21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"
22 Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
23 Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24 As he began the settlement, a man who owned him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25 Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26 The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' 27 The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28 But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. he grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
29 His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.
30 But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32 Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33 Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? 34 In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35 This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."Many of Jesus' parables are very challenging. That's partly the purpose of a parable, after all. In these short little stories, Jesus gives us a picture of what life looks like in the kingdom of God, and oftentimes, that life looks a lot different from the way we tend to live. The parables demand a reversal in our thinking. And I think this parable that Jesus tells in Matthew 18 might be one of the most challenging of them all.
The story itself is pretty easy to understand. There is a man who owes a large sum of money to his master. I mean, a large sum of money. His debt rings up to ten thousand talents. This is an absurd amount of money. A talent was the largest monetary unit at the time, and he owes ten thousand of them. The point is that the debt is unpayable. This guy is never going to get his hands on enough money to repay his master. So, when he's called to account, he does the only thing he can. He throws himself at the master's mercy, begging for more time. The master then has pity and not only gives the debtor more time, but he cancels the debt altogether.
You would hope that such an extravagant demonstration of mercy would have a lasting impact on the servant's behavior, but that's not the case. Right after having his enormous debt canceled, he walks upside and sees another guy who owes him 100 denarii--a much smaller debt that he had owed the master. And when this other servant makes the same request that the first servant had made ("Be patient with me, and I will pay you back"), he refuses to be lenient. Instead, he has the man thrown into debtors' prison. When the king hears about this, he subjects the first servant to severe punishment because he refused to show mercy after he himself had received mercy.
This parable is an important lesson in how God's mercy and forgiveness should flow through us and impact our own relationships. We are in the position of the first servant in this story. As God's creatures, we owe him perfect obedience. Because of our sin, this is a debt that we can never repay, and instead, we deserve death (Rom. 6:23). The wonderful, mind-blowing news for us is that God forgives us! In the cross, Jesus pays our debt.
And because of this, we are to be channels of God's forgiveness. We have had a huge debt canceled, but so often, we have a difficult time forgiving those who wrong us. We like to receive forgiveness, but we're not so quick to give it to others. What the New Testament tells us over and over again, though, is that because God has forgiven us, so too should we forgive one another (Eph. 4:32; Col. 3:13)
Maybe there's someone in your life that you've had a really, really hard time forgiving because, truth be told, they didn't something really terrible to you. I don't want to downplay whatever wrongs might have been done to you, as though forgiveness is something easy. The second servant in the story owed a significant amount to the first servant. A hundred denarii was about 100 days' wages. It was a good-sized amount, just like someone might have done something significant against you. But when we compare these wrongs to the wrong we have done against a holy and perfect God, they don't seem quite so large. If God has forgiven our sin, we too should be ready and willing to forgive others.
So how many times should we forgive? That's the question that starts the whole discussion in this passage. Peter asks, "How many times do I need to forgive? Seven times?" Peter probably thought he was being awfully generous. The rabbis taught that you had to forgive three times, and he's going way beyond that. But Jesus takes the blows the lid off the whole thing and says "Forgive not seven, but seventy-seven times." I don't think Jesus' point here is to put a limit on our forgiveness. He's not saying, "If someone wrongs you seventy-seven times, forgive him, but on the seventy-eighth time, you don't need to." The point is that our forgiveness needs to be limitless. Why? Because that's how God has forgiven us.
Who do you need to forgive this week?
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