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The Debts We Refuse to Forgive: On Economic Revolution

The Debts We Refuse to Forgive: On Economic Revolution

Last updated on: September 12, 2026 at 1:20 pm by Jeff Hood

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The Debts We Refuse to Forgive: On Economic Revolution 2026-09-12T13:20:00-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Economic Revolution

Economic Revolution?

Debts

Peter came to Jesus with a question. “When somebody keeps wronging me, how many times do I have to let it go? Seven?”

Jesus said, “Not seven. Seventy times seven. Stop counting.”

“Here is what the economic revolution of God looks like. A man who owned everything decided to call in his accounts. The first person brought to him owed a figure that ran into the billions. There was no way to pay it. So the owner ordered the man seized, along with his wife, his children, everything he had, until the debt was covered.

The man fell on his face. ‘Give me time. I will pay back every cent.’ Everyone in the room knew he could not.

The owner looked at him, felt something break open in his chest, let him go. The debt was gone. Every zero of it.

The forgiven man walked out of that office, found a coworker who owed him three months’ pay, grabbed him by the throat. ‘Pay me what you owe.’

The coworker fell down in front of him. ‘Give me time. I will pay you back.’ The same words. The same posture.

He refused. He had the man locked up until the money came in.

The other workers saw it. It made them sick. They went to the owner with what they had seen.

The owner called the man back in. ‘You wicked man. I wiped out everything you owed because you begged me to. You could not find it in you to do the same for someone who owed you pocket change?’

The owner handed him to the guards until he paid back the whole amount. The amount that could not be paid.

That is what God will do to every one of you who refuses to release a brother or sister from the heart.”

–Matthew 18:21-35 (paraphrase)

The Economic Revolution

Peter wants a number. Seven times? Jesus gives him a story instead. The story is not about counting. It is about a throat. It is also about an economy.

There is nothing equal about this debt.

A man who owns everything calls in his accounts. One of the people who work for him owes a figure with too many zeros to read aloud. That is not a sum. That is a lifetime multiplied by lifetimes. In today’s money, it would run into the billions. Nobody in the room expects it to be paid. The owner knows it. The debtor knows it.

So the owner does what power does. He seizes the man. Then the wife. Then the children. Then everything they own.

The debtor falls on his face. He begs. He promises what he cannot deliver.

The owner cancels the debt.

Then the forgiven man walks out of the office, finds a coworker who owes him three months’ pay and grabs him by the throat.

That movement is the sermon. A man receives mercy. Within the hour, he becomes an instrument of economic violence.

The church has spent centuries reading this story as advice about grudges. It is not advice. It is a description of two economies at war. One is built on debt. The other is built on release. The second is an economic revolution. Jesus is asking which one we intend to live in.

The world as it is

Jesus does not tell a story about two neighbors on equal footing. He tells a story about an owner. Then the people who owe him. One person holds the wealth. Others exist beneath it. That is the world as it is.

The first man’s debt is impossible on purpose. Jesus picked the figure. He could have chosen a number a working man might repay over a few hard years. He chose one that would take centuries.

Debt is never arithmetic alone. It is the mechanism by which one class decides what another class must surrender. Every civilization that has run on it has produced the same result: a few people who own, a great many who owe.

Poverty turns people into collateral

The owner’s first order is the darkest detail in the passage. The debt does not stay attached to the debtor. It spreads. It swallows a wife who signed nothing. Children who owed nothing. A house that was never the bank’s.

Economic violence is never confined to the person holding the bill.

When a hospital bill arrives, the whole family gets sick with it. When rent eats half a paycheck, children eat the instability. When a plant closes, every bedroom in the house lives inside that layoff.

A mother stands at a pharmacy counter doing math out loud. A father tells his son the field trip money is coming, knowing it is not. A grandmother splits pills in half to stretch the bottle to the first of the month. None of them signed the loan. All of them are being sold.

The cancellation is the economic revolution

Here is what the church keeps missing. The owner does not restructure the loan. He does not lower the interest. He does not set up a payment plan with a compassionate counselor. He erases the debt. All of it. In one sentence.

That is not charity. Charity leaves the ledger intact and adds a line of pity to it. This is abolition. The account ceases to exist.

Jesus did not invent the idea. He inherited it. Moses handed Israel a calendar with a fuse in it. Every seventh year, the loan papers burned. Every fiftieth year, a family walked back onto the land their grandfather lost. A man who had been sold walked home. Two generations of accumulated inequality wiped out in a single morning. Israel called it Jubilee. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth to announce who he was, he read Isaiah’s line about the year of the Lord’s favor. Everyone in that room knew the phrase. He was announcing the reset.

The owner in this parable is doing what Jubilee does. He is refusing to let a debt become a destiny.

An economy built on that refusal looks nothing like ours. It cancels medical debt rather than selling it to collectors. It ends cash bail rather than jailing people for being poor. It forgives the student loan rather than garnishing the wage for thirty years. It treats housing as something a person is owed rather than something a person must earn the right to keep.

Call that radical. It is. It is also the economic content of the Bible.

Refusing the economic revolution

Here, the parable turns.

The forgiven man has just walked away from an unpayable sum. He meets someone who owes him pocket change. He refuses mercy.

He is not being petty. He is choosing sides. He has been handed a new economy, one where debt can be released. He walks back into the old one within the hour. He has tasted liberation for himself. He will not extend it to anyone else.

That is the counter-revolution. The economic revolution does not fail because power crushes it. It fails when the forgiven keep the ledger going on their own.

The language gives us away. Our debt is a hardship. Their debt is a lesson. Our relief is common sense. Their relief is a moral hazard. We have built an entire vocabulary for keeping our hands around other people’s throats while calling it stewardship.

Healthcare as the case study

The cycle is easy to trace. Illness creates debt. Debt creates poverty. Poverty prevents treatment. Untreated illness deepens the poverty that started it.

Then we turn to the person trapped inside that circle and tell them to make better choices.

Better choices. As if anyone chooses the tumor. As if the child picked the asthma. As if a body that gives out after thirty years on a concrete floor is a failure of planning.

Jesus never asks why the debtor failed to manage his money. He begins with the human being standing underneath the debt. Before anyone asks what a person owes, the parable asks what is owed to them.

A country can be richer than any empire in history while ordinary people grow more fragile every year. That is not prosperity shared. That is prosperity hoarded. The parable has a word for the man who keeps that arrangement going. The word is wicked. The owner says it to his face.

Forgiveness is not a sedative

Forgiveness in this passage is not a private feeling. It is a structural act. It is a debt that no longer exists. Preached the other way, forgiveness becomes a sedative: the exploited are told to release their anger while the exploiters are told nothing.

The prophets never confused the two. Amos did not tell the crushed to forgive the ones crushing them. He told the ones crushing to stop. Mercy flows down the hierarchy in this parable. It does not flow up as a demand that the poor absorb what the powerful refuse to release.

The forgiven man’s sin is not accountability. His sin is that he received release without becoming an agent of release. He wants a world where his debt vanishes while everyone else’s stays on the books. That is not mercy. That is privilege wearing mercy’s clothes.

“Forgive us our debts” is a political demand

Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The prayer is more dangerous than the church allows.

It asks God to establish a different economy. Not an economy without responsibility. An economy without domination. One where a person’s worth cannot be reduced to purchasing power.

It also binds the one praying. As we forgive. The prayer is a pledge to carry the economic revolution ourselves, starting with whoever owes us.

The prayer sits in the mouths of people who then vote for the throat.

The parable ends in a prison

The owner hears what the forgiven man has done. He hands him to the guards until the debt is paid in full. The debt that could not be paid. The sentence has no end.

A man who refuses the new economy is given back the old one. A world of accounts. A world where every failure is collected. He asked for that world for someone else. He receives it for himself.

We have built that prison in stone. It holds people who could not pay a fine, could not make bail, could not afford the lawyer who might have changed the outcome. It holds the poor because they are poor. The revolution does not build such rooms. We do.

The economic revolution or the throat

Jesus does not end with a theory. He ends with a body.

A hand. A throat. A debt. A prison. A choice.

Our society has its hands on the throats of poor people. We have only changed the name of the grip.

The economic revolution is not a kinder version of the present order. It is a different order. It begins with cancellation. It is sustained by people who, having been released, go out to release others.

It works toward a day when everyone has everything they need. It makes a people of abundance out of a people of scarcity.

Do we cancel debts…or collect them? Do we release people…or tighten the grip? Do we build security for ourselves…or make it possible for others?

The revolution begins when we stop asking what people owe us. It begins the moment we ask what we owe each other. Then it asks us to go tear up the ledger.

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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