The Rev’d Ivica Gregrec

Sunday, 13 September 2026. Year A, Ordinary 24.

Readings: Genesis 50:15-2, Psalm 103:1-13, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 9:35-10:8

Grace to you and peace, this morning, as we gather in the Season of Creation – these weeks when we widen our gaze to take in the whole groaning, glorious creation that God so loves. Apologies for probably not most coherent homily – our guest speaker Dr Andrew Clark-Howard is taken down by Covid (yes, that thing is still roaming around), so these few thoughts were written yesterday in haste, on my day off.

You’ll notice our readings today don’t mention rivers or mountains or endangered species. And yet these texts, especially our Gospel, give us exactly what this season asks of us: a vision of the world as God sees it, whole and interconnected, groaning for healing, and deeply loved.

Joseph’s brothers, having sold him into slavery decades earlier, now fear his revenge. Instead, he weeps, and says words worth carving somewhere prominent: ‘Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people.’
This is not cheap forgiveness. Joseph names the harm plainly. But he refuses to let it have the final word, locating his family’s story inside a larger story of God’s providence, one that bends toward life. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is beyond redemption. That is how God relates to creation itself: bringing forth life from what is broken or discarded.
Psalm 103 gives us the vocabulary: ‘as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us.’ God is not a distant judge keeping score, but compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. This is the character of the God who made the world and called it good, a God of abundance, not scarcity.

Paul tackles what seems a small dispute: whether Christians should eat meat or keep certain days holy, and turns it into something larger. ‘Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?’ he asks. ‘Let all be fully convinced in their own minds.’
Paul lays down a principle of real breadth: the household of God has room for genuine difference, held together not by uniformity but by a shared orientation toward Christ. ‘We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.’
In this broad and generous tradition of the Christianity we call our home, that’s a word we know something about. We are a church that has learned, sometimes painfully, but always incompletely, that unity is not sameness. The Body of Christ includes people who pray differently, who read scripture differently, who come to the altar from wildly different places, and this is not a problem to solve but a grace to receive.

But I want to spend most of our time this morning with Matthew, because here is where the Season of Creation truly comes alive.
Peter asks Jesus a question that sounds generous: ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Seven was already an extraordinary number by first-century standards. Jesus answers: ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times’; in other words, forgiveness that has stopped counting altogether.

Then Jesus tells a story. A king settles accounts with his slaves, and one owes him ten thousand talents. Biblical scholars love to point out just how absurd this number is: a talent was already the largest unit of currency imaginable, worth more than fifteen years of a labourer’s wages. Ten thousand talents is not a debt anyone could repay in several lifetimes. It is a deliberately, comically impossible sum, designed to represent a debt beyond all reckoning.
The king, moved with compassion, the same ‘splagchnizomai’, the same gut-level mercy we hear elsewhere in Matthew, forgives the whole thing. Not a payment plan, not a partial reduction, but the entire, impossible debt, simply released.

And then that forgiven servant goes out and finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii: a real but entirely manageable sum, perhaps a hundred days’ wages. And he seizes him by the throat. He has him thrown into prison until the debt is paid.
When the king hears of it, his fury is total: ‘Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’

Here is where I think this parable speaks directly into the Season of Creation, even though not a tree or river appears in it. Because this parable is fundamentally about an economy: a system of debts, obligations, and what we owe one another. And in our current moment, we are learning painfully that creation itself runs on exactly this kind of economy.

We have run up an ecological debt of almost unthinkable scale: the ten-thousand-talent kind. Centuries of extraction, of treating the atmosphere and oceans and soil as a bottomless account to be drawn upon without repayment. And who bears the weight of that debt now? Overwhelmingly, it is the poor, the displaced, small island nations, subsistence farmers – people who contributed least to the debt and are being seized by the throat for a fraction of it. The pattern in Jesus’s parable, the very people who have been shown mercy turning around and refusing it to others, is not an ancient curiosity. It is a live diagnosis of how power and consequence still flow in our world.
The Gospel does not let us off the hook by spiritualizing debt into something purely private, a matter between individual souls. Jesus tells this story to a community, about how members of a community treat one another economically. And the theological claim underneath it is breath-taking: we have already been forgiven a debt we could never repay. Grace, mercy, the sheer gift of existence in a world that did not have to be beautiful and is: all of this was given to us free, unearned, impossible for us to have merited.
Given that, what does it mean for us to hold others (human neighbours, future generations, the more-than-human world itself) by the throat over what they owe us or what we’re owed by the world? What does ecological and economic mercy look like, practiced by a people who know themselves to be already, extravagantly, forgiven?

This is where Joseph, Paul, and Matthew come together. Joseph shows us a God who redeems harm rather than being defeated by it. Paul shows us a community wide enough to hold real difference without collapsing into judgment. And Jesus shows us, with almost mathematical bluntness, that mercy received and mercy withheld cannot coexist forever without something breaking.
In this Season of Creation, we are asked to notice the impossible debts owed to the earth and to each other, and to ask what forgiveness, costly, structural, real forgiveness, might look like: debt relief for nations drowning under both water and interest payments, ecological repair offered without demanding repayment first, a willingness to release our grip on what we are ‘owed’ because we ourselves have already been released from so much more.
The king in the parable does not ask the servant to forget the debt was ever owed. He asks him to let mercy be the last word rather than the first. May we, who have received mercy beyond counting, learn to give it the same way.
Amen.