Fr Paul reads from the Gospel of Matthew (18: 21 – 19:1) in which Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how often must I forgive someone if they wrong me?”. Fr Paul says, in the parable in today’s Gospel we hear the continuation and the conclusion of the theme of forgiveness. We are reminded that forgiveness is the life’s blood of the Christian community. We cannot live together without upsetting one another, unwittingly, or even deliberately. So, again we are reminded that forgiveness is the vital step. Like so many of Matthew’s parables, this one revolves round contrasting characters, the ‘goodie’ and the ‘baddie’. The contrast between the two sums of money is deliberately fantastic: the first slave owes millions of dollars, a sum no private person could ever repay, let alone a slave; it is more than a year’s tax for a whole Roman province The second servant owes a paltry sum, a mere couple of months’ wages of a casual labourer. With this in mind, Fr Paul asks us to think about ‘Who, in my life, do I need to forgive for what I have done and who, in my life, do I need to ask reconciliation with for what has been done to me?’