A Hard Saying of Jesus (Matthew 18.21-35)
If you're using the Daily Devotional Guide for your daily bible readings (and I hope you are!), this morning you read Matthew 18.21-35. This reading is one of the very difficult parables of Jesus that we tend to gloss over, explain away, or ignore.
In this parable, a king forgives a man who owed him an inconceivable amount of money: 10,000 talents. Now, some study bibles will do the math to compute exactly how much money this is in current dollars (the ESV Study Bible computes it at nearly $6 billion). What is more shocking, however, is that a) a talent was the largest known denomination of money at the time and b) 10,000 is the largest numeral for which a Greek term existed. In other words, it is not nearly as important to try and run the numbers as it is to realize this is the largest sum of money that could readily be described in that day. One scholar says the combined effect of these two terms together “is like our 'zillions.' What God has forgiven his people is beyond human calculation.”
After being forgiven an incalculable amount of money, this same servant refuses to forgive a fellow servant who owed him a much, much, much smaller sum. Even after that fellow servant begged him for more time to pay back what he owed—not even suggesting he forgive the debt but insisting that he would pay it in full—the forgiven servant refused to have compassion on the other. At the end of the parable, the king revokes his forgiveness and has the servant tortured until he could pay back the exorbitant sum, which of course he never could.
The hard lesson comes at the end. Jesus says, “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.” In other words, if we do not sincerely forgive others their sins and trespasses against us, God will not forgive us. Said differently, a lack of compassionate forgiveness toward other people demonstrates that we have not received God's forgiveness and saving grace.
That's not to say this is easy. This is possibly one of the hardest teachings of Jesus.
That's not to say we won't try to make excuses, exemptions, or special cases to try and justify our hardheartedness. None of these, of course, stand up to Jesus' very clear words here.
That's not to say we won't try to rationalize our unwillingness to forgive by shifting the focus on others and saying, “You don't know what they did to me!” But shifting the blame to justify ourselves is only ducking what Jesus is teaching us here.
That's not to say we forgive people and necessarily reconcile with them. Forgiveness and reconciliation are two very different things. Jesus is not talking about reconciliation here. That may or may not be possible depending upon the sin.
The bottom line good news is this: God will forgive us our impossible debt. At the same time, he expects us to forgive others their debts against us without excuse. This is only possible by grace. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”