The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - September 14

The Parable of the How-in-the-world-could-he-have-forgotten-what-it-meant-to-be-forgiven Servant
Matthew 18:21-35

People talk about this morning’s Gospel reading as a difficult parable. Difficult to digest, maybe; it is not difficult to understand. But it seems difficult because people fall into the trap of making the parable an allegory. In an allegory everything is a direct stand in or representation for something else. One for one. When we treat parables as allegories, we inevitably treat all father or king figures as stand ins for God.

It’s very hard figure out the king in this parable. And definitely difficult to digest some of what he does if you are imagining the king represents God. But parables are not allegories, they are worlds that we enter into. Once in the world of the parable, Jesus means to challenge or to reorient perceptions. In the world of this parable, the king is part of the scenery. He is someone who stimulates the real action of this parable which revolves around the slave. For whatever reason, maybe just because he was human, the slave was indebted 10 thousand talents to his master.

Evidently one talent was about 130 lbs. of silver and was the equivalent to about fifteen years of a laborer’s wages. Which means that the servant owed his master about 150,000 years of labor. In other words, he owed a debt that he would never be able to pay back… in his lifetime, in his children’s lifetime, in his children’s children’s lifetimes.

That’s what he was forgiven! That is the debt that was wiped away.

How could he forget what that meant to him? How could be forget what that felt like? To be freed of such a monumental debt?

I think that’s what this parable is about. It’s about knowing and remembering that we have been forgiven. It is a jarring reminder of the immeasurable magnitude of what we have been forgiven. And a reminder to remember. To not forget what we have been forgiven.

As the parable continues, a fellow slave owed the first slave 100 denarii. A denarius, by comparison to a talent, was worth about one day’s wage, which meant that the second servant owed the forgiven one about a hundred days of labor – not a trivial debt, but a totally different world from the first.

This parable is often called the parable of the unforgiving servant. Remember, Jesus did not name his parables. I’d rather call it the parable of the ungrateful servant. Or the parable of the how-in-the-world-could-he-have-forgotten-what-it-meant-to-be-forgiven servant? How could he have forgotten what it meant to have his own debt relieved?

Jesus tells this parable in response to Peter’s question. Peter asks Jesus: How often should we forgive? Probably trying to please Jesus, Peter suggests what probably seems to him an extravagant amount. Seven times? Should we forgive one another seven times? Aren’t I a good disciple, Jesus? But Jesus responds to Peter: You’re looking at it all wrong. Not seven times, but seventy times. Or some translations say seven times seventy times.

Jesus seems to be implying to Peter and to us that we’re keeping the wrong ledger. Peter, and the first slave (and often us) are focused on the ledger of who is indebted to us. Who has wronged us. Who has sinned against us. Those are the accounts we keep. And in the parable first slave was so intent on that ledger he found himself living a life of eternal torture. Self-inflicted torture. Because his focus was only what he was owed.

I expect Jesus would like us to throw away the ledger book all together. God has. But if we can’t quite do that, can we try to keep it differently? Can we keep track of how many times God has forgiven us? How many times and how much we have been forgiven? Remember that. Be mindful of that.

How often should we forgive one another? As often as God has forgiven us…

We are often encouraged to count our blessings. That’s a good thing to do, but what about also counting our forgivenesses?

I know I’ve said this before, and I’m preaching to myself as well… But I wonder if we’d do better at remembering and being mindful of being forgiven if we were more intentional about asking for forgiveness from God. Rather than bringing that vague, but easily summoned, feeling of general unworthiness to God… over and over again in our own prayers or at the time of the general confession… Try to keep track of specific sins, negligences and offenses. And confess to God our specific sins that need forgiving. Not to make ourselves feel miserable, but to increase our awareness of the immense magnitude of God’s forgiveness.

In the Lord’s Prayer we pray: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Or, in the contemporary form: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. It’s good that the prayer links the two—our seeking forgiveness and offering forgiveness.

But the Lord’s Prayer almost makes it sound like God forgiving us is conditional upon us forgiving others. As we have forgiven others, God will you please forgive us. But this parable reminds us that it is clearly the other way around! We have been forgiven immeasurable amounts of sin and debt.

God has already forgiven us immeasurable offenses. Remembering that, starting from there, can we not graciously forgive the lesser hurts against us?