10 June 2026 • Friday of Trinity 1 (observed) • Luke 17:1–10 / Galatians 3:6–11
It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones (Lk 17:1–2).
In the Holy + Name of Jesus. AMEN.
The word Jesus uses is skandalon. Stumbling block. The thing in the path that sends a person sprawling. He is not softening it. “It is impossible that no offenses should come” (Luke 17:1). Not unlikely. Not regrettable. Impossible.
You live in a world full of offenses. You live in a church full of people whose faith is fragile, people who came to the altar broken and are still being put back together. And the people around them — sometimes you — are capable of destroying what the Lord has been building.
The millstone is not just rhetoric. A millstone hung around a neck and cast into the sea is a mercy, compared to leading one of these little ones to fall. The Lord is naming the value of a human soul. The value of faith, planted by his Word, was destroyed by your words. By your example, by what you did, or by what you failed to do. The millstone is the measure of what is at stake. It would be better…
You know this intimately. If you have been the scandalizer — and who here has not — you feel something of that weight of guilt. Or if you have been scandalized, you wish for something worse than the millstone for the offender, the weight of shame. That weight is where Jesus begins his instruction. Not with the one who sinned against you, but with you personally.
“Take heed to yourselves” (Luke 17:3). To yourselves first. Because the first impulse, especially when there is sin in the community, is to tell everyone except the person involved. To let the wound fester while the talk spreads. Dr. Luther calls it slinking about in corners (LC, 8th Commandment, 281). It does not heal anything. It enlarges the damage. It makes two wounded where there was one.
But the way of the Lord is different. He says to go to your brother to gain him. “If he listens to you, you have gained your brother” (Matt. 18:15). That is the word Luther keeps returning to in his discussion of the Eighth Commandment. Gained a brother! Drawn back from the edge, given back to the community of the baptized.
And if he repents — “forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him” (Luke 17:3–4). Seven times. In a day. The disciples know their own hearts. They say the only honest thing left: “Lord, increase our faith” (Luke 17:5). They know what it costs to forgive once, genuinely, all the way down. And seven times from the same person? The same repentance, the same wound, the same apology — and you are to release them. Again and again. “Lord, increase our faith” is an admission that forgiveness at this depth is beyond what they have in themselves.
Jesus takes the admission seriously. But He turns the question. The issue of the size of the faith is only a problem if faith is the power. A mustard seed will do, because the power belongs to what the faith is attached to. A mustard seed of faith in the Lord of heaven and earth moves mulberry trees. The power is not yours — it is His, working through whatever small faith you have.
St. Paul names the same principle from the other perspective. “The just shall live by faith” (Gal. 3:11). By faith — whatever size it comes in — is nothing other than being at the receiving end of a promise. Abraham trusted what God said, and God counted it as righteousness. The faith that forgives seven times a day draws from the same well: the One your faith is attached to, not something you have to manufacture inside yourself.
That One has already forgiven you more than you will ever be asked to forgive. Dr. Luther writes in the Large Catechism, on the Fifth Petition: “He has given us the Gospel, in which is pure forgiveness before we prayed or ever thought about it” (LC, Lord’s Prayer, Fifth Petition, 88). The forgiveness you are commanded to extend is a forgiveness you are already living in. The well does not run dry because it is not your well. You draw from His living fountain of forgiveness waters.
It is out of this prior forgiveness that Jesus tells a parable — one that might seem at first to have nothing to do with what came before. You come in from the field. Everything was done. You did not cause offense. You went to your brother when you should have. You forgave when repentance came. You served. Now what? No thanks. No seat at the table. The apron goes back on. You might expect the parable to end with: therefore, keep going. But it ends somewhere else entirely.
“So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty’” (Luke 17:10).
The Augsburg Confession draws out what this means: “The forgiveness of sins and justification is received through faith. The voice of Christ testifies: ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty’” (AC XX.2). Even when everything is done correctly — every rebuke given faithfully, every forgiveness extended, every duty performed — there is no merit on the table. No account in your favor. Unprofitable servants. That is the word.
But hear what that word does for you. It does not crush you. It frees you. You are released from the weight of whether you forgave enough, or well enough, or from motives pure enough to count. The servant is not standing on his works. He is standing on his Master.
And this Master is not like the master in the parable suggests. In Luke 12, our Lord describes what he will actually do when faithful servants are found at their post: “He will gird himself and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them” (Luke 12:37). The servant who returns from the field — the one who has done only his duty — is also the one for whom supper has been prepared.
The Lord’s Supper is not given to profitable servants who have earned a seat. It is given to unprofitable ones. Given precisely where the Law has done its work — where you know you have been the scandal, where you know your forgiveness came out thin and grudging, where your faith on its best day is the size of a mustard seed. “Lord, increase our faith” (Luke 17:5).
In the Holy Name + of Jesus. AMEN.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin