Text - Matthew 18:21-35
Forgiveness
21 Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ 22 Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant
23 ‘For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; 25 and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” 27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28 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.” 29 Then his fellow-slave fell down and pleaded with him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” 30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he should pay the debt. 31 When his fellow-slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?” 34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt. 35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’
Of all the things demanded of us in this life, perhaps the toughest ask is that we forgive. When we have been wronged by someone, it really, really hurts - perhaps especially if it’s someone close to us. If left to fester, a state of ‘unforgiveness’ can destroy relationships, communities, and even people. And that’s why forgiveness is such a pillar of the Christian faith - because people, relationships, and communities really matter to God.
We’d probably all like to get out of having to forgive if we could possibly do so. And so at the opening to today’s gospel reading, St Peter wants to know, is there kind of statute of limitations on forgiveness? He wants to know if there’s a ‘reasonable’ number of times that he must forgive. He tentatively suggests… perhaps 7 times? That seems pretty generous!
But Jesus says, ‘no, you’ve got it all wrong!’ You must forgive seventy-seven times - or it could also mean seventy times seven. Now, a multiple of seven, in Jewish symbolism, stands for a sort of ‘perfectly enormous number.’ So Jesus is saying there’s no use counting: we must forgive an infinite number of times. It’s not just generous, but constant forgiveness, a grace so ingrained as to become incalculable.
In relationships, you can’t really quantify forgiveness. Imagine how odd it would be if we portioned it out in limited chunks. “I’ll forgive you on the third Thursday of every month, unless it’s a five-week month, in which case the previous weeks’ forgiveness will roll over…” It’s just absurd! Love - of whatever kind - is like a river, always about to burst its banks. So, we are not just to forgive when we feel like it, or when it’s most obviously required. But we are to go on, and on, and on, forgiving in countless little ways.
Forgiveness, in other words, catapults us into limitless realms. It stretches us. To offer it is to say to the one who has wronged us: I know you can’t make this right, I know you can’t repay me, I know you can’t undo the hurt and pain you’ve caused. But I will begin to heal that wound myself by offering you forgiveness. I will release you from your wrong, and in so doing release myself from bitterness and resentment. It’s an enormously powerful thing, and yet it’s almost never talked about in our public life. When was the last time you heard a politician speak about forgiveness? When was the last time you heard someone ask for it? It’s rare.
Forgiveness is painful and powerful, partly, I think, because it’s always a specific, concrete act. You can’t forgive generally; you are always forgiving someone for something. So helpfully, Jesus gives us, if you like, a worked example in today’s parable. But it’s a lot more than just an example, as I think we’ll see.
The story starts with a king who’s owed 10,000 talents. Again, the idea of limitlessness - of infinity comes into play. 10,000 talents was a ludicrous amount of money - it’s more money than was in circulation in the whole of Israel at the time! The hapless slave couldn’t possibly pay, and in fact, it’s beyond rational comprehension how he could have got into such debt in the first place. Even if he worked for a thousand years, he couldn’t put more than a tiny dent in it. Even the value of his life on the open slave-market wouldn’t have come close. This gives us a clue as to what Jesus is doing here. He wants us to try and grapple with this sense of the infinite, the countless, the limitless. He wants to stretch our minds.
This idea of a limitless debt has its parallels. Imagine if I tried to ‘payback’ my mother for giving birth to me. My birth was pretty traumatic. My mum had placenta previa, and I had to be born via an emergency caesarian. So I came out the escape hatch! My mum had to endure countless hours of pain, have her body torn open, and endure weeks of recovery, and she still bears the scar. All so I could be born. How could I ever repay her? I couldn’t if I tried.
The point I’m making here (apart from to say, aren’t mothers amazing?) is this: if we conceive of life in terms of balance sheets and debts and transactions, we are on a hiding to nothing. Life and relationships are too gloriously rich and unpredictable for that. Life is not ‘balanced’, as if it were an Excel spreadsheet. On this analogy, life is far more like a ‘word document’ - a story, a saga, never-ending and unfolding.
So in the parable, we read that the king ‘has compassion’ on his slave - and forgives him. Again, compassion can’t be counted or quantified. As if we could say, ‘I am precisely 50.75 percent sympathetic towards you, and therefore, I have decided to forgive you.’ When we forgive, it’s because we’re tapping into a resource far deeper than our rational minds or capricious feelings. We’re tapping into something limitless, something eternal.
Let’s remind ourselves where the parable ends up. Now, if it been a straightforward morality tale, we’d expect the forgiven slave to go out and immediately forgive his own debtor. But in a slice of clear-eyed realism, Jesus has the slave do the opposite. Instead of aping his master’s grace, the forgiven slave behaves ruthlessly, mercilessly and abusively. It’s a tragic twist in the tale. But it rings true, doesn’t it? As parents know from our own children, you can model all the good behaviour you like, and they can still choose to rebel! Try as we might, we can’t force our children to behave, especially once they are adults. We can only advise them, plead with them, love them, and call them back. That’s the tragedy of love. We have to let go.
Now perhaps what is most puzzling at the end of Jesus’ parable is the apparent character of the king. Upon learning of his slave’s utter lack of forgiveness, the king’s own patience seems to run out, and his own mercy seems to dry up. ‘And in anger, his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt.’ That would be a harsh enough ending to the tale, but then comes the real kicker: ‘So my heavenly Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart’. It sounds like a threat. If that’s the ‘take-home message’ of the parable, well, frankly it doesn’t sound very forgiving, does it?
So how can we make sense of it? Well, we need to back to the place where we started: with the limitless nature of love. Are we to assume that God is unwilling or unable to keep his own commandments? Are we to conclude that we mere mortals are to aspire to an ethical standard of constant forgiveness, but, somehow, God is not? Are we to forgive seventy-times-seven, but God will only give us one chance and then our goose is cooked?
Let’s look carefully at what the text says and what it doesn’t. ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you.’ What is it, exactly, that Jesus is saying God will ‘also do’? The main verb in the previous sentence is not the verb ‘to be tortured’ but the verb ‘handed over.’ So the thing that is ‘done’ by the king is not the torturing, but the handing over. This might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s really important. Jesus is saying that if we neglect to forgive our brother, then God will hand us over to the consequences of our decision.
I mentioned parenting before. Like a good parent, God gives us freedom. He lets us make our mistakes, while always calling us back to love. And God will - though it hurt and even enrage him to do so - he will in a sense ‘hand us over’ to the way we choose to live. This is not because his love is limited - quite the opposite! He loves us much too much to make us slaves.
All this means that it can indeed feel like God ’hands us over to be tortured.’ But this isn’t some horror-film version of hellfire. The torture we endure in this life is the self-inflicted torture that comes from our refusal to forgive. If we hold on to our resentments and bear our grudges - these will lock us in bitter prisons of hatred. It is indeed a form of torture - any lesser word wouldn’t do it justice.
I knew a woman once whose husband had, many years before, cheated on her and it broke up the marriage. It was a terrible thing he did, and I think he lived to deeply regret it. But though he tried to make amends, she never forgave him. Now, it’s not for me to judge her. But I couldn’t help but feel that, justified as she was in her anger, she was actually imprisoned by it. Onto that original pain, there had fastened a parasitic resentment which meant she never really trusted a man again. I think it left her desperately lonely.
How, then, can we be set free from this prison of bitterness? Well, despite the world-weary realism in Jesus’ parable, I still believe that the key is knowing we are forgiven ourselves. And so to the punchline to the parable. At this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is about to set off for Jerusalem. He is literally heading to his death — to the cross. And that’s where we must go too.
The great and shocking news of the Christian faith is that it is not, in fact, we who endure the ultimate torture, the painful extraction of our debts. No, it is our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us. This is not balanced. This is not calculated. It’s not a transaction as such. It is limitless love in action. Jesus on the cross reveals a God who would rather suffer and die as one of us than see his people destroyed by their own sins. That’s love, that’s forgiveness.
You see, we are the ones in the story who are infinitely indebted — indebted to those who give us life — not only our earthly parents, but our Father in heaven. We are the ones who so often squander this gift of life and throw it back in our Father’s face. But in Jesus, we are the ones whose debt has been written off, forgiven, absorbed into compassion. Jesus was ‘handed over to be tortured’ (by us!) but in God’s wisdom, this becomes the very thing that sets us free. All our pain, all our resentment, all our bitterness: gone, dealt with, taken to the cross. You can’t know this with your mind alone. It’s too incalculable for that. But you can know it in your heart.
So when the king in the parable begins to feel compassion rising up in his heart, and when that flowers into forgiveness, we are meant to think of Jesus and all he has done for us. And in the light of this, we are meant to see forgiveness as a real, beautiful, and godly highway through the strange and tragic tale we call life.
I said before that forgiveness is always concrete, always about real people and real things.
So what do you need forgiveness for today? What do you need to send to the cross - the place where all the evils of the world are undone? Do you perhaps need to forgive someone for something that’s happened to you that has been torturing you? Do you need to forgive God for allowing it to happen? Or is it that you need to forgive yourself for some failure, some mistake? That can be the hardest forgiveness of all. But if Jesus forgives you — can you do any less?
What Jesus’s parable leaves us with then, is an unfinished story, and an unanswered question. If we have begun to experience the limitless love of God in Jesus Christ, will we allow ourselves be shaped by it? Will we practice habits of forgiveness, so that we become the kind of people who forgive constantly, willingly, joyfully? If you live with others in family or in community, then opportunities to forgive are ample. If Christianity is about relationships (and I think it is) then those relationships may well mean not so much one giant cross to bear, but rather countless little ones. All the many little quirks and bad habits that irritate us - each an open door to forgive. Will we walk through it? These are questions that cannot be answered by parables or sermons alone. They can only be answered with the cross of Jesus Christ, and with the lives we live in the light of it.
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