(avg. read time: 8–16 mins.)
I have already written on Matt 18:21–35 as part of my series on forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation. But that was part of a series of sermons I did and here I would like to write a more dedicated exposition on it. As I did in that series, though, I want to start with defining key terms.
“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. “Repentance” is the act and process of turning away from the current direction in one’s life, confessing and apologizing for action taken in that direction, and accepting a new direction and agenda for one’s life. “Reconciliation” is the process of two or more parties meeting repentance with forgiveness. The outcome of the process of reconciliation thus has at least four components: 1) the offended releases the offender from debt; 2) the offended removes the source of the debt by expunging the violation from memory; 3) the offended and offender are thus restored to their proper relationship; 4) the two or more parties enable the forging of new life between them. These actions stem from God, and if we are looking for a paradigm of what they mean, how they work, and how we should enact them, we must look to God’s precedents. And that leads us to this teaching of Jesus, his most extensive, but by no means only, teaching on forgiveness (for others, see Matt 5:7; 6:12, 14–15; 7:1–2; 9:1–7; 10:8; 26:28; Mark 1:4; 11:25; Luke 1:77; 6:37; 7:47; 11:4; 17:3–4; 24:47; John 20:23).
Let us start with the discussion that provides the occasion for this parable. Only Matthew has this story, and in its context Jesus has just instructed his disciples on confronting one another regarding sin, communal discipline, and on how 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 for the purpose of forming a flourishing community. 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 (Matt 9:1–7). And, as some scholars theorize, he may have heard the teaching preserved in the rabbinic texts that a person is forgiven three times for intentional sin (b. Yoma 86b.10–11; 87a.13). This is less clear, because it is difficult to be confident of how far back this teaching goes.
But in any case, Peter asks if he should go beyond this threshold and forgive seven times. He had obviously paid at least some attention to what Jesus had taught to this point. Among those blessed in the Beatitudes are the “merciful,” which includes practicing forgiveness (Matt 5:7). The paradigmatic Lord’s Prayer includes—in both the Matthean and Lukan versions—the entreaty to forgive us as we forgive others (Matt 6:12 // Luke 11:4). In fact, the follow-up teaching made even clearer the connection between these two, as those who do not forgive others will themselves not be forgiven, while those who forgive will be forgiven (Matt 6:14–15). This was further reinforced with Jesus’s teaching on judgment, as he said that the measure with which one measures will be used on oneself as well (Matt 7:1–2). As noted already, he had seen Jesus himself offer forgiveness on behalf of God (Matt 9:1–7) and he instructed the disciples when he sent them out to give freely as they had received freely (Matt 10:8). And besides, seven is a good symbolic number for such a threshold as he was suggesting, since it was the number of completion and wholeness.
But as he usually does, Jesus goes beyond even this elevated expectation of seeming perfection. Depending on your translation of this ambiguous Greek phrase, he says “seventy-seven times” or “seventy times seven times.” 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.
Scholars have often noted the resonances of this opening of Matt 18:21–22 with Gen 4. When God sent Cain away for killing his brother Abel, Cain worried that he would be killed. Yet God mercifully promised to mark him for vengeance, so that if anyone killed him, he would be avenged sevenfold (Gen 4:15). His descendant Lamech would take this a few steps further and say that anyone who killed him for the man he killed would receive vengeance seventy-sevenfold (Gen 4:23–24). One can see the never-ending spiral of violence such escalations create. By contrast, Jesus calls for a spiraling upwards of forgiveness and reconciliation.
To elaborate on his teaching about forgiveness, he uses a parable about what the kingdom of heaven is like. I have explored here the importance of the kingdom of heaven in Jesus’s ministry according to Matthew’s narration. It is a way of describing the eschatological state, and so the dynamics involved in forgiveness are also characteristic of this hoped-for eschatological state that Jesus brings to bear on earth in himself. Of course, forgiveness is not only a characteristic of the eschatological state, as it appears quite often in the OT outside of eschatological contexts, whether from God towards humans (Exod 32:32; 34:6–9; Lev 4:20 26, 31, 35; 5:10, 13, 16, 18; 6:7; 16:30–34; 19:22; Num 8:19–21; 14:18–20; 15:25–26, 28; Deut 21:8; 1 Kgs 8:30–39; Neh 9:17; Pss 25:16–22; 32:1–5; 65:3–4; 78:37–39; 79:8–9; 85:1–7; Isa 6:7; 43:25; Jer 36:3) or from humans towards other humans (Gen 50:17–21; Exod 10:17). But there certainly is precedent for describing the eschatological state—including in cases where “kingdom” imagery may be more pronounced—as one that is established by forgiveness (Isa 27:9; 33:20–24; 40; 44:21–28; 53:7–12; 55:5–7; Jer 31:31–34; 33:6–26; 50:19–20; Ezek 36:25–28; 37:23–28; Dan 9:15–19, 24; Mic 7:18–20; Zech 13:8–9). Likewise, repentance was certainly known in the OT outside of eschatological conditions (1 Kgs 8:33–35, 47–49; 2 Kgs 17:13; 23:25; 2 Chr 6:24–27, 37–39; 7:13–14; 30:6–9; 33:12–17; Neh 1:9; Pss 7; 51:13; 78:34–39; Isa 1:27; 6:10; 10:20–34; 19:22; 31:6; Jer 3; 5:3; 8:4–6; 15:7–19; 18:11; 23:14–22; 25:5; 26:3; 35:15; 36:3, 7; 44:5, 14; Lam 3:40; Ezek 3:19–20; 13:22; 14:6; 18:21–32; 33:9–19; Dan 9:13; Hos 2:7; 3:5; 5:4; 12:6; Joel 2:12–14; Amos 4:6–11; Jon 3:8–10; Zech 1:6–21; Mal 3:7). But it was also obviously linked to the arrival of the eschatological state (Lev 26:40–45; Deut 30:1–10; Isa 44:22; 55:7–11; 59:20; Jer 24:6–7; 31:16–40; 50:4–5; Hos 14:1–4). Thus, we see that forgiveness and repentance—as well as their merging in reconciliation—were long-expected dynamics of the eschatological state of the kingdom of heaven/God. Thus, Jesus is not revealing something entirely new when he speaks this parable about what the kingdom is like, but he is the one who brings these expectations to fruition, and he is the one whose teaching brings these grand promises to bear on the individual and communal levels in how we live together.
And it is because of that effect at the individual and communal levels that people have problems (even apart from the notion that God can be so forgiving of whoever we regard as “those people”). What Jesus suggests prior to saying this is what the kingdom of heaven is like 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 us 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?
The kingdom of heaven is compared to a king who settles accounts with his servants. One servant had a gargantuan debt of 10,000 talents. 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 (one denarius), at the rate of working seven days a week, it would take 164,000 years to earn that much (as there were 6,000 denarii to one talent). If one were to go by the standard of working 300 days a year, this debt would take 200,000 years to pay off. 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 master orders for the servant, his family, and all that he has to be sold, but this would 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, recategorizing it is as a loan to be forgiven in the Jubilee (see the use of δάνειον in Josephus, Ant. 3.282), 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. 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 despite his much smaller debt—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.
As I have noted before, not every detail in a parable is meant to provide a one-to-one correspondence for whatever the object of the analogy is. For example, the king is analogous to God in respect to the central teaching, and his ethos is expected to govern the ethos of the kingdom, but not every detail of what he says and does is meant to match God per se. Still, there is a correspondence in this part of the story that is interesting to consider. Considering Jesus’s previous teaching on how to handle conflict in the community, the actions of the other servants here shows that a lack of forgiveness in response to repentance, as well as a lack of repentance (as already indicated in Matt 18:15–18), can be grounds for enacting the prescribed procedures. More specifically, it would indicate that a lack of forgiveness in response to repentance is an offense that has communal repercussions and thus can be grounds for communal involvement.
The king summons the servant and he wastes no time denouncing the servant as wicked because he 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.