Many are Called but Few are Chosen! (Matthew 22:1-14)

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Father Dave

“Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.”” (Matthew 22:1-2)

The Kingdom of God is a party! it’s a familiar theme. Jesus told a lot of party stories, and He had a reputation as a party-goer. Jesus loved parties, as most of us do.

I love a good party, and thirty years of living in a big old rectory allowed me to host some spectacular parties with jumping castles, trampolines, petting zoos and lots of stuff designed to generate lots of fun for the kids, but not all parties are like that.

I remember attending a dinner party at Bishop’s Court years ago at the invitation of the archbishop and his wife, and you know when you’re invited to a party at Bishop’s Court, it’s not going to be a night of hard drinking and bawdy jokes. It’s the kind of party where you use the correct cutlery and pass the port in the right direction!

At that party, my then wife accidentally tripped and splashed her glass of wine on one of the paintings! I don’t think it was any historic work of Jesus and the blessed virgin (thanks be to God) but probably a portrait of one of the previous Archbishops. The archbishop’s wife was gracious – laughed it off – but we were never invited back.

Not every party is frivolity and laughter. Some parties are serious parties, and the party Jesus talks about in Matthew 22 is a serious party.

“[The King] sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.” (Matt 22:3-7)

This sort of kills the party atmosphere, doesn’t it? In a few short verses we move from jumping castles to burning buildings! I guess it was never that kind of party.

The prince’s wedding is a serious party with a carefully chosen guest list. To refuse the invitation is an act of rebellion! Those who make light of the occasion and those who kill the king’s servants are equally rejecting the king’s authority. They’ve started a rebellion, and so the response of the king is as understandable as it is brutal.

Jesus’ parable is not an allegory, of course, where every element in the story corresponds to a particular person or group, so we don’t need to ask, ‘whose city should I burn?’ Even so, His parables do tend to target particular groups of people. Who is being targeted here?

This parable is indeed the third in a trilogy given in the Temple precincts. There’s the ‘Parable of the Two Sons’ – one who says the right thing and one who does the right thing. Then we get the ‘Parable of the Wicked Tenants’ who refuse to pay rent and murder the owner’s son, and now this wedding banquet story with its unsettling amalgamation of celebration, laughter, rebellion and bloodshed.

So who are the bad sons, the wicked tenants, and the rebels in God’s kingdom? The uncomfortable truth here is that the people Jesus is targeting aren’t the Romans, the Samaritans nor any of those heathen groups that all God’s people rightly despise. The problem here is us. It’s God’s own leaders and people that are in rebellion!

It’s tempting here to say, ‘It’s not us. It’s first‑century Judaism that’s the problem. That why God replaced them with the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’. Then you look at the history of violence and corruption within the church, and at the global sex abuse scandal in our own day, and you just can’t maintain that with a straight face anymore.

When I published my book, “Christians and Muslims Can Be Friends”, I couldn’t get any of my church leaders to recommend it. The back cover has endorsements from the Prime Minister and from various civic and religious leaders, but my own church could only see Muslims as the enemy. Biblically speaking though, my enemy is my guest, and my real enemy is almost always found within my own tribe and even within my own family!

[the king] said to his slaves ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.” (Matthew 22:8-10)

So the king invites everybody to join Him – the good, the bad and the ugly – and it looks as if this story is going to have a happy ending of sorts after all!

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 22:11-13)

It’s a disturbing end to a disturbing story. Some commentators suggest that the king’s question “how did you get in here without a robe” implies that robes were being handed out at the front door, meaning that this guy must have snuck in through the back door or even through some underground tunnel, suggesting that he was a terrorist. Maybe so, or maybe there are just lots of ways of offending this king.

It’s my son’s wedding next weekend and the invitation says that we’re supposed to wear ‘formal attire’. I don’t have a tie. Even so, I won’t be turning up in my boxing gear. I don’t think my son would have me thrown into the outer darkness if I did, but I will wear my clerical collar and my suit because I want to show him some respect.

There are lots of ways of showing disrespect, especially to kings. You can ignore his invitation. That will do it. You can start a rebellion and murder his messengers or turn up to his wedding banquet dressed like a slob. Those will work too! You can probably think of other ways – urinating in the punch or throwing up on the king’s carpet. There are, no doubt, multiple ways of disrespecting the king and getting yourself ejected.

The Kingdom of God is a party, but it’s the King’s party, and hence it’s a party that needs to be taken seriously, as the king who is throwing the party is a serious kind of king who demands our respect.

There’s room for all of us. Even so, we’ll likely be surprised by who we find there. “For many are called but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:14)

Matthew 22:14

First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – October 11th, 2026

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Violence in the Vineyard! (Matthew 21:33-46)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Father Dave

“There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went away.” (Matthew 21:33)

Thus begins one of the most violent parables Jesus ever told though it doesn’t begin violently. It’s a story of a beautiful vineyard, and it might have been a lovely story except that the vineyard goes to seed very quickly through themismanagement of its tenants, though the focus of the story is not so much on their mismanagement of the property as it is on their callous disregard for the rights of the legal owner.

“When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third.” (Matthew 21:34-36)

The behaviour of the tenant-farmers in this story is vicious. Moreover, it’s senseless! Even if they were useless tenants and couldn’t come up with the rent, why would they act with such disregard for the law and for their relationship with their landlord?

The longer I live, the more I become convinced that all violence is senseless, and indeed, I’ve seen way too much of it.

I’ve been in war zones in Syria a number of times. I was almost killed in a riot in Israel in 2004, and I somehow survived being drowned off the coast of Manus Island in 2016. Even so, the worst violence I’ve seen has been right here at home.

I was parish priest in Dulwich Hill during the early 1990’s when the heroin trafficking was at its peak, and during that time three members of our parish were shot though, happily, they all survived. Now, depending on where you are in the world, that may be pretty normal for your church. In Sydney, that’s pretty rare.

Yes, there’s violence in the streets, violence in our homes and here there’s violence in the vineyard and it is absurd violence! The master sends his servants to collect the rent and, if these tenant farmers had wanted to keep the master happy and at a safe distance, you’d think they would have just given him some token amount of rent to keep him satisfied? He doesn’t seem to have been a hard man to please.

Or why didn’t they try to give the owner the impression that his servants hadn’t shown up, or, if they were determined to kill the master’s servants, why didn’t they do it covertly and dispose of the bodies in secret? No! These people are unabashed in the way they behave! It’s as if they had forgotten that they had a master? Certainly, they act as if the master didn’t exist!

The only character more difficult to understand than the tenant farmers in this story is the master whose consistent response to the violence of these people is just to keep sending more servants! One messenger after another is abused and killed, and we’re waiting for the master to try something different, and … eventually, he does. He sends his son! They will respect my son,’ he said.” (Matthew 21:37)

What made the landowner think that these people would respect his son? Given their behaviour up to this point – their complete disregard for his rightful claim on the property, and the acts of violence that they had consistently meted out to every one of his representatives, what made the landowner think these people would now act differently? When is the penny going drop that this situation is not going to improve?

“when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.” (Matthew 21:33-39)

Jesus ends his story with a question: Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” (Matthew 21:40) My response to that question is, ‘I don’t know. Has he got another son?’

We could have told him what would happen. What was he thinking?  What sort of set-up is this where everyone is trapped in an endless cycle of mindless violence? What sort of people are these tenants? What sort of master is this?

This is our world, isn’t it? Look around! This isn’t just some 2,000-year-old fable. This is our story – the lies, the violence, the exploitation, and the complete disregard for rightful claims of the master. We aren’t just reading this. We are living it!

And so Jesus’ ends the parable with nothing resolved.  The master has no rent, no servants, no vineyard and now … no son!  The evil tenants are alive and well, and appear to still be running the show, and so the violence continues with no sign of resolution. ‘He who has ears, let him hear!’

When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

Yes, the hope for a final reckoning is there at the end of the story, and yet the reality we experience is exactly as Jesus depicts it – the servants have been rejected, the Son has been killed, and the ownership of the vineyard still seems to be very much in doubt! Meanwhile, the tenant farmers run wild in their violence and stupidity!

Where’s the Good News? Is there any good news in this story?

Personally, the good news I find in this story is less in the hope for a final reckoning than it is in the character of the master. Yes, the master is hard to understand. He seems far too indiscriminate in who he lets take charge of his vineyard, and he seems way too tolerant in terms of what he puts up with. Even so, there are two things that come through very clearly in this story.

Firstly, the master will not give up on his vineyard, and this despite the fact that it seems to be a lost cause. The master still loves the vineyard. He’s not letting go. That’s the first thing, and the second is this: that the master is committed to doing whatever it takes to regain control. No price is too great!

Hear the parable of the vineyard! Hear it in the chaos of our world. Hear it in the violence we endure. Hear it in the patience of God. Hear it in the sending of the Son.

The Master has not given up on us. He has not abandoned His vineyard. He has not withdrawn His claim on us. And He still calls out: “You who have ears, hear.”

Matthew 21:42
First publisher in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – October 3rd, 2026

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The Scandal of Grace! (Matthew 21:23-32)

Posted on September 26, 2026 by Father Dave


Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” (Matthew 21:31)

Of all the confronting things Jesus ever said, this may be the most scandalous. It is not just the content. It’s the audience. Jesus is speaking directly to “the chief priests and the elders of the people” (Matthew 21:23).

These were the spiritual authorities, their ordained leaders, the guardians of Israel’s religious life. These were men of discipline, learning, and piety, yet Jesus says that the tax collectors and the prostitutes — the very people they despised — were entering the Kingdom of God ahead of them!

It is shocking enough that Jesus names these two groups, but it is even more shocking that He lumps them together as, apart from the fact that Jesus accepted both groups, they really had nothing in common.

First century Jewish tax-collectors were wealthy collaborators. They were people who had responded to the Roman occupation by saying “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. They worked for the foreign occupying power – taking your money and giving it to the enemy (after taking a healthy cut for themselves). They were traitors and they were understandably reviled. They were sinners by choice.

People who worked in the first century sex industry, on the other hand, were almost certainly not there by choice. Most would have been slaves. They could be violated by their owners at any time or loaned or rented out by their master or mistresses to others for sexual services. These people did not own their own bodies!

Mind you, when I worked with people in the sex industry back in the mid 1980’s, their situation wasn’t a lot better. I was then with the Anglican church in Kings Cross – the red-light capital of Sydney – and I worked with young people on “the wall” on Darlinghurst Road which was where these boys and girls lined up to ply their trade.

I ran a Friday-night coffee shop outreach in the church grounds that targeted ‘the wall’, and all those I engaged with were under 18. I remember one girl telling me how she’d been on the street since she was 12. I’ve never forgotten her story as to why she left home, but I will not repeat it here. Suffice it to say that the sex industry was not a chosen career path for any of them. It was where life had spat them out.

“Tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you”,

These two groups, in a sense, cover the full spectrum of human brokenness – the powerful and the powerless, the exploiter and the exploited, and we see something of their spiritual condition in the parable Jesus gives us immediately before this pronouncement – namely, the parable of the two sons:

“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today. He answered, ‘I will not,’ but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same, and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” (Matthew 21:28-31)

If you’ve had teenage children, this parable probably strikes a familiar chord.

“Can you please clean you room?”, you ask wearily. “Sure thing! No problem! I’ll get right to it” is the enthusiastic reply, so you leave it be for a couple of hours, for a couple of days, for a couple of weeks … nothing.

Jesus contrasts this boy with his brother who, when you ask him to do his chores just stares back at you with attitude, though he does later relent and comply.

Which sort of teenager do you have? Which sort of teenager were you? Which brother did Jesus see in the chief priests, elders, tax-collectors and sex-workers?

In truth, neither of these sons is anything to write home about. The chief priests and elders say the son who does what he’s told is the better of the two but, personally, I prefer to get the response of enthusiastic compliance rather than ‘talk to the hand’.

I think the key here is to recognise that both kids in this story are their father’s sons, and at the end of the story they are still their father’s sons.

The father doesn’t have any perfect sons or daughters. All His children are difficult in their own way. Some are lazy and recalcitrant and some make a better job of it and are first in line when everybody gets to go home but, in the end, everyone does go home. Jesus isn’t saying that there isn’t room for His religious antagonists in the Kingdom of God. They’re just further back in the line behind the people they despise.

“For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him, and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.” (Matthew 21:32)

That’s the final puzzling statement from Jesus in this passage – puzzling because I’m not sure what repentance looked like in the case of tax-collectors and prostitutes.

Yes, we do see two examples of tax-collectors repenting in the Gospels. Matthew, the tax-collector, walks away from his job (Matthew 9:9) while Zacchaeus, a more senior tax-collector, shows his repentance by making restitution to anyone he has defrauded and by giving away half his wealth (Luke 19:1–10).  In the case of first century sex-workers though, repentance may not have been quite so clear cut.

If you were a sex-worker because you were a slave, no amount of repentance would find you another job, and even if you weren’t a slave, if you were living in a small farming community and were known by your trade, you couldn’t just decide one day to go get a job at the bank. Your options were very limited.

My guess is that many of those whom Jesus saw as leading the march into the Kingdom of God were tax-collectors who were still working for the enemy, and sex-workers who were still plying their trade – persons who were being renewed inwardly and spiritually but whose external circumstances may never have caught up.

In the end we are all God’s children – that, I think, is what Jesus is reminding us of here. None of us are perfect sons or daughters, and those who lead the way spiritually are often the very ones we overlook or deliberately look away from.

And that is the scandal of grace!

Matthew 21:31first published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – September 26th, 2026

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The Revolution of Mercy! (Matthew 20:1-16)

Posted on September 19, 2026 by Father Dave

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last,” says Jesus in Matthew 20:16, though He doesn’t only say it there. Jesus talks about the first being last and the last being first on five separate occasions in the Gospels: Matthew 19:30, Matthew 20:16, Mark 9:35, Mark 10:31 and Luke 13:30.

It’s not exactly the same phrase every time, because these aren’t five accounts of one speech. Jesus reused and reworked the saying, but the thrust is clear enough: when the Kingdom of God comes, things change. Our social system gets turned upside‑down. 

It reminds me of what my socialist friends used to say to me at university — that when the revolution comes, everything changes. In their version, of course, the threat was that I might be one of the first lined up against the wall! Jesus’ revolution also threatens people, though it’s not obvious that anybody gets shot.

Jesus begins this teaching with “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.” (Matthew 20:1)

It’s a long story by parable standards, but the storyline is simple: this landowner hires workers throughout the day and promises each of them a denarius — essentially the minimum wage of the time. It was enough to keep you going but never enough to make you wealthy.

Plenty of people were happy to work for a denarius. Many start early. Others start later. Some don’t start until late afternoon. No one complains about the wage until those who’ve worked all day realise that the latecomers are being paid the same amount. They protest: “These last fellows worked only one hour, yet you have made them equal to us who have endured the burden of the day and the scorching heat!” (Matthew 20:12). “It’s not fair”, they say — and that’s exactly what I would have said.

Anyone who has raised more than one child has heard those words a lot. If you doubt the innate human sense of justice, try dividing a stash of lollies between two young children. The complaint is never “I didn’t get enough” but always “she got more than me!” That’s why King Solomon came up with the principle that if you’re dividing a piece of cake between two children, one cuts and the other chooses (I think it was Solomon).

And it doesn’t stop when we grow up. We just get more sophisticated. A trade union leader once told me that there’s never been a strike over low pay — only over pay differentials. It’s not that what we’re getting isn’t enough; it’s that we’re not getting as much as the person next to us.

A hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s wage. That’s basic to our sense of justice. It’s what our parents taught us, and it’s what we teach our children: you get what you deserve. That’s what we were taught in school too. When lazy Joe asked to see my homework because he’d had a big night, I could say “sure,” knowing he was only hurting himself. Then the exam results came in, and lazy Joe and I got the same mark! It’s not supposed to work like that!

Good, honest, hard‑working people like us are supposed to be rewarded, while useless layabouts who spend their days at the pub and take up our tax dollars to buy weed shouldn’t get the same heavenly pay‑cheque at the final checkout.

This is a confronting story. If the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t about justice, what is it about? Surely if you’ve worked all day in the heat, you deserve some recognition. Have we got our concept of justice wrong? I don’t think so. The problem isn’t justice — it’s the vineyard owner.

He replies: “Friend, I’m not treating you unfairly. You agreed with me for a denarius, didn’t you? Take what is yours and go. I want to give this last man as much as I gave you. Am I not allowed to do what I want with my own money, or are you envious because I am generous?” (Matthew 20:13–15)

It’s hard to argue with his logic. It’s just not the logic of justice. It’s the logic of generosity — of mercy — and there is always tension between justice and mercy.

Jesus saying to the woman caught in adultery, “I don’t condemn you either” — that’s mercy, not justice. Justice would have seen her stoned. Jesus saying, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” — that’s mercy, not justice. Justice would have seen His mockers strung up alongside Him.

“Doing unto others as they do unto you” — that’s justice. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — that’s mercy, because that’s how we want to be treated. We don’t really want justice for ourselves, not if we’re honest.

Jesus concludes, “the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:16) It doesn’t quite make sense, because the last aren’t really ahead — they’re equals. But if you were expecting those good‑for‑nothing layabouts to be miles behind you, perhaps it looks like they’re ahead when they’re suddenly alongside you.

The point, at any rate, Jesus says, is that the Kingdom of Heaven is like that.
Really? Is Heaven full of exhausted labourers and hung‑over latecomers? Is it a place of resentment and arguments? Is God not just?

If justice means everybody getting what they deserve, then maybe God isn’t just — at least not in that sense. What God clearly is, according to this story and according to the whole ministry and life of Jesus, is merciful.

If you’ve been to court, I’m sure you’ve seen Justitia – the Roman goddess of justice. She’s blindfolded, holding scales and sword, showing no partiality. The God of the Bible is never depicted that way. God’s eyes are open. God shows partiality, bending towards the poor, the needy, the weak, the oppressed, and God has mercy upon all.

Jesus’ parable isn’t trying to confuse us — it’s trying to convert us. The Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t run on the cold arithmetic of fairness but on God’s generosity. And if that generosity offends our sense of justice, then it’s our sense of justice that needs reshaping. For we are all held by mercy — from first to last, and last to first — and that, thank God, is the revolution Jesus brings.

Matthew 20:16

First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – September 19, 2026

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Bare-Knuckle Boxing! (SBS)

Posted on September 19, 2026 by Father Dave

Inside Australia’s Illegal Bare-Knuckle Fight Club

14 May 2026 – SBS’s ‘The Feed‘ put together a documentary on bare-knuckle boxing. They asked me to be a part of it. I wasn’t doing any bare-knuckle boxing, of course. I was offering an alternative.

Bizarrely, some of the people who are behind the bare-knuckle fights are friends of mine. I suppose friends don’t have to agree on everything. I can’t support it. From my perspective, any sport where you have a good chance of being seriously damaged every time you participate is not a sport.

You’l get the whole 15-minute piece below. I don’t appear till around the 10-minute mark.

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The Irrational Power of Forgiveness!

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Father Dave


“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him” (Matthew 18:23-24)

When I think of the stories Jesus’ told about mercy and forgiveness, the first person that comes to mind for me is not a Christian person at all but my dear Muslim brother, Dr Hassoun, the former Grand Mufti of Syria.

For those who don’t know the story, Dr Hassoun’s youngest son, Sariya, was murdered by rebel insurgents in 2011, and at the funeral, Dr Hassoun delivered a eulogy where he spoke of forgiveness and reconciliation.

You can still watch it online. It’s about 20 minutes long. Towards the end he says:

“Those who are listening to me, who killed my son, Sariya, I’m addressing you. May God preserve you from heartache, and may you never experience the agony that you have caused us. I am asking God to inspire you to repentance before you leave this life, so as not to be your accuser on the day of judgement. … I forgive you.”

It is hard not to see the presence of the Spirit of God in those who truly forgive. From a Christian theological perspective, forgiveness is the ultimate gift of God to humanity, and those who compare the religions of the world tell us that Christianity is indeed distinctive in its emphasis on the divine nature of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a beautiful thing. It is a divine force that has the power to heal individuals, to end wars and to bring peace to nations. In this story Jesus gives us in Matthew chapter 18, though, forgiveness is also a bit scary!

“One who owed [the king] ten thousand talents was brought to him” (Matthew 18:24)

​A talent in this context is a weight of around 34 kilograms, presumably of solid gold. On today’s market, with gold selling at just under AUD $200,000 per kilogram, this slave had somehow incurred a debt of roughly two billion dollars – quite possibly greater than the GDP of his entire country! How had the king not noticed this?​

I’m sure you’ve heard it said that ‘when you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem, but when you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, the bank has a problem’. In the case of this guy’s debt, the whole country has a problem!

Parables, of course, are often a form of humour, but if this is a joke, it is dark humour. This slave has somehow generated this impossibly large debt. The king responds by imprisoning the man and his family until they can pay him back in full, which is obviously futile. The debtor-slave pleads for more time, as if this will help, and then he finds himself forgiven of everything, which is the craziest thing of all!

The story reminded me of a relative of mine who had worked for a large winery on the south coast. One day he was responsible for monitoring the wine while it was pumped into a large container truck when he took a call on his phone and wandered off, resulting in something like 10,000 litres of wine being poured out on the ground!

What do you do with someone who stuffs up like that? I’d assumed he would have at least lost his job but, curiously, he didn’t. Apparently, you had to lose about twice that amount of wine before it cost you your job! That seemed crazy to me, but nothing like the craziness of a king who forgives his slave a debt so large that it would have surely thrown the entire country into an economic depression!

Is forgiveness on that scale even responsible for a national leader?

The size of the debt is outrageous, and the mercy of the king is incomprehensible, but the craziest thing of all is what happens next.

“But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed  him a hundred denarii, and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.” (Matthew 18:28-30)

The debt of 100 denarii is not nothing (about three month’s wages for a labourer) but it is insanely trivial \when compared to the debt that the man was just forgiven. The king hears what has happened, of course, and the story ends with the first slave “being handed over to the torturers until he pay his entire debt” (Matthew 18:34). If this is a joke, the punchline is dark humour indeed!

Forgiveness, at any rate, is serious business. According to Jesus, it’s not an optional extra. Forgiving those who have wronged us ‘from the heart’ (Matthew 18:35) is a deadly serious obligation if we don’t want to be ‘handed over to the torturers!

The painful irony for me, of course, is that the most forgiving man I have ever met—my friend, Dr Hassoun—is the one who has literally been handed over to torturers!

He is eighty years old now, and I’m told that the wounds he has received in prison over the last eighteen months are so severe he will never recover, even if he were to live for many more years, and the conditions in his prison are apparently so appalling that he is unlikely to live long (which I suspect is by design).

I continue to pray for my friend. I pray for mercy. I pray for justice. But I recognise that Jesus’ parable does not end with a happy resolution. Both slaves are in prison. The king’s treasury is empty, and the kingdom itself is struggling. It is a bleak story,

And yet one truth shines through the darkness: forgiveness has power.

Forgiveness blesses the forgiver as much as the forgiven. It can liberate both individuals and nations. It is the secret weapon of the spiritual warrior — irrational, yet divine. Wherever forgiveness appears, it generates faith, hope, and love.

Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother? Up to seven times?” Jesus replied, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven times.” (Matthrew 18:21-22).

Forgiveness is not reasonable, efficient, or safe, but it is the way of Jesus, and it is our only path to the Kingdom of God!

Mathew 18:33

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What if Love IS the Truth? (Romans 13:8-14)

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Father Dave


“All you need is love … da, da, da, da …”

Who said it? Yes, the Beatles, in the song of the same name first broadcast in July of 1967. Even so, Saint Paul said it nearly two millennia earlier:

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)

Paul may not have had Lennon and McCartney’s melody, but the message is the same: love is all you need.

These are threatening words for me, of course, as a priest for, if it’s really that simple – that all we need to do is love one another – then why would any of you need to pay a highly trained and credentialed cleric like me to unlock the secrets of the Scriptures for you. If love is all you need, you can work out the details for yourselves!

It does bother me when I see religious clerics who address us in a tone that suggests that they hold the keys to secret knowledge that we can only pray we will one day gain access to.

It makes sense for a Rabbi to be that way as the Torah is a complex legal tapestry. For a Sheikh, likewise. interpreting Qur’an and hadith requires a fair degree of scholarship. But if the early church really decided not to build itself on any labyrinth of laws but simply on one command – love one another – there’s not a lot left to keep professional interpreters like me going!

Of course, the real problem with the church is not that it has overcomplicated things but that it has consistently failed to make love its priority.

This hit home for me recently when I was told that if I wanted to renew my license as a functioning priest in the Diocese of Sydney, I had to start by completing a twenty-two-page questionnaire designed to weed out the unworthy. It asked about sex, pornography, alcohol — but nowhere did it ask whether I had tried to love God and neighbour through my years of ministry, and it did make me question whether I wanted to belong to an organisation so fixated on personal purity and so apparently uninterested in love.

Of course, this is not just a local problem but is the basis of the worldwide schism of the Anglican communion. We are, at this very moment, in the middle of a historic rupture of the global Anglican and Episcopal church, and, sadly, it’s not over Gaza or Ukraine or Iran. Indeed, it doesn’t have anything to do with the terrible suffering going on around the world at the moment. The issues at stake are:

  • Same‑sex marriage
  • LGBTQ+ clergy and
  • Women as bishops

I’m not saying that each of these are not important conversations, but they are not the centre of the gospel either, and they are not worth sacrificing love for.

Sadly, it has always been this way. If the history of crusades and inquisitions have anything to teach us, it’s that the church has always chosen truth over love! We burn people at the stake, not because they are unloving but because they are wrong!

Over the last two thousand years, the church, at least at an institutional level, has consistently chosen truth over love, but what if love is the truth.

I’m not trying to be romantic or poetic here. On the contrary, I remember many years ago reading some of the work of German philosopher, Martin Heideggar, on ‘Truth as Aletheia (which is the Greek word for truth used in the New Testament).

Heidegger challenged what is commonly called the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ where we understand truth as a correspondence between what we say and what scientifically is. When what you mean corresponds with the facts, that’s truth – that’s how we generally define the word truth, but even in English ‘truth’ can mean other things, such as when we say, ‘be true to yourself’ or when we speak of a ‘true friend’.

Heidegger suggested that the ancient Greek word for truth was more focused on the process of uncovering rather than on any static correspondence between word and fact. In other words, maybe, biblically speaking, you don’t have truth if you don’t love and, conversely, if you live in love, you live the truth, just as Jesus was the truth!

I don’t mean to end on too philosophical a note. Let’s go back to the Beatles – “All you need is love, love, love …”

Whether or not the Beatles were inspired by Saint Paul, I’m not sure, but I am pretty sure that Paul was inspired by Jesus. After all, it was Jesus who taught us that all the law and the prophets came down to love (Matthew 20:40)!

It’s not that hard to figure out, is it, and you don’t really need me to unlock any of the hidden mysteries for you. That’s why I’ve got my backup career as a professional boxer – for when you realise that you don’t need me – and I can only hope that some of my fellow priests and bishops will consider similar career paths when their time comes as I think I’ve still got my best fights left in me and I’d love to take a shot at some of those … sorry, that’s not a very loving path to go down, is it?

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” (Romans 13:8) Amen!

Romans 13:8
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – September 5th, 2026

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Getting Jesus Wrong — Even When We Sound Right! (Matthew 16:21-28)

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Father Dave

“But Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me.” (Matthew 16:23)

I hope you’ve never been in a relationship like that – one that starts with you affirming your eternal love for one another but ends up with you calling your beloved ‘Satan’!

Relationship do go toxic – we know that – but when that happens it normally takes a good few years for things to really deteriorate. In the case of Jesus and Peter, their relationship goes from hero to zero in a matter of seconds!

Peter has just made his great confession – “You are the Christ – the son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), and Jesus commends Peter, blesses Peter, and promises that he will build His church on this rock – Peter (Matthew 16:17-18). Five verses later Jesus is calling him ‘Satan’?! In real time, about 30 seconds later!

What happened? Did Peter suddenly become evil? Did Jesus lose His temper? Did we miss something?

When Peter says “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, of course we know what he means, don’t we? He means that Jesus is the only Son the Father – ‘God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made”. 

Of course that’s not when he means. Those words from the Nicean Creed come three centuries later. What Peter meant when he called Jesus, ‘the Christ’, was that Jesus was the one who was going to liberate them from the Romans! That’s what the Messiah did, and ‘son of God’ was simply the title they gave their kings!

Psalm 2:7: “This is my son. Today I have begotten you.” It’s a coronation Psalm. The king is designated as adopted God’s ‘son’ at his coronation, after which his key job is to go out and lead God’s people into battle.

It is fascinating, I think, that Jesus makes such a fuss over the confession of Peter – that He is the Christ – when He must have known that while Peter and He were using the same vocabulary, they were speaking entirely different languages!

Understanding Jesus isn’t just about having the right words, is it?

When I listen to people who preach the so-called “Prosperity Gospel” or when I hear someone espouse “Christian Zionism”, all the right words are being used. They speak of ‘blessings’ and ‘faith in God’s promises’, and they quote the Bible with great accuracy and in great volume, yet it becomes very obvious very quickly that what they mean by those words is on an entirely different plane to my understanding.

It’s quite possible to say all the right things yet be completely wrong!

​Peter and the disciples longed for liberation — and understandably so. The Roman occupation was brutal, humiliating, and violent. As Tom Wright notes, even phrases like “forgiveness of sins” had become shorthand for ending the occupation by then.

If you were living in Gaza today and someone arrived claiming to be God’s saviour, you wouldn’t need to ask what He came to save you from. So when Jesus says He must “go to Jerusalem, suffer, and be killed”, Peter reacts exactly as any oppressed person would: “No. Absolutely not. This is not how liberation works.”

“Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to Me.” (Matthew 16:22-23)

It’s harsh however we look at it, but keep in mind that ‘Satan’, in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, is not the fiery-coloured character with the tail and the pitchfork. He is ‘the tempter’ who has already tried to tempt Jesus once to take an easier path, and Peter here is again tempting Jesus to avoid the way of the cross.

“Take this cup away from me” (Matthew 26:39) Jesus prayed on the night he was betrayed. Jesus didn’t want to die either. Even so, Jesus ultimately accepted that the path to true liberation – for the Jews from the Rome, for the Palestinians from Israel, and for all of us from the pain and violence that so engulfs our world – is found at the end of the via dolorosa – the path of suffering.

Saint Paul understood this better than anyone. When people questioned his spiritual authority, he didn’t point to his academic credentials or his celebrity endorsements. He’d say, ‘Hey, I’ve received the forty lashes minus one five times! I’ve been beaten with rods three times, stoned once, shipwrecked three times!’ (2 Corinthians 11:23-28). “I bear in my body the marks of Christ” (Galatians 6:17).

I look back at my own life. I don’t want to compete with Paul. Even so, I was almost beaten to death outside Ashkelon prison in Israel in 2004. I somehow escaped being shot outside Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria in 2015. I almost drowned off Manus Island in 2017, pursued by the local navy after breaking into the Asylum-Seeker Processing Centre there, and I don’t know how I survived the experience of being disowned by my own church in 2019 – the most painful experience of them all.

Look back at your own life – at the things you’ve gone through, the price you’ve paid for love, the friends and family members you’ve sacrificed yourself for – pain you’ve endured. To some extent all of us, I am sure, bear in our bodies the marks of Christ.

It didn’t make sense to Peter that Jesus had to let things play out that way, and we still have trouble making sense of it all! Didn’t Christ offer us ‘life in abundance’? (John 10:10). Isn’t religion supposed to make our lives better and more enjoyable? How did the way of the cross somehow become the path to life?!

My favourite philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard’, gave a sermon on Matthew 7:14 – “narrow is the way that leads to life” – suggesting that it isnt’ just coincidental that the way to life happens to be narrow. “Narrowness is the way”, he said. In other words, for the follower of Christ, struggle is always our defining narrative! When life is a constant battle, you know you’re on the right path!

I don’t know exactly why discipleship always has to take this path of pain. I don’t even fully understand why Jesus had to suffer the way He did. Even so, I think we all know that at the end of the journey, we’ll look back and know it was worth the effort!

Matthew 16:26

First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – August 28th, 2026

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Jesus Unmasked! (Matthew 16:13-20)

Posted on August 22, 2026 by Father Dave

“Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”” (Matthew 16:13)

If you’re a fan of Batman or Spiderman or any other masked superheroes, you’ll be familiar with that critical scene were someone finally works out who the superhero really is. Batman really is billionaire playboy, Bruce Wayne! Who would have guessed? The guy in the spider suit really is young Peter Parker! Well … Matthew, chapter 15, is that moment for Jesus.

Up to this point, everybody, including the disciples, has been asking, “who is this guy?”, but here, at at Caesarea Philippi, all is revealed! The mask comes off! Jesus’ hidden identity as the future ruler of the world is revealed, All questions are answered and all ambiguities are removed, even if it takes the disciples a good while to work out what it all means.

Of course, the scene doesn’t begin with Jesus ripping off his mask. It begins with Him asking, ““Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” “What”, in other words, “are people saying about me?”

In years past, I only ever saw this as a warm-up to Jesus’ real question – “but who do YOU say that I am?” – yet it occurs to me, on reading it again, that the question of what the average citizen of Judea thought of Jesus was itself an important question.

Mark Twain said that church is a place where “nice, respectable people go and listen to a nice, respectable man tell them how to be nicer and more respectable”. If you’d asked one of Mark Twain’s contemporaries who the Son of Man was, I expect they would have said something along those lines – that Jesus was a nice, respectable man – a paragon, indeed, of civility and respectability.

I’m not sure how much has changed. One of our Fighting Fathers elders shared something in our mid-week Bible study this week – that when her local parish priest asked the congregation to summarise the Christian faith, most people said something like, “Try to be nice to each other.” Jesus barely got a mention!

I think I’ve been biased the other way in that I’ve known too many people who have been abused by the church, and I think many people in our community associate the church with abuse. Perhaps some might even think of Jesus as an abuser?!

Of course, church abuse goes back hundreds, and even thousands, of years, and not only sexual abuse. I’m a bit sorry now that I read that book on the Crusades as it was appalling to read in detail of all the violence enacted in the name of Christ!

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” I’m not sure I really want to know what all my contemporaries think. In the case of first century Judea though, we do know:

“And they said, “Some say John the Baptist but others Elijah and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”” (Matthew 16:14)

These were the superheroes of generations past, and they were all dangerous men – prophets who confronted kings, exposed corruption, and paid for it with their blood!

  • John the Baptist had just had his head chopped off by Herod
  • Elijah spent much of his life on the run from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.
  • Jeremiah, “the weeping prophet” endured terrible persecution:
    • Beaten and put in stocks (Jeremiah 20:1–2)
    • Mocked, isolated, and socially ostracised (Jeremiah 20:10)
    • Threatened with capital punishment (Jeremiah 26)
    • Imprisoned and left to die in a sewar (Jeremiah 38:6)

These were not nice, respectable men telling everyone how to be nicer and more respectable. They were rebels and social agitators of the kind that regularly got themselves assassinated.

And Peter goes one step further by saying of Jesus, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). In other words, “you are the chief agitator!”

When we put Peter’s statement in context, this is quite clear. They are in the district of Caesarea Philippi – a part of the world named after two of the world’s greatest dictators (Julius Caesar and Philip of Macedon). They were great and powerful rulers, but Peter sees in Jesus someone even greater and more powerful!

Peter is right, of course, in a sense, though he’s also tragically wrong about a lot of it as well, as becomes evident when Jesus concludes the Caesarea Philippi episode by referring to Peter as Satan (but more on that another time)!

Let it suffice to say here that the average Jew of Jesus’ day understood Jesus better, I think, than the average person today, and that Peter understood Jesus better than most of his fellow peers. That’s clear from his confession, and the church continues to hold to that same confession today, though it’s not obvious that today’s Christians have a much better understanding of what it all means than they did back then!

Even so, Peter, and by extension, the church built upon him, holds the keys to the Kingdom, and that’s a sobering thought – that this flawed and broken man with his flawed and broken church is all we’ve been left with to mediate Christ to the world!

Couldn’t God have given us something cleaner, safer – something less broke?
Couldn’t’ God have supplied us with something less likely to damage people? Well … He didn’t. Christ gave us the church we have — the one built both on Peter’s confession and on Peter’s many weaknesses.

Our superhero has been unmasked, His majesty revealed and His powers passed on to His people even though we were never ready for all that power or for the responsibility that came with it.

Lord Jesus, come back quickly, please. Restore Your world, redeem Your church, and bring to completion the work justice and mercy that You began. Amen.

First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – August 21st, 2026

Matthew 15

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