1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this Christian Education Sunday is taken from Matthew 18:21-35 and Colossians 2:6-7, it’s entitled, “Rooted in Christ-Forgiven People Forgiving People,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Another school year has begun. Backpacks are packed, pencils are sharpened, and somewhere in this congregation this week a child cried at school drop-off — and maybe a parent cried in the car afterward too. As we launch into this new year together as a congregation and a school family, St. Paul gives us our school year theme, which is “Rooted in Christ.” In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he writes: "As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith" (Colossians 2:6–7). Rooted. Built up. Established. Not rooted in a curriculum, not rooted in a schedule, not even rooted in this church building — rooted in Christ Jesus the Lord. That is the soil our children, and all of us, need to grow in this year.
3. But roots take time, and roots are tested. And nowhere are they tested more than in the ordinary, grinding work of forgiveness — which is exactly where our texts from Holy Scripture plant us today. Our Old Testament reading from Genesis 50 finds Joseph's brothers still afraid, years after Joseph had already forgiven them from selling him into slavery and telling their father a lie that he was dead (Genesis 37). Their father Jacob has just died, and the old terror resurfaces: "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him" (Genesis 50:15). Notice something painfully human here — Joseph had already forgiven them back in Genesis 45. He wept over them, kissed them, spoke kindly to them. And still, years later, they doubt it. They send him a message, possibly even inventing a deathbed command from Jacob, because they can’t quite believe forgiveness that thorough could be real.
4. How many of our own people — how many of us — live this way? We confess our sins, we hear the absolution spoken plainly over us, and still we walk around bracing for the other shoe to drop. Joseph's answer to his terrified brothers is theology, not just sentiment: "Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:19–20). Joseph will not play God over his brothers' sin. He hands the verdict back to the Lord, and the Lord had already turned their evil into the salvation of many. This is a root system growing beneath the surface long before anyone can see the fruit of it.
5. Where did Joseph learn to forgive like that? Psalm 103 shows us the source. The Lord "forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit" (Psalm 103:3–4). "He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities" (v. 10). "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us" (v. 12). Before Joseph could forgive his brothers, he himself had been forgiven — by a God who is, in the Psalmist's words, "merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" (v. 8). This is always the order in Scripture. Forgiveness flows downhill from God to us before it can ever flow sideways from us to our neighbor. You can’t hand out a fruit you have not first received from the root.
6. St. Paul, in Romans 14, addresses Christians squabbling over food and holy days — matters of conscience, not core doctrine. "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls" (Romans 14:4). "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (v. 8). A congregation rooted in Christ does not need to uproot the neighbor's conscience to feel secure in its own. When our identity is planted firmly in Christ and not in being right, or being in control, or being vindicated, we are freed to welcome the weak in faith rather than quarrel with them.
7. And then the Gospel drives the nail all the way through. Peter thinks he's being generous — "as many as seven times?" (Matthew 18:21) — and Jesus answers, "seventy times seven" (v. 22), which is to say: stop counting. Then the parable: a servant owes his master ten thousand talents — a debt so vast it is functionally infinite, something like hundreds of thousands of years' worth of wages. He cannot pay it. He never could. And the master forgives it all, out of pure pity and mercy, with a word.
8. That servant walks out the door and finds a man who owes him a hundred denarii — a few months' wages, a real debt, but a molehill next to the mountain that was just erased from his own account — and he seizes him by the throat. "He refused" (v. 30). And the master's judgment falls hard: "Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?" (v. 33).
9. Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, preached on this parable with characteristic bluntness. He said that a Christian who will not forgive his neighbor has, in effect, torn up his own certificate of forgiveness — he has taken back into his own hands a debt that Christ already nailed to the cross. Luther's Small Catechism teaches us to pray "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" — and in the explanation he reminds us that God forgives us "not because of our own worthiness," so that we, in turn, would "heartily forgive and readily do good to those who sin against us." Forgiveness is not a transaction Christians negotiate. It is the family trait of people who have been forgiven an unpayable debt.
10. This is why Colossians 2:6–7 is exactly the right verse to plant over a new school year. Notice Paul does not say "achieve Christ" or "perform for Christ." He says "as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him." Receiving comes first — the way a root receives water it did not manufacture itself. Everything after that — the walking, the being built up, the being established in the faith, the forgiving of debts a hundred denarii or ten thousand talents — grows out of that received gift, or it does not grow at all.
11. Parents, teachers, students, saints of every age: this year you will be sinned against. Someone will say something careless in the hallway. A grade will feel unfair. A friend will let you down. A brother or sister in this congregation will hurt you, and you them. And on that day, the question will not be whether you have the willpower to forgive. The question will be whether you are rooted — whether, like Joseph, like the Psalmist, like Paul, you have already received so much mercy that a hundred denarii looks small next to it.
12. You have. At the baptismal font, God buried your old self of sin and raised you new in Christ Jesus your Lord. At this altar, our Lord Jesus hands you His own body and blood "for the forgiveness of sins" — not a metaphor, but a gift you can taste. And from that absolution spoken over you moments ago, the Holy Spirit sends roots down into ground that will hold in any storm this school year brings.
13. Do not fear. You are not in the place of God, and neither is the one who wronged you. As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him this year — rooted, built up, and established, forgiven people forgiving people. Amen. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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