. The thing that was chasing you is done. Not one of them remained.

You can stop watching the beach.