Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times. “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. 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. “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go. “But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matthew 18:21-35)
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I want to go back to that line from The Lord's Prayer for a moment: “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Now, the traditional words that we use are, of course, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” They say largely the same thing, but with a bit of a different emphasis. “Trespasses” suggests that we need forgiveness for going places we shouldn't have gone – and that we need to offer forgiveness for the same thing. “Debts,” on the other hand, “suggests that we have been let off the hook for something that we owed, and that we need to let others off the hook for what they owe to us as well. I challenge tradition very cautiously, of course, but our traditional version of The Lord's Prayer is wrong. The word in the New Testament means literally “something that's owed.” It means a debt in other words, and not really a trespass. It puts the whole idea of “forgiveness” into what you might call economic terms rather than strictly moral terms. So Jesus seems to be saying that real forgiveness is about not holding someone in debt to you. That seems to be emphasized in the parable we read today.
Jesus is still speaking in terms of forgiveness. Jesus is still speaking about consistency and reciprocity in forgiveness, but to make his point he uses a couple of business exchanges for lack of a better word. He offers this parable – which is an interesting parable because it's not mysterious and it's not hard to understand and it really needs no explanation, unlike many of the parables Jesus taught with – as a way of helping His disciples understand the true nature of forgiveness. The very existence of the parable (and the fact that it's placed in Matthew's Gospel where it's placed) is another hint of how hard true forgiveness really is. Think about it. Last week, we talked about forgiveness in The Lord's Prayer, and the use of the word “debt.” That was in chapter 6. Now we're in chapter 18. In the context of Matthew's Gospel at least, 12 chapters have passed by and Jesus returns to the point to give a more in depth explanation of the concept of forgiveness – because it seems as if even after all this time His disciples still haven't got that message! So, once again, Jesus speaks of forgiveness in relation to debt and its repayment.
One of the problems that's been around forever is that it's hard for many people to get out of debt. There was the old sharecropper system, where former slaves were “given” parcels of land to work by their former masters. They had to buy seeds and other supplies from the landowner, they had to give the landowner usually half the crop they produced and pay for the seed and supplies on top of that and the end result was that they were rarely able to pay off their own debt, and they were condemned to a never-ending cycle of poverty, and even unofficial slavery – supposedly free to move on anytime as long as their debts were paid off, which could hardly ever happen. There are other examples closer to home. Think about pay day loans. So if you suddenly need $500 that you don't have, you borrow $500 from a pay day loan company. The company charges you interest, meaning that you have to pay back more than the $500 out of your next paycheque, meaning that you're probably short again as the end of the pay period approaches, meaning that you need another pay day loan. And on and on it goes. The Criminal Code of Canada allows interest rates of up to 60%! So you end up basically working to pay off the pay day loan company. And have you ever wondered why banks keep asking to up your credit card limits? It's because they want you to get hopelessly in over your head so they can make interest off you once you have a balance that you just can't pay off. Debt is a burdensome thing, and so many people who are in debt can never get out of debt. They constantly owe their creditor. They can't live their life in freedom, or even with any hope for freedom. The parable uses this every day problem to make a spiritual point.
In the parable, the debt in question is huge: ten thousand bags of gold, or (in traditional language) ten thousand talents. If you think that this at least puts a limit on the debt owed, think again: in ancient Greek culture, the highest number possible was 10,000. There was no higher number. In the modern world it's like a child trying to imagine the biggest number possible and you hear something like “a million, billion, trillion, jillion, kazillion times.” In context, then, Jesus is saying “the sky's the limit” when it comes to the first man's debt to the king. He cannot pay it off; he has no hope of paying it off; he is constantly in bondage to the king, and in this first case the response to the unpayable debt is an unimaginable forgiveness. The traditional rule of the rabbis was to forgive someone three times. When Peter asks about offering forgiveness seven times, then, he's being surprisingly generous – going above and beyond the call of duty. Jesus essentially makes the amount of forgiveness to be offered the equivalent of the unimaginable debt. Depending on the translation it's either seventy-seven times or seventy times seven times, but it doesn't really matter, because the number Jesus uses is as symbolic as 10,000 bags of gold, or “a million, billion, trillion, jillion, kazillion times.” So much traditional Christian language and so many of our hymns speak of the huge debt we owe God – and that misses the point. The debt is forgiven. It doesn't exist anymore. The forgiveness God has given us is unimagineable.
This debt is huge – and so is the forgiveness granted, and so is the forgiveness demanded in response. By way of comparison, while the first man owed the king an unimaginable debt, the second man owed the first man “a hundred silver coins – or a denarius - what would be the equivalent today of about 16 cents. I talked last week about the need to offer forgiveness if one receives forgiveness, so I'm not going to dwell on that again. The point of the parable is about getting out of debt or being held in debt. I was thinking this morning as I watched the news about the George Zimmerman trial in Florida. Zimmerman is the Neighbourhood Watch guy who shot and killed an unarmed teenager named Trayvon Martin who was carrying nothing but a bag of Skittles for no good reason except – I guess – because he was a black teenager in a neighbourhood where he wasn't supposed to be. Zimmerman was found not guilty yesterday. This morning it was being speculated that the Martin family might file a civil suit – basically asking for money in repayment of the “debt.” One family member said that they hadn't decided what to do, but that money could never pay them back. The truth is that nothing can pay them back. I don't know if the Martin family can get to the point of forgiveness toward Zimmerman. That would be tough. I'm not sure I could do it. But acknowledging that the debt can't be paid would be a good first step toward forgiveness. Dealing with simpler matters, let me ask you: how would you feel if the credit card companies wiped out your debt? Or if the bank said to just forget about making payments on your mortgage? Or if the car dealership said “just take it. You don't have to pay.” Jesus is saying that this is the sort of thing that God does. This is what forgiveness is. This is what we are called to do.
Real forgiveness – the way we see it described in the Bible – is quite simply not holding people in your debt. When we refuse to forgive someone we are, in a way, saying that they owe us something, that we deserve something from them, that nothing they do can satisfy us. We already have that problem in our relationship with God. We owe a lot to God – more than can ever possibly be repaid. And that could put us into bondage. It could take away our freedom. The parable ends on a bit of an ominous note, speaking of the person who won't forgive the debt being tortured by the jailer. Understand, though, that in the parable it's the jailers doing the torturing, and in the parable God isn't the jailer. The jailer who tortures the one who won't forgive might well be unforgiveness itself – which forces a burden on us, which eats our soul away and saps our life of joy. God won't prevent that from happening - but God desires us to live in freedom, and so God solves the problem of unpaid debt by simply cancelling the debt and choosing not to hold us in bondage. Consider the mortgage covered. Consider the car paid off. Consider the credit card debts wiped clean. Consider what you could have the freedom to do if you had no debts at all. None. Zero.
This is not forgive and forget. God doesn't forget. But it is a reminder that we no longer owe God anything – whether in the Old Testament system of sacrifices, or in the way Christians often think they repay God – with good works. We owe God everything, and yet at the same time we owe God nothing, because our debt is forgiven. We are not in God's debt, because being indebted to God would take away our freedom as children of God. We offer forgiveness for the same reason – so that people are free from their burdens to us to live as children of God, or at least to seek God. Forgiveness takes away indebtedness. Taking away indebtedness gives freedom. That's what God does for us. That's what forgiveness is all about.
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