START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Matthew 18:21-35
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OBSERVE:
It seems that Peter has been listening carefully to the teaching of Jesus. In Matthew 18:15-20, Jesus has carefully outlined a procedure whereby conflict might be resolved within the community of faith. Peter seems to make the connection between this teaching about methods of reconciliation and Jesus’ earlier teaching about forgiveness.
When Jesus taught the disciples about prayer in his Sermon on the Mount, forgiveness was so central that he reiterated the same point after teaching the prayer:
Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors…For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 5:12, 14-15).
So Peter’s question seems to be in the spirit of Jesus’ teaching. He says:
Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times?
No doubt, Peter’s expectation was that Jesus would praise him for his generosity, much as Jesus had praised him when Peter recognized Jesus as the Christ (Matthew 16:16-18). The number seven is a significant number in the Hebrew world view, symbolizing completeness and perfection. It would seem that Peter is suggesting a very patient, even “perfect” forbearance toward repeat offenders.
But Jesus’ attitude toward forgiveness is far more expansive — we might even say infinite — than Peter’s proposal. In fact, Jesus’ answer suggests an exponential difference:
Jesus said to him, “I don’t tell you until seven times, but, until seventy times seven.
Once again, Jesus isn’t speaking literally, but symbolically. If Peter was literal-minded (which might be likely), he may have been testing the limits of forgiveness. Is seven times enough, he may have been asking. But If we do the math, Jesus is suggesting the offender be forgiven four hundred ninety times. This is hardly a literal prescription for forgiveness. Jesus is taking a number suggested by Peter, symbolizing perfection, and expanding it exponentially. In other words, forgiveness never ends.
Jesus then employs one of his favored means of communication to illustrate his point about forgiveness — the parable. He likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a king who calls in his debts. One debtor owes the king ten thousand talents. This is an astronomically high number. Ten thousand talents is the equivalent of three hundred metric tons of silver.
Just for the sake of comparison — ten thousand talents is the equivalent to sixty million denarii, which was the coin of the time. A denarius was the typical day’s wage for agricultural labor. Today, the United States Department of Agriculture says that the average day laborers’ wages per hour is between $10.50 to $10.80 per hour. Those wages would probably look pretty good to a day laborer in Jesus’ time. A day’s labor in Jesus’ time wouldn’t be eight hours a day — it was sunrise to sunset. So, if we assume that a normal day might be ten hours, perhaps we are talking about a worker earning $80 to $105 a day. To cut to the chase, the servants debt might be the equivalent of at least four billion, eight hundred million dollars! This is an astounding debt! What on earth did this servant intend to do with that money? And where did he spend it?!
In short, he just doesn’t have it. And the consequences are dire — his entire family would pay the debt by being sold into slavery!
But because he couldn’t pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, with his wife, his children, and all that he had, and payment to be made.
The servant’s response is to throw himself upon the mercy of the king. He humbles himself and pleads for mercy. This man who has squandered what amounts to billions of dollars is completely helpless. He begs:
The servant therefore fell down and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, have patience with me, and I will repay you all!’
Despite the huge debt, the king forgives the entire amount, without even requiring a repayment schedule:
The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt.
We can only imagine the enormous relief, forgiven of such a huge debt. And this makes the next events all the more shocking:
But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow servants, who owed him one hundred denarii, and he grabbed him, and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will repay you!’ He would not, but went and cast him into prison, until he should pay back that which was due.
This servant who has been forgiven a debt in the billions of dollars refuses to forgive a debt which amounts to perhaps $1,050. This is not a tiny amount of money — but it wouldn’t buy a house today, or a new car. Compared to the ten thousand talents, one hundred denarii is miniscule. And yet this man, forgiven of a huge debt, cannot find compassion in his own heart to forgive a debtor who owes him much less.
The irony is staggering. The hypocrisy is shocking. And the king’s servants, who see this scenario unfold before their very eyes, could not remain silent. They reported the servant’s behavior to their king.
The king’s moral outrage is palpable:
Then his lord called him in, and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt, because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?’
What is interesting is that the consequences for the servant’s hypocritical behavior differ from the king’s original judgment. His family and property are not sold into slavery. Instead, all of the consequences fall upon the servant:
His lord was angry, and delivered him to the tormentors, until he should pay all that was due to him.
It would seem, as was the fashion in ancient times, that the servant was to suffer at the hands of professional torturers. He was to pay, as it were, with a pound of flesh.
Lest we miss the point of the parable, Jesus makes it very clear:
So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don’t each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds.
Those who have been forgiven are to forgive others. Otherwise, they themselves will suffer the consequences of judgment. A failure to forgive results in a failure to be forgiven.
APPLY:
Like Peter, don’t we tend to want to measure our responses to grievances and wrongs? How many times must we forgive, we ask, just like Peter. Jesus’ answer is that forgiveness is unlimited.
The truth is that forgiveness is at the very heart of the Christian Gospel. But there is no such thing as cheap grace when it comes to forgiveness. Forgiveness is costly.
Where we begin is with the ultimate source of forgiveness. According to Jesus’ parable, forgiveness is equated with something that most of us can understand — financial debt. Jesus doesn’t single out particular sins. He suggests that hurts, grievances, and wrongs are equivalent with a sense of indebtedness.
To whom do we owe not only our salvation, our abilities, and even our very existence? The answer is simple — God himself. That is who the king in Jesus’ parable represents. And we all owe a debt to God that none of us can repay.
This debt, incurred by our birth, is increased by our lives that “draw” on God’s account. And it is our sins — our moral failings, our squandered opportunities, our resentments, lusts, and little selfishnesses — that incur our debt to God. And this is why Jesus, as the incarnate God on earth, exercises his authority to forgive these debts during his ministry and, finally, on the cross. When he is crucified at the hands of sinful men, the sinless one says:
Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34).
And this forgiveness pivots toward our relationship with others. Like the servant in the parable, when we have confessed our faith in Christ and asked his forgiveness, we have been forgiven a massive debt that we could never repay.
So, when it comes to hurts, grievances, and injuries that we have suffered from others — no matter how great — do we really imagine that they surpass the debt that we owe to God? Again, we are like the servant in the parable. We owe, in effect, billions of dollars to God. There are people who are indebted to us, who have wronged us in some way — but in comparison, those debts are small.
And Jesus’ central teaching on forgiveness is sobering. We not only pray it regularly, he stresses it:
For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 5:12, 14-15).
Again, Jesus’ parable is instructive. When we have been forgiven so great a debt, what right have we not to forgive those in debt to us, especially when that debt is relatively small in comparison. It may be that God can’t forgive us when we refuse to forgive others because our hearts are too hard and too self-righteous to receive his forgiveness.
RESPOND:
Years ago I learned a principle from the world of cognitive behavioral therapy that has spiritual applications. It is called the emotional bank.
Here is the concept: when we are in a relationship, we have a tendency to think that our acts of kindness — like helping out with the chores, or doing someone a favor — is a kind of emotional “deposit” into the emotional bank. On the other hand, when we do something unkind or wrong, we are also making “withdrawals” from the emotional bank. We accumulate “capital” by our good behavior, and we lose “emotional capital” by our bad behavior. If we withdraw more than we deposit, we end up with an emotional deficit with our family, friends, or co-workers.
That may sound a little mercenary, as though it reduces a relationship to a mere transaction. But it’s also pretty honest. Whether we like it or not, we do tend to think of our relationships as transactional. We might try to be more noble, but the emotional bank is a handy benchmark.
The parable Jesus tells suggests a similar transactional concept. The “debt” incurred by the servant is colossal compared to the “debt” he is owed by his fellow servant. I’m reminded of something else Jesus says elsewhere:
with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you (Matthew 7:2).
The truth is, there is no transaction that we can make with God to receive his forgiveness. His forgiveness and grace toward us are incredibly costly. When we forgive, we are in a sense drawing on his “line of credit” of grace toward others.
Once, long ago, when General Oglethorpe of the English Colony in Georgia said, “I never forgive,” the Reverend Charles Wesley retorted:
Then I hope, Sir, that you never sin.
As the cliche says:
We owed a debt we could not pay; Christ paid a debt he did not owe.
Lord, I can never repay the debt I owe you. But I can follow your example on a smaller scale and forgive those who sin against me. Give me grace to do so. Amen.
PHOTOS: "70 Seven Times" by WELS net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.
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