Storytime With Jesus: The Unforgiving Servant

Bad Estimators

Today we are talking about what stuff costs. Here in America we pride ourselves on knowing how much stuff costs, and we like to complain when those prices go up! “The Price is Right” is the ultimate show on which people hope to get the chance to guess how much a jar of peanut butter costs. If they’re right, they might win A NEW CAR! To see if you are one of those people who actually know what stuff costs, we’re going to play a quick game. Let’s see how well you know the prices of these products.

• Mountain Dew – 12 pack at Hy-Vee     ($9.49).
• 3D laser printer at Amazon (9” creations and Prime shipping)     ($168.99).
• Ford F-150 Lariat 4×4 from DeYarman Ford in Indianola     ($85,990).
• 3-bedroom house on 18 acres in Lucas County     ($498,000).

Sometimes things come at a cost, but not as directly as making a purchase. Here are a couple of situations that come at a cost.

• Crashing your CAR – (A long list of various costs that will continue).
• Forgetting Valentine’s Day – (She’ll never forget how you forgot!)

Some of you probably had a decent idea of what some of those items cost. On the other hand, some of you probably guessed way too high or way too low. As much as we like to think we know the costs of our culture, often we really have no idea.

As we jump into Story Time with Jesus today, we’ll look at how we estimate (and quite likely under-estimate or over-estimate) one of the most important costs in our lives. Based on how we live – how often we screw up, wrong God and others, act selfishly, and miss the mark of how God commanded us to live – how much debt do we owe to God? Really? Do you think anyone has any idea how much it would take to somehow repay God for all the ways we have wronged Him and others?

Some people think God has a giant, cosmic scale of justice. But if He did, do you think anyone is actually measuring their badness with any accuracy at all? I agree it’s odd to look at our sin as a monetary cost, but it’s an angle Jesus takes as He teaches about forgiveness in His parable of the Unforgiving Servant.

Our passage today, from Matthew 18, falls in the middle of a large section of Jesus’s teachings, and so we don’t know the exact context of the question Peter asked Jesus. Matthew must have wanted to make sure he included Jesus’s teaching on forgiveness in his Gospel, and so that is the topic we approach today: Forgiveness and the Cost of the Debt that is Canceled.

How Much Forgiveness is Enough?

Matthew 18: 21-22 – ²¹Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

²²Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.”

Our passage begins rather abruptly and directly: “Jesus, how much do we have to forgive others?”  The teaching within Judaism was that three times was enough to show a forgiving spirit. Rabbinic Judaism recognized that repeat offenders, after a certain point, may not really be repenting at all. This was based on passages about God’s limit to forgiveness, such as:

Job 33:29-30 – ²⁹God does all these things to a person – twice, even three times – ³⁰to turn them back from the pit, that the light of life may shine on them.

When Peter offers his answer of seven times, he is really trying to be the teacher’s pet. He is more than doubling the expectation of the law, and he lands at seven, the number widely understood to be the number of perfection, according to God. But Jesus pushes back and says that Peter’s answer is actually way too low. It’s not seven, but seventy-seven times!

Some of your translations may say “seventy times seven.” When you do the multiplication, you get 490. But if we start arguing about what the numbers mean here, we are losing the point. The actual, countable number of times a person can wrong you and you must forgive them is not the subject here at all. The point Jesus is making is that there is no count! If a person asks for your forgiveness, you extend it to them.

In Luke 17:4 Jesus teaches something very similar, saying specifically:

“Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”

Now, allow me to nerd out here for a moment, because many people probably miss the important connection between Jesus’s teaching on forgiveness here in the New Testament and a little-known story from the Old Testament about vengeance. See if you can spot the parallels I’m SURE Jesus knew He was echoing.

All the way back in Genesis 4, after Adam and Eve sin in Genesis 3, we have the story of Cain killing his brother, Abel, out of Jealousy. The consequence is that God banishes Cain to be a wanderer in a new land, but Cain worries that the banishment will basically be a death sentence because people will want to kill him.

Genesis 4:15 – But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.”

So God promises that the cost of killing Cain will be the vengeance of God seven times worse on the killer.

Then Genesis continues to tell about the next five generations from the family of Cain, coming to his descendant Lamech. Of all these descendants, Lamech is the only one to be quoted in the Bible.

Genesis 4:23-24 – ²³I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. ²⁴If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.

Do you see this fascinating parallel here? Where God says His justice for killing Can would be vengeance times seven, Lamech – a man thirsty for blood – says that is not nearly enough. Instead, he will mete out vengeance seventy-seven times.

And now, Jesus, flipping everything upside down, uses those exact numbers to describe not vengeance on wrong-doers, but forgiveness!

Word Shared for Forgiveness and Canceling a Debt

While Jesus answers Peter’s question directly, He continues by telling a parable to explain WHY a person should always extend forgiveness no matter how many times they have been sinned against.

Before we begin the parable, we must first discuss the Greek verb aphiemi. In our English Bibles we often translate aphiemi as “Forgive,” but it has a wide range of meanings including letting a wife go in divorce, or leaving a place. It’s important for the message today that we understand that this verb is also used for canceling or “forgiving” a debt that is owed. The wide range of translations for this word is important for our 21^st-Century ears because Jesus uses the dual meanings of forgiving sin and canceling debt for this one verb in the next parable.

Matthew 18:23-27 – ²³“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. ²⁴As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. ²⁵Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

^26“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, a ‘ and I will pay back everything.’ ²⁷The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.”

By telling this extraordinary story, Jesus begins to teach about forgiveness in the New Kingdom He is bringing to the world.

The King decides to settle accounts, and he must have started with the biggest accounts first. Here in the NIV it says 10,000 bags of gold! (The King James says 10,000 talents.) This is hard to bring into current-day currency because in Jesus’s time a “talent” was based on average wages of a daily laborer rather than tied to an actual weight of metal like gold or silver. Anyway, to give you an idea of the absurdity of this debt, based on a current average wage of $10 an hour, this poor guy owed the king FIVE BILLION DOLLARS! I don’t know about you, but if you owe someone 5 billion dollars, I would think you did something very, very wrong!

You have to love the servant’s hope. “Just give me a little more time and I’ll get you your money.” It’s a line straight from a Hollywood movie. It’s comical to consider this guy thinking he could get back SO MUCH money even if it took him the rest of his life.

Yet, the king – the master of this delusional man – took pity on him. He knew that his debt was overwhelming and could never be settled. So, out of an abundance of mercy, he canceled – he FORGAVE – the debt. The king wrote off this immense sum of money he was owed as if it had been PAID IN FULL.

At this point, I’m sure those listening to Jesus hear the clear connection He has just made to Peter’s question about forgiveness. But then, as Jesus continues telling the story, he moves the audience from the position of the king, who is forgiving the debt completely, to the position of the servant who had his debt forgiven.

Matthew 18:28-30 – ²⁸”But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servant who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. ²⁹His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ ³⁰But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.”

After the first servant is spared a life of slavery for himself and his entire family, he decides to go collect from those who owe HIM money. He finds a guy who owes him 100 silver coins – the equivalent of roughly $8,000 in today’s money. That’s not an insignificant amount, but it is nowhere near as extreme as his own debt. This was an amount that could reasonably be settled in a short amount of time.

However, this servant who was forgiven of so much debt shows none of that mercy to his fellow servant. Instead of offering him time to pay him back, he throws him in prison until every penny can be paid back.

Matthew 18:31-34 – ³¹”When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. ³²Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said. ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. ³³Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had on you?’ ³⁴In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.”

Those on the outside looking in were stunned at the lack of mercy shown by the one who had just had such an impossibly large debt canceled. So they told on him! As you would expect, the master who had been so merciful was outraged to see the servant who had received such a gift act so cruelly toward a fellow servant. So he decided to again hold the first servant’s massive debt against him, this time having him tortured in a cell until all he owed was paid back. Obviously, his sentence was for the remainder of his life.

Our Estimation Errors

This is a bit of a grim parable, but Jesus uses it to point out two common estimating errors we all are prone to.

• We underestimate our own sin.

Like this unforgiving servant, we owe an enormous, unpayable debt to God. We can’t put a numerical value to the debt we owe God, but suffice it to say that if we laid all our sin on the scales of justice, we could NEVER do enough good deeds to earn our way into Heaven.

First of all, that’s not how God works.

Second, even if He did, anybody who thinks giving a few dollars to homeless people and trying to be a “good person” will outweigh the debt of all their sin is woefully underestimating the cost of all their wrongdoing. Romans 6:23 tells us “The wages of sin is DEATH.” That is the cost of your sin: your very lifeblood! It can’t be purchased with a few good deeds. It’s not a light and trivial matter.

Every person needs to grasp from this parable that we are all like the unforgiving servant. Due to our sin, we all owe an insurmountably large debt to the King, and we could never repay that debt.

• We overestimate others’ sin.

While we may trivialize our own mistakes, shortcomings or even intentional bad behavior, it’s easy to keep a tally of other people’s sins and allow our minds to build that into a huge pile of debt.

1 Corinthians 13 – part of the Love Chapter, says “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”  But that’s not what unforgiving servants do. They keep score. They know exactly what each person has done to them, and they don’t ever let it go. Instead, they let this hurt fester and drive a wedge into the relationship. They let the debt – the cost of the sin against them – grow and grow in their hearts and minds. They have no interest in letting the sin go, in forgiving the person, or in erasing the tally of wrongs.

As you hear this story, you may realize this describes you! Perhaps you have a hard time letting go, forgiving people, and canceling their debt against you. Instead, no matter what they have done, it always feels like a HUGE deal, something you could NEVER forgive.

If that’s you, then Jesus’s conclusion to this parable must speak into your heart.

Forgive To Be Forgiven

• Matthew 18:35 – “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

We say that if you put faith in Jesus He will forgive your sins. But then we see a parable like this – or we read Jesus’s words from earlier in Matthew:

Matthew 6:14-15 – ¹⁴”For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵But if you do not forgive others for their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

These are really direct statements! They show that faith without forgiveness of others is no faith at all. Your faith in Jesus is proven by your forgiveness of others. You MUST forgive to be forgiven!

You must also understand what forgiveness is and isn’t.

Forgiveness is:

Forgiveness is an action of the heart, a decision to refuse to live in the past, and a conscious choice to release others from their sin so you can be set free.

Forgiveness allows you to rediscover the other person’s humanity. Rather than seeing the person as an enemy to be vanquished, you surrender your right to get even, and see that person as a sinner in need of forgiveness.

Forgiveness means you give up any hatred or bitterness, knowing you have reached total forgiveness when you are able to ask God to bless that person.

Forgiveness is NOT:

Forgiveness is not approving of someone’s action, or making excuses for someone’s bad behavior. It is not pretending evil never took place, or denying that someone has repeatedly tried to hurt you. Forgiveness is not forgetting that the wrong was done, or being required to restore the relationship to the same place it was before the injustice was done to you. Forgiveness is not allowing the person to avoid all the negative consequences of their sin, be it legal or relational, by hiding the sin from those who should know.

Conclusion

A sermon on forgiveness is pretty straightforward to prepare; but, as C. S. Lewis said, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive.” If you have ever been hurt deeply, you know how difficult it is to actually put these words of Jesus into practice

This command to forgive doesn’t give you an option. You can’t simply say it’s too hard and you can’t do it. You don’t get to act like Lamech and mete out your own vengeance seventy times seven. You have been commanded to forgive others and trust God with the justice.

Your own forgiveness is riding on your willingness to forgive others, and perhaps your inability to forgive the debts of others demonstrates that you fail to see clearly the magnitude of the debts Jesus has forgiven you.

Praise God, the miracle of forgiving somebody who has hurt you deeply does not rest on your wounded shoulders. Ask the Holy Spirit – the power of God inside you – to help you begin to release, to cancel, and to forgive the debt of those who have hurt you. When you feel like it is too much to do, ask for God’s strength. He will provide, and the healing that lies on the other side of forgiveness will make the difficult struggle seem worthwhile.

God has forgiven each us of so incredibly much, we must follow His lead and forgive others.