Then
came Peter to him, and said,
Lord,
how oft shall my brother sin against me,
and
I forgive him? till seven times?
Jesus
saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times:
but, Until seventy times seven.
It is difficult to escape
the enormity of Jesus’ answer to St. Peter, just as it is the gravity of the parable
Jesus used to emphasize it. I doubt the
average fisherman or day laborer whom Jesus called into His service was
particularly gifted at mathematics, but they could immediately grasp the significance
of Jesus’ use of symbolic numbers. Peter,
in asking if he should forgive someone who worked evil against him up to seven
times, was making what he must have thought was a generous overture (who would
let someone walk into their house seven times and steal their things, and
forgive them when they repented after each theft?) Jesus corrected this perspective of an
ostensibly pious human, by granting divine perspective—seven offerings of
forgiveness might seem gratuitous to a person, but in relation to God and His
grace, such an offering is in reality vanishingly small.
The parable which
followed showed this clearly. A steward
who owed his master 10,000 talents of gold, was brought in for a
reckoning. This steward must have had
control over much of his master’s resources, as this was more money than anyone
could hope to earn in several lifetimes—perhaps like a hedge fund manager who controls
a billion dollars of Warren Buffet’s vast fortune. Imagine that hedge fund manager lost, either
by neglect, malfeasance, or corruption, a billion dollars of his boss’ money,
and was called into the office to give an account, surrounded by attorneys and federal
officers. His boss would have the right
to have this wretch’s whole personal inventory and assets seized and sold to
pay a fraction of the debt, and the hedge fund manager would likely go to
prison for the rest of his life. In the
ancient world, the penalties were even more severe, where the perpetrator could
be put into slave labor in the prisons until they worked off the debt, which in
this case, they could never accomplish.
Such was the debt and the guilt of the steward before his master, that
all he could do was plead for mercy, with vain promises to pay back what he
knew he could not live long enough to repay.
In a radical and shocking
act of grace, the master forgave the steward the debt; which is to say more
precisely, the master took the penalty of the steward upon himself. 10,000 talents were still owed, but the master
paid it out of his own resources, accepting the loss on his servant’s
behalf. Can anyone imagine that
happening to the hedge fund manager who lost or stole a billion dollars from
his boss? And yet, this is the image of
divine mercy and grace that Jesus presented to St. Peter—of forgiveness for a
servant’s unrepayable debt, with the suffering and loss taken by the wronged
master. Such an idea was as shocking
then, as it is now.
And yet, that’s not the
end of the story. That same servant,
forgiven in radical grace, went out and seized a fellow servant of the same
master, demanding what amounted to about 1/3 of a year’s wages. Certainly not a small amount of money, but
orders of magnitude smaller than what he was just forgiven. Instead of mercy when begged, he threw his
fellow servant into the prisons to work off the debt, imposing suffering and
misery on this servant and his family until the debt was repaid. Of course, with his own debt forgiven before
his master, this would all be profit to him now, and he could wallow in the
money without fear of losing it to his creditor.
When word of this reached
the master’s ears, He was implacably angry, and summoned the unforgiving
servant into his court. Not only was the
servant handed over to the debtor’s prison but also to the torturers, from who’s
grasp he would not escape until he had paid back every penny of his unpayable
debt. The image is one of the torments
of hell, where the eternal suffering of the damned continues until the eternity
of their debt is repaid—which is to say, that their calamity is forever. The steward who had received grace and mercy
from his master for sins against the divine majesty, who then exacted judgment
upon his fellow servant for sins against his own person, is then given back the
justice due his crimes. Mercy denied is
justice received. Jesus ended His parable
with a warning to His disciples, that the same fate would befall each of them,
if they did not earnestly forgive their neighbors their trespasses.
So, too, we find
ourselves before God. The debt of sin
and evil we each have is infinite and unpayable by human labors, no matter how
many lifetimes we might be given to do so.
We are the stewards who have squandered the riches of life and time and
prosperity, of every good gift we have received from our Creator, and who must
stand before the judgment seat of God to give an account of our negligence, our
malfeasance, and our betrayal. It is we
who have no other escape but to plead for mercy, to offer our lives a living
sacrifice in our Master’s service, and to beg to be spared from the eternal
fires of hell.
And it is to us that God responds
with unimaginable grace and mercy, taking our debt upon Himself in the person
of His Son. The debt against the divine
majesty must be paid, and instead of demanding justice upon us, He satisfies
justice against Himself, so that He might offer forgiveness, life, and salvation
to all who repent and believe in Him. This
forgiveness is one of incalculable magnitude, an eternal debt for every soul,
settled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Here, even the image of seventy times seven
pales by comparison, when we look upon the sins of others against us, and
realize that there is no wrong we can suffer which amounts to the wrongs we
have been freely forgiven. Thus we
become the ambassadors of grace from a gracious King, offering to every soul
the radical forgiveness of Jesus, knowing that it is by this grace alone,
through faith alone, in Jesus alone, that our peace with God is made.
As
the recipients of this radical grace, it is both our gift and our duty to
forgive, lest we find ourselves demanding justice upon others who have wronged
us, only to receive justice instead from the God to whom we owe our every
breath. This grace, this unfathomable,
healing grace, is the gift of life to all who would repent and believe in
Jesus, for which we are sent to every sinner who needs it as desperately as we
do. In this grace we surrender justice
to the Cross of Jesus, that grace and mercy may abound to us all, and that we
all might live forever in Him, forgiven and free. Amen.
