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. That is why the kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who decided to settle accounts with his servants. When he began the accounting, a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount. Since he had no way of paying it back, his master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his property, in payment of the debt. 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. When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants, who owed him a much smaller amount. He seized him and started to choke him, demanding, ‘Pay back what you owe.’ Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he had the fellow servant put in prison until he paid back the debt. Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master and reported the whole affair. His master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked 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?’ Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt. So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.” (Matthew 18.21-35)
For the most part, we are people obsessed with numbers. Yards in football. Goals in hockey. Home runs in baseball. We use numbers to orient our days. Minutes until we get up in the morning. Hours until we go home in the afternoon. Days until the weekend. Take numbers out of our lives, and we’d be lost. Our recipes depend on careful measurements. Our cars run on gallons of gas in the tank. Our checks clear the bank based on the dollars we have in our account.
So, we really aren’t surprised when we hear Simon Peter attach a certain number to the times for forgiveness in the passage from Matthew’s gospel that we hear on this Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. He’s simply doing what we’ve all done in one way or another. We quantify. We keep count. We put a number to everything important. The years until our mortgage is paid off. The months before our kids graduate from college. The days until Christmas. In a real way, numbers rule our lives.
Peter is being realistic when he asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” It’s not as if he hasn’t given some thought to it. He has. The Jewish standard was three times, based on the words of the prophet Amos, “For three transgressions, I will forgive you. For four, I will not turn away from its punishment.”
Being alongside Jesus long enough to figure out he has a bleeding heart for sinners, Peter does some quick math and decides to double the standard and add one more for good measure. Surely that number will get a nod of the head from Jesus. But it doesn’t. Jesus answers him, “I say to you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Sometimes the verse is translated as seventy times seven. Either way, Jesus’ answer is clear enough. You can’t count that high.
For good measure, knowing Peter is slow on the draw, Jesus offers a story to seal the deal. The parable he tells, often called the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, imagines a servant who owes his master a huge amount. Our translation doesn’t spell it out in the exact terms that the gospel does, which states he owed him ten thousand talents. Our text simply uses the phrase a huge amount probably because the currency doesn’t mean anything to us.
But even the phrase “a huge amount” doesn’t come close. The word astronomical is closer to the truth. Or, better yet, he couldn’t have paid it off in a lifetime. Jesus is obviously making an exaggeration for a purpose. And that purpose is shown to us soon enough when the king forgives the debt and the servant turns around and demands repayment from a fellow servant for a much lesser amount, one hundred denarii, which ends up being the wages for working a hundred days.
Rather than show the same leniency to his fellow servant that he had received from the master, the first servant shows severity, going for the jugular, and has the poor man thrown into prison until the debt is repaid. Others, seeing the lack of forgiveness by the first servant, inform the master of what has happened to the second servant, resulting in the master’s anger.
He summons the unforgiving servant and says to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant even as I had mercy on you?” It doesn’t end there and it doesn’t end well for the man. The parable ends with the line, “His master was angry and delivered him to the tormentors until he should pay all that was due to him.”
Wanting no confusion on Peter’s part, Jesus offers him the moral of the story, telling him, “So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don’t each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds.” Apparently, Peter has nothing to say, stunned by the story and the numbers rattling in his brain. Matthew concludes the episode in this way, “When Jesus delivered these words, he left Galilee and went to the district of Judea across the Jordan.”
Honestly, the trouble that we have with the passage is that it is too clear, too understandable. We can find no wiggle room that would allow us to navigate through it with counter-arguments or with our perfect logic. We’re left with a simple, straight-forward, steadfast rule. “If you don’t forgive your brother, neither will the Heavenly Father forgive you.”
If we’ve paid attention along the way, it really isn’t a new message from Jesus. Already in the Sermon on the Mount, he concluded the now famous Lord’s Prayer with the words, “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.” The story he now tells Peter is simply a dramatization of the same teaching.
Likewise, earlier Jesus also issued the warning to his disciples that “the measure with which you measure will be measured out for you.” So, he’s not suddenly offering a radically new idea to Peter and the others. He’s saying in another way the same things he’s said before, offering the same warning to the disciples, wanting them to understand that those who place limits on others will have limits placed on them by God.
Here, we want to recall that this passage is one part of a series that began with the parable of the lost sheep who is sought and found by the Good Shepherd, followed by the means to bring back into the fold an errant brother who has drifted away from the community, concluding with this parable of the unforgiving servant that Jesus offered in response to Peter’s question about putting a number on forgiveness.
Looked at as a whole, the same point is being made over and over again. The first point is the radical mercy of God, exemplified by the Good Shepherd who searches out the lost soul, and the mercy of the man trying to find the means to bring back into the assembly a fallen brother, and by the master who forgives the humongous debt out of pity for the servant. The through line that is visible from start to finish in the sequence is the compassion of God.
In the parable, Jesus described the master as having been moved with compassion when he forgave the debt owed to him. Over time we have watered down the meaning of compassion, making it something not even in the same category, thinking of it in terms of feeling sorry for someone in trouble. But the literal meaning of the Greek word that is translated as compassion is a deep stirring in the bowels. In other words, it’s a feeling so strong it is like a punch in the guts.
What that means is that, seeing us in distress, God is bent over in pain, in anguish, and he does all in his power to bring us solace, a second chance. His compassion is not a one-and-done, but is done innumerable times because we are children who find ourselves in a fix innumerable times, fragile, forgetful, and falling short even on our best days. Each time, God is moved by compassion to forgive, to find an answer, and to fix the mess.
As difficult as it is for us to understand, his compassion is limitless. The Heavenly Father doesn’t keep count and doesn’t have a scorecard on our wins and our losses. Our debt to him may be astronomical, but his compassion also is astronomical. Try as we may–and we do on a daily basis–we cannot exhaust the Father’s patience, his mercy, and his love.
But there is one catch and that is the whole point of Jesus’ message. If God places no limits on his mercy to us, then we cannot place a limit on our mercy to others. As he is willing to show mercy to us again and again, then we must be prepared to show mercy to other people again and again. If we fail to forgive as he has forgiven us, then we will find ourselves in the same boat as the unforgiving servant, suffering the consequences of our hard-heartedness and of our refusal to show compassion to others.
Why does Jesus insist that we do not keep a tally, a running score, or a cut-off point? Because compassion, if it’s the real stuff, not the watered-down kind, isn’t quantifiable. Compassion doesn’t come in units. It’s either a complete punch in the gut or it isn’t. Unlike the standard scale for measuring pain, 0-10, compassion is always 10 or it isn’t compassion. There is no such thing as having a little compassion, anymore than there is being a little pregnant.
God is all in and he wants his children to be all in. Compassion is supposed to be a family trait, passed down to us by our heavenly Father, and showing up repeatedly in us his children. It is not without significance that Jesus ends the passage today with the word “brother.” “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.” It’s the same word we heard last Sunday when Jesus began that lesson with the words, “If your brother sins against you.”
Compassion is what keeps the human family together, brother with brother, sister with sister. Inexhaustible compassion. Made of mud and spit, fallible and failures all of us, we can survive only if we continuously show compassion to one another. We stick together, mutual compassion being the glue that binds us together. Jesus lived it and he wants us to live it.
In Frederick Buechner’s novel, “Brendan,” he offers an imaginary story of the life of Saint Brendan who undertakes a journey on the sea that covers years, the less-than-perfect man encountering all manner of men and things along the way. The story is narrated by Finn who accompanies Brendan. At one point in his journey, they meet a crippled man named Gildas. At first neither saw the missing limb. Buechner writes:
“For the first time we saw he wanted one leg. It was gone from the knee joint down. He was hopping sideways to reach for his stick in the corner when he lost his balance. He would have fallen in a heap if Brendan hadn’t leapt forward and caught him. ‘I’m as crippled as the dark world,’ Gildas said. ‘If it comes to that, which one of us isn’t, my dear?’ Brendan said.”
“Gildas with but one leg. Brendan sure he’d misspent his whole life entirely. Me that had left my wife to follow him and buried our only boy. The truth of what Brendan said stopped all our mouths. We was cripples all of us. For a moment or two there was no sound but the bees. ‘To lend each other a hand when we’re falling,’ Brendan said. ‘Perhaps that’s the only work that matters in the end.’”
Buechner’s story is the perfect answer to Jesus’ parable of the Unforgiving Servant. What the unforgiving servant failed to see Brendan saw. And that one thing was the necessity of mutual compassion, or, as Brendan described it, “To lend each other a hand when we’re falling.” Having heard Jesus’ parable, we know he also would agree with Brendan when he said, “That’s the only work that matters in the end.”
–Jeremy Myers
