Biblical values (about money)
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
September 13, 2026—Proper 19A
Exodus 15:1b-11,20-21; Matthew 18:21-35
When do I get to punch him? (that’s the title I would give that gospel story)
Peter has provided one of my favorite disciple moments in the gospels. It comes after Jesus has been talking about how to be community together, about what the values of the kingdom of God look like when they are lived out by real people in real life. He’d begun by making it clear that the kingdom will NOT be made up of perfectly holy, non-sinful people (the lost sheep entered the chat). Then he went into a whole thing about the consequences of that, laying out what you should do when people in the community sin against you, with a very specific process for accountability (first go alone, then take two or three, then bring it before the whole church…). And Peter is like, yes, yes, good, but JESUS … tell me when I get to punch him!
How much is too much? Is there a point at which I don’t have to forgive anymore? Surely there are some people, some things, that push us too far…
And Jesus, who has just finished describing the process by which serious, repeat, unrepentant offenders might need to be removed for the good of the community, understands that Peter’s question is not about those people. We know that, because his answer speaks to something different. Speaks to that part of us that wants all kinds of exceptions and understanding for ourselves, but leaps to throw the book at everyone else.
The story Jesus tells in response is about money. About a truly staggering sum of money that a slave owes, so that he will never be able to pay it all back, and the king releases him from the debt. Amazing. But instead of passing along his joyful liberation, the slave turns around and demands payment from another slave who owes him money. When that man asks for more time, he grabs him by the throat and has him thrown into prison.
The story is about the astonishing forgiveness and grace of God. It’s about our refusal to extend that grace, to live out the grace that God has given to us. It’s also about patience, about the willingness to give the process of forgiveness the time that it needs. It’s about all that.
But what if it’s also about the money? What if those churches who recite “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” have retained an insight into Kingdom values that the rest of us lost when we only retained the metaphorical level of Jesus’ story? After all, the Bible very much emphasizes the evils that money can lead to: from dishonest business practices, to exploitative economic systems, all the way up to full-blown idolatry, in which we make money and possessions our God.
And the Torah is particularly concerned with the evils that can arise in the lending of money. Within the people of Israel, charging interest was forbidden, and loaning someone money was understood as an act of charity, rather than a business transaction. Even beyond that, Jubilee laws in Leviticus sought to prevent generational poverty by essentially resetting society every 49 years: debts were to be forgiven, those forced into indentured service were freed, and any land sold due to poverty was returned to its original family owners (Lev 25). These are the ways of God.
So the astronomical size of the slave’s debt would have set the disciples on high alert. We modern Americans might be looking at him, condemning his foolishness for racking up such a debt, but to the disciples’ ears, it would have been the righteousness of the king that was up for judgment. Imagine, then, their hoots and hollers when he did the right thing (not just a generous thing, or what we might consider a financially insane thing, but the righteous thing) by forgiving the debt! But then we hear their cheers turn to hisses and boos, as that slave refuses to do the right thing in his turn, instead insisting on his right to throw his debtor into prison.
He’s the bad guy. Not the one who couldn’t pay his debt, but the one who demanded repayment from someone who didn’t have the money; and demanded punishment when they couldn’t pay. He’s the bad guy. It’s a very different value system from that of our society.
The Bible commands us “Do not steal,” but our modern, secular understanding of theft is nowhere near as expansive as the Bible’s. It does mean taking someone else’s donkey. But the Bible also equates charging interest with theft. And it not only commands landowners to leave the gleanings at the edges of their fields for those in need (Lev 23:22), but failure to do so is understood as depriving the poor of something that is legally theirs. Which is another way to say that it is stealing. The Biblical understanding of theft is not simply one of private property rights, of who has established ownership of something. It encompasses a moral imperative to communal well-being; it gives moral value to the distribution of wealth.
Our criminal justice system is not set up to reflect such Biblical values. If you steal a backpack, you could well end up in Rikers. But if you encourage students to rack up debt so large that they spend decades paying back several times the original loan amount, and still aren’t anywhere near done paying … that’s just business. Same goes for the immense gap between workers’ wages and corporate profits (not to mention CEO salaries). And it’s not just that these things aren’t illegal: it’s that within our worldly value system, they are actually seen as right and good and just. According to secular values, the real theft lies in the suggestion that the wealthy share more of what they consider to be theirs alone.
It’s always worth asking: who is it that makes the laws, who defines morality and immorality, and who are those things protecting? And whenever we discover that the answer is “Me. This law, this standard, this morality is protecting me,” then we need to ask more questions. About who isn’t being protected … who might actually be being harmed. And, as people of faith, we’re called to find a way to bring God’s law, God’s values, God’s priorities into the conversation. To consider what it means, in our political and economic life, to follow a God who is firmly on the side of the un-protected, of the poor, of the wounded, of the oppressed. Because yes, God loves every last one of us, but God also takes sides.
In the Exodus, God takes the side of the enslaved against their enslavers. This is the core narrative, the central story around which the Bible is formed, and it shows us the nature of our God. God takes the side of the oppressed against the oppressors, the wounded against those who wound them, the poor against the systems and people who keep them poor. Which is a theological reality that should call us up short, if and when we realize we’re on the wounding side, the oppressor’s side, the impoverishing side.
And they’re the things we need to think about, if we wish to hear hoots and hollers, rather than hissing and booing, when Jesus tells the story of our lives.
May it be so. Amen.