How Should We Live in Light of Forgiveness, Repentance, and Reconciliation?

(avg. read time: 7–14 mins.)

Last time I posed a question about what it looks like to embody God’s righteousness, or, more directly, what it means to embody God’s reconciling action. Since the approach we are taking here is “theological ethics”—in which facts about who God is, what God has done, and who we are in relation to God have ethical implications—the text of Deut 30:1–10 serves as a good bridge from where we started to where we are today.

Deuteronomy 30 addresses Israel in exile. Deuteronomy 28 had exile and scattering as part of the climax of Israel’s punishments and Deut 29 reiterated the warning that this would be the most extreme outcome for the most extreme degree of faithlessness. For the Israelites, relationship with God in obedience to his word was the definition of “life.” Ideally, this life was supposed to be lived in the promised land, since staying in the promised land was dependent upon Israel’s obedience. Therefore, exile meant death. So as most of Deut 28 is God’s word of judgment and death, Deut 30 is God’s word of reconciliation and life. Verses 1–5 summarize well God’s forgivingness, Israel’s repentance, and the resulting reconciliation. With their restoration in the land, they had the possibility of new life opened up to them. But what would that new life consist of for the people? What are they supposed to do now that they have been reconciled? Verses 6–10 answer these questions by focusing on what it will mean for Israel to repent.

In essence, God will bring Israel’s repentance to fullness by transforming the Israelites themselves, circumcising their hearts to address the deeper problem of sin. Then they will be more devoted to following through on their initial turn back to God and be able to live the life of repentance according to God’s agenda more thoroughly. And Moses identifies obeying the commandments with loving God with all your heart and soul. Again, when we recognize and love God as the Lord and act appropriately, everything else about how we approach the world changes around that center, because we are properly ordering our lives with God on the throne and at the helm. The distortions and idolatry of sin are progressively removed and our awareness of what it means to love God and obey God grows in the process we call “sanctification.” In this process, we are made to be more and more like what God created us to be: divine image-bearers, divine representatives. After all, to love God is to know God. And to know God is to become more like God, since God created us in his image and likeness. There are several places, particularly in Leviticus, where God tells the Israelites that they are to be holy as the Lord is holy. In other words, there is a sense in which their obedience to God enables them to be imitators or representatives of God. In this text, what would it look like to be an imitative representation of God or to be repentant in the fullest sense? Would it not be to be forgiving toward others and to seek reconciliation toward others because you are a representative of God? Would it not be to embody God’s forgiveness and reconciliation, to forgive because we have been forgiven, to seek reconciliation because we have been reconciled? That is after all what the Israelites have just been told about what God does. He is forgiving in the most extraordinary way. If we are truly repentant, accepting a new agenda and direction for our lives, does this not mean that we should be forgiving and ever eager for reconciliation as well? If we live in a covenantal context where forgiveness of sins is promised, should we not enact that forgiveness with others?

Jesus certainly seems to think so. And who was a better image-bearer of God than him? Nowhere else does Jesus more vividly make this connection between God’s forgiveness and our own forgiveness than in Matt 18:23–35. Only Matthew has this story and in its context Jesus has just instructed his disciples on confronting one another regarding sin, communal discipline, and that the ultimate goal of such discipline is recovery and restoration of the offender. Jesus finishes this particular teaching with telling his disciples that wherever two or three of his followers are gathered together in his name, there he is. If that is true, it surely shapes how we are to act in his presence. This prompts Peter to ask a question of Jesus regarding the sin of one of his brothers in faith. He knew Jesus to be a great forgiver, even one who mysteriously forgave on behalf of God. And, as some scholars theorize, he may have heard the rabbinic teaching that a person should forgive premeditated sin against oneself three times. Peter, having some knowledge of how Jesus operates and wanting to reflect Jesus’s generosity, asks how often he should forgive a brother who sins against him, except he suggests seven times. This is more than double the rabbinic limit and it’s a good symbolic number as seven was the number of completion and wholeness. As he usually does, Jesus goes beyond even this elevated expectation. Depending on your translation of this ambiguous Greek phrase, he says “seventy-seven” or “seventy times seven.” By multiplying perfection like this, Jesus does not intend to keep an actual tally so that you can stop forgiving someone once they sin against you seventy-eight or 491 times. The whole point is that you need to stop keeping count if you are trying to figure out whether or not to extend the offer of forgiveness. If you are counting, you are not forgiving.

Now this all seems quite absurd. This sounds like the ethics of a doormat. In the everyday world, it sounds like Jesus is saying, “Just let people walk all over you or you’re in the wrong!” Let’s remember, though, what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is the act and process of granting a costly pardon, no longer holding an offending action against someone, releasing the hold on interpersonal debt, and extending the offer of reunion if the person should repent. Nothing about forgiveness is passive; it is all active, just like its complement of repentance. And it is a characteristic action of the kingdom of heaven precisely because it is a characteristic action of the King of heaven. To be a follower of Jesus is to be a member of the kingdom of heaven and to be a member of the kingdom of heaven is to embody and enact forgiveness. If we cannot forgive, can we really be a part of the kingdom ruled by the King who forgives? Jesus addresses precisely these issues in the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who settles accounts with his servants. One servant had a gargantuan debt of 10,000 talents. We don’t measure things in terms of talents anymore, so let me put this all into perspective for you. A talent was the highest unit of measuring weight and wealth. It was equivalent to somewhere between 75 and 100 pounds of the substance in question. 10,000 is a translation of a “myriad,” the highest unit of measurement at the time. In other words, this man had accumulated the most extreme of debts. With the average daily pay of a laborer back then, at the rate of working seven days a week, it would take 164,000 years to earn that much. In fact, it would be 2,000 talents more than the taxes of all people living in the areas from Judea to Syria, a total estimated at around 4 million people. To put it shortly: this is an unpayable debt.

The option of selling the servant, his family, and all that he possesses would still not even put a dent in the overall debt. In desperation, the only thing that the servant can do is plead for mercy and a chance to pay the unpayable debt. In other words, he is claiming to be repentant. It is at this moment that the story changes and the king does what the servant would not even dare to ask him to do. The king pities the servant and forgives his debt, meaning he must absorb an enormous cost. Therein is the key to grasping the nature of forgiveness. Because forgiveness is the offer to remove an interpersonal debt and to restore the offender, the one who was offended has to absorb the cost of that debt. Furthermore, for forgiveness to become reconciliation, the process makes a demand on the offender and offended to forge a new life for their new relationship. Both forgiveness and repentance can start with a single decision, but reconciliation that will last requires renewing those decisions constantly in how offender and offended live together. In the case of God, God has absorbed the cost of forgiveness in the death and resurrection of Jesus so that anyone who is united to Jesus in the Holy Spirit by faith may inherit the promised life. God goes further than any other forgiver in undertaking the entire transformation process so that he enables the offenders to live this new reconciled life. And no interpersonal debt can ever be as great as the sin debt we accrue before God because our every sin, by the very nature of sin, is a direct, defiant offense against God.

In the case of this specific story, the servant has experienced a deliverance from debt beyond his imagination and surely the proper response would be overwhelming joy and gratitude. He has seen for himself the true character of the king he serves and how that king runs his kingdom. Surely this new awareness of what it means to call the king his king would affect how he lives in this kingdom. Yet the next verse tells us that the first action the servant takes as he leaves is to address a debt owed to him. I want to make something perfectly clear here. The debt that this servant demands from the other is 100 denarii. It is not a small sum at all. It is equal to 100 days of wages. I doubt anyone would like to go 100 days with their pay withheld. The issue here is not that the servant is dealing with a paltry debt. The only thing that makes the debt small is its comparison to the much larger debt that the servant owed to the king. In the words of N. T. Wright, “Every time you forgive someone else, though, you pass on a drop of water out of the bucketful that God has already given you. From God’s point of view, the distance between being ordinarily sinful (what we all are) and extremely sinful (what the people we don’t like seem to be) is like the distance between London and Paris seen from the point of view of the sun.”¹ This servant was not willing to pass on that drop of water to a man thirsting for mercy, to be gracious enough to absorb a cost that, while significant to him, was miniscule compared to the cost he would have incurred vainly attempting to repay the debt he owed to the king. His own debtor is in the same position he was in, and the debtor even says mostly the same thing. This is the servant’s test. After all, the king had initially demanded payment for debt—though the servant violently adds seizing his fellow servant by the throat—but when the servant repented, the king forgave his debt. With this opportunity, the servant does the exact opposite by throwing his debtor into debtor’s prison.

The other servants bring this to the king’s attention, not only because of the outrageous contradiction between the forgiveness the man experienced and the complete lack of forgiveness the man showed. They also told the king because actions between two people rarely, if ever, affect just the two of them. These other servants know both the servant in debt and the servant to whom the debt is owed, they share in common that they serve the same king, and the dynamics of these interrelationships change when something happens like what the unmerciful servant did. Drastic, life-changing actions can radically threaten more relationships than just the one that is left in ruins. In this case, because of the especially egregious nature of what the servant has done, he will himself be left in ruins.

The king summons the servant and he wastes no time expressing how pissed off he is that the servant has treated the king’s mercy with contempt. The king had shown that mercy beyond imagination was action worthy of a king, yet the servant’s action demonstrated that he thought mercy that was meager by comparison was not a worthy action for him. In his wisdom, the king deemed it better to show unbelievable grace to the repentant servant with an unpayable debt, but the servant in turn treated him like a fool for taking his words of repentance as if they meant something. The king had offered the servant a new life in the kingdom instead of locked away from it in prison with a debt that would keep him there forever, but the servant scorned the kingdom by showing that he did not care for the way the king ran it. And so in the tragic reversal, the servant ends up precisely where he was redeemed from, outside the life of the kingdom, in a prison he cannot escape. He learned the hard way that forgiveness not shown is forgiveness not known.

Jesus punches this point home in the most vivid way by saying that this is how his Father will treat every one of us if we are not forgiving as God is forgiving. If we do not follow the ways of our God in whose image we were created, we are not truly repentant either. In other words, when we act as the servant has acted, this means that we are shirking the whole reconciliation process. Forgiveness is not an esoteric moral law with arbitrary sanctions surrounding it; it is God’s way of life, God’s way to life. If we do not live in it with how we treat others, how can we say we live in it in how we relate to God? Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those two commandments are so integrally related for a reason. How we treat other humans who are also image-bearers of God extends from how we relate to God. To withhold forgiveness after we have been forgiven is to commit an idolatry of forgiveness. It is to say that whatever costs God has had to absorb to forgive us our debts, the debts incurred against us are too great to forgive. It is to say that sins against us are more severe than sins against God. It is to deny that sin is chiefly against God, and it is to deny that we bear the image of the God who forgives. If we commit to this lie, God eventually says, “so be it” and treats us as we have really treated ourselves and others. When you shut down your faculties to express forgiving love, you shut down your faculties to receive forgiving love, just like if you stop exhaling, you can’t inhale anymore either. Forgiveness is the breath of new life, and you constantly need to breathe it in and breathe it out; it is not something you do just once.

We all need to think about what it looks like to embody God’s reconciling action in our own lives. We all need to think about what forgiveness looks like in each of our situations. We all need to realize that whatever pains others have inflicted on us and whatever debts they have incurred against us, they will never match the debts every one of us has incurred before God. We all need to reflect on what it means to live the gospel, not merely to hear it passively. We all need to move past the whataboutery that tries to justify not doing as God has commanded. We all need to remember that when God gives us new life with his forgiveness, we have no right to pretend we are above the wisdom and love of God in withholding forgiveness. What is stopping us from extending a small token of forgiveness compared to how much God has forgiven us? How can we reflect God’s forgiveness in our own lives?

Of course, this forgiveness is one of two aspects to the reconciliation process. Reconciliation only happens when we add forgiveness and repentance together. So what happens when the equation breaks down? If I repent and the other person is not forgiving, what is my responsibility? If I am forgiving and the other person is not repentant, what is my responsibility? What do you think? We’ll talk more about it next time.

1. N. T. Wright, Matthew For Everyone: Part Two (Chapters 16-28), 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 2004), 39.