Imagine walking into a bank and asking for a loan of one hundred and sixty thousand years' wages. Not one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. One hundred and sixty thousand years of labor. That is the debt in today's Gospel. Ten thousand talents. Scholars tell us a single talent was worth about twenty years of a laborer's wages, and Jesus multiplies it by ten thousand, the largest number in the Greek language attached to the largest unit of currency. It is deliberately absurd. It is a number no human being could ever repay. Jesus wants us to feel the weight of it.

And then this servant, who has just been released from an unpayable mountain of debt, walks out the door, grabs a fellow servant by the throat, and demands a hundred denarii. A hundred days' wages. Now notice, friends, that is not nothing. Three months of pay is a real debt.

Read more