Forgiveness

Grudges. They’re so easy to acquire. In this world, it seems that there’s always some sort of conflict going on. No matter how hard we try to get along, someone is always stabbing us in the back. In Matthew, Peter asks Jesus a reasonable question about dealing with difficult people. He asks, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (Matthew 18:21) Does this seem so unreasonable?

Think about the difficult people in your life. If you keep on forgiving and forgiving won’t these people just walk all over you? You’ve given the offender seven chances, and they still doesn’t get it. But Jesus responds shockingly, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.” (18:22) So we have to wait until 490 times? Does Jesus really expect us to count to nearly 500 before we’ve had enough? Of course not – this hyperbole is to tell us not to even keep tabs on it.

Then Jesus goes on – in his ordinary fashion – to teach us the reasoning behind such a seemingly absurd amount of endurance. He tells of a servant who owes his master 10,000 talents and the master threatens to throw his entire family into prison since he cannot pay. At first glance, the modern reader would assume that this is quite a debt, but we fail to grasp the full breadth of the servant’s desperation. One talent equaled the monetary amount of 20 years of labor. If we were to update this to modern economics we could take a round number such as $30,000 a year. So with that estimate, a talent would be worth six-hundred-thousand dollars. Therefore, this servant’s debt was 6 billion dollars. Imagine the absolute desperation of this man. There is no way the servant could ever imagine paying that back.

But his master has mercy. He forgives the whole debt. He doesn’t even make an effort to get any of the money back. Then comes the part of the story that is often misinterpreted: the servant goes out and finds a friend that owes him 100 denarii. Many times we see this and we assume it’s a small amount and that the servant is being petty when he chokes the friend and puts him in jail. But what we fail to realize is that a denarius was the monetary equivalent of one day’s labor. When we take that same $30,000 we would have about 115 dollars a day. So 100 day’s worth would be about $11,500. While the 6 billion seems like a hyperbole, this amount seems reasonable. It could be paid back within a lifetime, and at the same time, when a person is missing that amount it does hurt.

When the master hears of this, he is infuriated. He says to the man, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?” (32-33) Then he hands the servant over to jailers, which could also be translated as torturers to pay for his debt. And then Jesus concludes with, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” (35)

Think of this. The second servant had quite a debt with his friend: eleven thousand dollars. If we were to think about this in terms of people wronging us, this isn’t just a minor infraction. This is not an off color remark about the morality of someone’s mother. This is a serious wrong done, but the debt that God has forgiven us of is a debt that we cannot even put a dent in. Then, when there’s something substantial that is done wrong to us we are expected to forgive. And when we think about it, what does that say about the petty things that we hold against each other? It’s also necessary to look at the seriousness of the issue. Jesus isn’t warning us of a sharp rebuke, or a harsh lesson to learn. The master hands the servant over to torturers.

This last parallel between God’s reaction to his children when they are unforgiving and the master reminds me of the sixth chapter of Luke. When Jesus teaches about loving our enemies he says “Forgive and you will be forgiven.” Think about that logically: the converse to that is “If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.” This poses so many questions about God’s grace and our standing with him; I’ll have to get into that in my next entry.