The Amazing New Testament: Forgive us our debts
It is astonishing to realize how much of Jesus’ talking has to do with debt. Obviously, in Roman Palestine, debt was a very real, agonizing, often brutal reality. Forms weren’t mailed from the Roman Revenue Service, but strong men showed up demanding payment – and they’d break your knees if you came up short. The unfairness of it all, the desperate craving for mercy, proved to be Jesus’ best window into the hearts of his listeners when trying to talk about divine and human forgiveness.
In Matthew 18:23-35, Jesus compares the kingdom to the most absurd debt collection scenario imagineable. Jesus made up this profoundly true story: a certain king decided it was time to settle accounts, and one man owed him 10,000 talents. There is simple no way to translate this into modern dollars, as it is an absurd, laughable, ridiculous amount. The “talent” was the largest denomination of money in the ancient world. We can reckon 10,000 talents as roughly 100 million days’ wages for the average worker. 100 million days? Judeans in those days earned maybe 600 talents in a year! This lone individual, as Jesus tells the story, owes the king more money than was actually in circulation in Judea at the time! How could one get in such a hole? But why then did the king let so much debt accumulate before this reckoning?
Why does Jesus use such hilarious, impossibly extravagant hyperbole? Partly he wants to undercut, in advance, any counter-arguments, like if someone owed 4 talents and it was forgiven, then what about somebody who owed 6? No one could ever, ever owe 10,000 talents. Jesus also wants to blow the minds of his listeners with the immense largesse in the heart of God. How much can be forgiven? Not manageable, believable amounts of sin, but any, all, no matter how high the mountain, no matter how awful the infractions.
In Jesus’ laughable story, the king, knowing the man quite obviously cannot pay, concocts the idea of selling the debtor into slavery to repay the debt. But the most excellent slave in history would have gone for just a single talent. The debt would still be astronomical. So why not just go ahead and cancel the debt? And so, so very graciously, it is done. Massive forgiveness.
Jesus then introduces another character who owes a comparatively microscopically small sum – and yet he is shown no mercy by the very man who’d been forgiven a zillion times that amount himself! The crowd would chuckle, to be sure – and then, perhaps, realize that Jesus was underlining what God might expect of us.
How much do I owe God? I owe God plenty, an incalculably large amount, for the grief I have laid on the heart of God, by my sin, by simply ignoring God, by my failure to do and be what God needs me to be. I also owe God that much and even more for all the benefits, for God’s immense goodness in huge and quite small ways, every day, and throughout my life, and the life of the world.
How can such a debt be repaid? It cannot. We only fling ourselves on the mercy of God, and when it comes, we humbly give thanks and praise, and unstinting service.
We also look at any forgiveness required of us, from any one who has hurt or caused our little worlds to shiver, and we forgive. Forgiveness is the relinquishment of power. The power of blame. The power of fault-finding. The power of feeling “right.” Jesus taught us to pray “Forgive us our trespasses (or debts) as we forgive those who trespass against us (our debtors).” Who would dare to ask God to forgive us in the measure to which we have forgiven others? The man in Jesus’ parable couldn’t pray this prayer for a single moment. Can we?
So very Jesus, this story. Massive, unpayable debt is remitted, but then the one so stunningly and undeservedly off the hook cannot find a way to relieve the tiny bit owed him; such is human nature; such is the truth about us! But Jesus would have it otherwise.
Failure to forgive is not just bad form, or something God frowns upon. Failure to forgive is failure to be like God; failure to forgive digs out some massive gulf between ourselves and God. Frederick Buechner: “When somebody you’ve wronged forgives you, you’re spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience. When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you’re spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride. For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other’s presence.”