Peter approached Jesus and asked him, Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, I say to you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18.21-22)
It doesn’t take a math wizard to know that the number seventy-seven is much higher than the number seven. When Simon Peter put the question before Rabbi Jesus about the number of times he should be expected to forgive someone, he surely was shocked by the response. Doubtlessly knowing something of the Teacher’s knack for kindness, Simon had already stretched the reasonable expectation by more than double.
Rabbis as a rule, followed the code stipulated by Amos the prophet when he chastised the nations for their transgressions, indicating that the Lord God would forgive three crimes committed by them, but not four. With the fourth transgression, he would exact judgment. There is every reason to believe that Simon Peter knew this ancient tradition and, taking into account Rabbi Jesus’ kind heartedness, he more than doubled it, assuming that would be more than enough leniency even by Jesus’ standards.
But he was wrong, as he often was. Rabbi Jesus answers Simon Peter, giving him an impossibly high number. “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Some translations of the text interpret the Greek phrase to mean seventy times seven, which ends up being 490 times. Either way, Rabbi Jesus is extending forgiveness well beyond the expected number.
Nor does he intend for Simon to attach a piece of paper on the refrigerator with a magnet to keep a running count of the number of grievances he has forgiven, awaiting the day when he doesn’t have to be bothered with forgiveness any longer. The absurdly high number means that forgiveness can’t and shouldn’t be tabulated.
And right there’s the rub in Rabbi Jesus’ answer. As we know only too well from experience, imperfect people living in an imperfect world are always causing harm and heartache to one another, if not worse. Even with the first instance, it is difficult to absolve the wrongdoer of the offense, even if we try to forgive and forget. With each succeeding instance, it is next to impossible for us to let go of the hurt and anguish that have come to us by way of another person’s misdeeds or maliciousness.
But, as we have come to expect from Rabbi Jesus, he puts before us a different way of living in the world than the one we are used to living. He uses the occasion to tell a parable or story that makes his point, a story that begins with these words, “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king,” a sure sign to us that Jesus is making the case for living in the world, not as we normally do, but in a way that conforms with the will of the Most High God.
He then tells the story about a servant who owed the king an impossibly high sum of money. Realizing the real possibility that he and his family will be sold into slavery because he can’t repay the loan, he falls on the mercy of the king. To quote, “At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said, ‘Be patient with me and I will pay you back in full.’ Moved with compassion, the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan.”
Scholars are quick to point out that the amount owed to the king–ten thousand talents–gets us into the zillions of dollars. A talent is the largest monetary unit in the Greek world and ten thousand is the highest Greek number. So, put together, it is an inestimable amount of money that the servant owes, too high to pay back in several lifetimes, much less a single one.
The ridiculously high dollar amount serves to show us the depth of the king’s mercy or compassion, as the text calls his response. In other words, his compassion is as deep as the deepest sea, his mercy comparable in depth to the hole in which the servant finds himself. The symmetry is intentional, the story wanting us to see the king’s mercy as well beyond the norm.
Also, the high dollar amount functions as a contrast in the second part of the parable. In that part, we find the same servant meeting up with a fellow servant who happens to owe him one hundred denarii, a miniscule amount when contrasted to the amount the first servant owed the king. And what does the forgiven servant do?
Just the opposite of what the king had done. Rabbi Jesus tells us that the “servant grabbed him, and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe.’” Even when the man begged for mercy, promising to repay the debt, the first servant showed not an iota of compassion, instead having the second man thrown into prison until he could pay back what he owed.
So, we have a study in contrast, not only in the amount of money owed somebody, but also in the response to the debt by the lender. In the first instance, the king forgives the humongous debt owed him by the servant; in the second instance, the same servant refuses to forgive another man who owes him a fraction of what he himself had owed to the king, the difference in dollars like the difference between an elephant and an ant.
Rabbi Jesus does not end the story there. He adds a third part, telling Simon that others who had seen what the servant did to the man went to the king to tell him of what had transpired. And, as we might guess, the king was none too happy, having forgiven the servant, only to see him fail to show any mercy to someone else. Jesus ends the story with the king saying to the servant, “I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?”
Whereupon, the king threw the unforgiving servant in prison. Rabbi Jesus adds this coda, “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.” The story as a whole leaves no doubt as to the Teacher’s position on forgiveness, fortifying his statement to Simon that he must forgive someone who has sinned against him “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
Hearing the story as Jesus tells it, we’re left with the impossible task of imitating the mercy of the Almighty, impossible because we’re not built that way, our notion of fairness more in line with the “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” school of fair play. Even on our best days, we’re sluggish in extending an olive branch. And on our bad days, we’re armed to the hilt with the weaponry of war.
Of course, Rabbi Jesus is never one to shirk away from issuing us a challenge, this one being one of his most demanding, the one we’re the least equipped to handle. All of which explains, I suppose, why he begins with the phrase, “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to,” the words making it clear to us the ways of God are not the ways of the world.
But that reality does not excuse or exonerate our failure to comply with the ways of God or his wishes for the world that he created. As Rabbi Jesus sees it, the Creator intended the world to be a place of harmony, not a place of disharmony; a place of unity, not a place of disunity; a place of quiet, not a place of disquiet. He infused the world with his own inner peace, building it as a paradise for our first parents, not as a prison where inmates segregate into gangs and cut-throats, out to destroy or debilitate each other.
Contrary to what we may initially want to believe, there is a certain realism in what Rabbi Jesus proposes. The simple truth of his words is everywhere for us to see. Failing to forgive, refusing to reconcile, insisting on keeping a running count on how other people have harmed us has resulted in a world perpetually at war, a world ruled by survival of the fittest, not by the rule of God.
And it is easy to see the results. Not only do countries war against each other, causing incalculable damage to human lives and a blight on human history, but internal conflicts continually tear at the fabric of societies far and wide, splintering states, cities, and neighborhoods, the acrimony on the street entering homes, damaging families beyond repair.
Without the willingness to reconcile, the only option is war. And rather than living as civilized peoples, we live as animals in the jungle, seeking only our self-interest, disinclined to care about others, especially anybody different from us in any way, their differences interpreted as an affront to our state, our status, or our position.
Hence, the realism in the words of Rabbi Jesus. Reconciliation is the only pathway to survival, individually and collectively. A world constantly at odds is not a world with a future, the mechanics of war eventually destroying everybody and everything in it. So Jesus is in many ways stating the obvious, unwelcome as his words might be. Ignore them and we are doomed. Attempt to live them out and we have a chance of surviving.
So long as we refuse reconciliation over conflict, we will continue to behave as the servant in the parable, a witless, merciless man creating wars everywhere he goes. Rabbi Jesus describes him well when he says “he took the other man by the throat,” an uncomfortable image for us to carry if we behave in the same way, all the while pretending to follow the ways of the Teacher, who instructed us to show boundless mercy.
I’ve told the story often, but it bears repeating. When the respected and acclaimed anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked to offer her opinion on the start of civilization, the moment when humans stepped out of the jungle and decided to care for one another, she answered with three words, “A healed femur.”
She explained that a healed femur meant the wounded had not been left behind, that others had stopped to care for him or her, and that there was now a sense of collective responsibility for one another, not just for oneself. A healed femur meant somebody cared, or as the king in the story did, showed compassion.
Not surprisingly, the famous anthropologist was saying in so many words the same thing that the Teacher named Jesus said. We can call ourselves civilized so long as we care for one another, forgive each other, and place more importance on our commonality than on our differences. The question both of them leave us with today is whether we are becoming more civilized, or less civilized.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 