Romans 14. 1 – 12
Matthew 18. 21 – 35
Fr Alex
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I wonder how many times you’ve said those few words – words of course from the Lord’s Prayer. Perhaps thousands of times.
They’re so familiar, and so simple to say. But the concept of Christian forgiveness is actually one of the hardest aspects of our faith. And this is what Jesus addresses today in this parable.
The first thing to remember is that parables don’t exist simply to teach us moral lessons. If we treat them like Aesop’s fables, they lose so much of their power. They exist, rather, to show us what God is like – how God interacts with his creation, and how we can live in response to that contact with God. And today’s parable is no different.
It starts with a king who wishes to settle accounts with his slaves. One slave owes an incredibly vast sum – 10,000 talents.
The daily wage for a labourer of the time was 1 denarius. One talent was made up of 6000 denarii – about 16 years’ wages. So if you keep doing the sums, it would take this slave more than 160,000 years of continuous labour to pay back the 10,000 talents he owes.
It’s a totally ridiculous sum. But the value – and of course the question of how he could possibly have racked up such a debt – that’s beside the point. The point is, he never had the faintest chance of ever being able to pay back this money that he owed.
And yet, when the slave falls on his knees and pleads for mercy, the king extravagantly forgives him, and cancels his debt.
If this is a parable about God, then the teaching for us is clear. Like the slave, we have no hope of repaying humanity’s debt to God for all the sins and sufferings of the world. God would’ve been well within his rights, like the king, to do away with us altogether.
But instead, he offers us mercy – extravagant and unprecedented mercy – and at great cost to himself. The cost to the king in forgiving the slave’s debt was enormous – 10,000 talents. The cost to God in settling accounts with his creation, was the death of his beloved Son.
Beginning with the forgiveness of the cross, the parable ends by looking forward to our judgement at the end of times. The slave who had received such mercy, refused to forgive his fellow slave who owed him so much less, and came to a terrible end.
If we acknowledge the mercy we have received, but do not act mercifully ourselves, we will face a merciless future. How can we expect God to continue to “forgive us our trespasses,” if we refuse to forgive the trespasses of others?
And so the challenge for us is how we live in the present, between the cross and our judgement. And we have to acknowledge that the reality of living in this present time can be really hard. As I said at the beginning, the concept of Christian forgiveness is one of the most difficult aspects of our faith.
Because when we are wronged, whether it’s in lots of little ways, or in terrible and destructive ways, the cost to us in forgiving that debt can feel too great.
There’s an acknowledgement of that in the parable – the smaller amount that the second slave owed was nothing like 10,000 talents, but it was still more than three months’ wages. It would’ve been very costly to the first slave to forgive all that debt.
But of course we don’t live in parables, we live in real life – and we live with real hurt, and real pain. And we must also remember that our attempts at forgiveness are but a reflection of the perfect forgiveness of the cross, or indeed our baptism, or when we make our confession. We are not God.
As I offer you some reflections on this call to forgiveness, I don’t think it’s helpful to try to say what forgiveness is; because the complexity of forgiveness will look very different for each of us. But perhaps we can think about what forgiveness is not, based on today’s parable.
The first thing to say is that forgiveness is not… optional. Jesus places no limit on the amount of times we must forgive. And the parable begins – our whole life begins – at the starting point of God’s forgiveness. Any action of ours that is not working towards forgiveness is an action away from God.
But forgiveness is not… a quick or easy process. It might take seven attempts, it might take seventy-seven attempts, or even more, to be in a position where we might forgive. And that’s as it should be.
We can do ourselves even more harm if we rush to forgive someone when we don’t mean it – or when they’re not ready to receive it. God’s forgiveness of us was not cheap, far from it. Neither should ours be.
And so forgiveness is not… letting people get away with it. Mercy follows justice. The slave fell on his knees, acknowledged the weight of his debt, and asked for mercy. If we can truly forgive, we must know that the debt has been accepted, and that forgiveness has been asked for.
And in a similar way, forgiveness is not… the same as reconciliation. There’s a story of an old man on his deathbed, and his wife pleading with him: “Please, John, forgive your brother, after all these years.” “Ok,” he says, “write to him, and tell him I forgive him. But only send it after I’ve died.”
To forgive someone doesn’t oblige you to welcome them back into your life. Sometimes it’s only in the life to come, gathered into the perfect union of God, that the deepest divisions can ever come to be reconciled.
And so we can take encouragement, that forgiveness is not… just down to us. It is something that God works with us in bringing about.
So often forgiveness feels impossible because the wrong we have received has become part of our identity. It has destroyed part of who we are, or who we wanted to be. But Jesus encourages us to reimagine our identity, with him.
To see ourselves not merely as people who have been wronged, but as people to whom such love and mercy have been shown; people who have been given the gift of freedom and life, beyond our deserving.
If any of this resonates with you at all, then I pray that you may be inspired and strengthened by the promise of this parable. May we all rejoice in the love and mercy we have received, and receive afresh every time we fall on our knees before God.
And may we know that, while the demands of our faith are often hard, God is with us, working his loving purposes within us; that nothing is impossible with him, and he never asks more of us than we can achieve. Amen.