Matthew 18:21-35
Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.
“Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
A FEW DETAILS ABOUT THE TEXT
A Protocol for Addressing Sin
The text that comes before this parable is Matthew 18:15-20, in which Jesus lays out an order of operation for when a brother sins against you. The word “sin” is important. This is not about clearing up a misunderstanding. This is when there has been a real sin. When a brother has been offensive, aggressive, bullying, dishonest, gossipy, or immoral toward you. By brother I also mean, of course, a sister; but throughout I will stick to the biblical term “brother” (you will see why later).
Jesus does not want his disciples to paper over sin and act like it never happened. He lays out steps with the end goal of the process being forgiveness—“gaining your brother.”
Let’s pause here and say “Thank you, Jesus!” I don’t know of another religion where followers are given a protocol for addressing sin within the community. Sin tears churches apart. But if you will follow Jesus’ plan for when a brother or sister sins against you, with forgiveness as the end goal, we will be stronger.
That’s the preceding text and it’s important to keep it in mind when considering the text before us.
Peter’s Math
After Jesus’ teaching on addressing sin, Peter connects some dots. If I do this process, then I will be in the position of having to forgive my brother—maybe a lot. He comes to Jesus and asks, “What’s a reasonable cap on this?” Peter’s suggestion of seven times is him being generous.
Jesus replies with, “seventy-seven times.” This is not meant to be an exact number, but forgiveness beyond all calculation. Whoever counts has not forgiven at all.
When Dawn and I were going through premarital counseling, we saw a video where a husband and wife each kept a ledger of each other’s behavior. When the husband brought home flowers, she wrote down 10 points and he was pleased. But when she noted that he had forgotten to take out the garbage, she deducted five points to his dismay. Pulling out his ledger, he removed five points for her failure to pick up something at the store. And so on.
Jesus’ point is that forgiveness cannot exist in a counting environment. That’s not how life in his Father’s kingdom works. To illustrate this, Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant.
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant
Jesus says that the kingdom may be compared to a king settling accounts with his servants. Two things here:
First, we have to acknowledge the unequal relationship between a king and a servant. The servant is inferior to the king, and there is no one higher than the king.
Someone in authority settling accounts may remind us of another parable: the parbale of the talents. This is where the master gives talents to servants who are responsible for multiplying those talents and, later, the master settles accounts with them. That means that we shouldn’t think of this servant as a household slave, but a subordinate official who has been entrusted to invest the king’s money.
And he does a horrible job. Whether by mismanagement or embezzlement, he owes ten thousand talents.
A talent was worth somewhere around 20 years of a laborer’s wages. We’re talking ten thousand talents. The amount is fantastic. It is beyond all calculation. One commentator said it was ten times more than Herod the Great collected in taxes in a single year. If you can outspend the government 10 to 1, you’re at a whole other level.
So his debt is completely unpayable. His promise to pay it all back is absurd. It isn’t realistic. He’s going to lose everything: his wife, his children, himself. That’s why it’s important to note that the master doesn’t simply grant him more time; he cancels the debt. It’s gone.
The Fellow Servant
The servant walks out free, but finds a fellow servant. This term “fellow servant” is used four times in the parable. Unlike the king and the servant who are unequals, the freed servant and his fellow servant share the same line on the org chart.
The fellow servant owes the equivalent of three months wages or so. Jesus wants you to compare the immeasurable amount forgiven to the first servant and the comparatively insignificant amount owed by the fellow servant. Don’t ignore it.
The fellow servant makes almost exactly the same plea as the first servant, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you,” but he is refused.
The Parable’s Disturbing End
After the king finds out what his servant has done, he unforgives the debt he had cancelled and hands him over to the jailers (the word could also be understood as “torturers”) until everything is paid back. Which can’t happen. You can’t pay back debt when in jail or under torture.
Jesus’ summary statement in 18:35, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart,” takes us back to the Lord’s Prayer, where he says, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
In both cases, Jesus makes unmistakably clear that our own forgiveness depends upon our willingness to forgive others.
TRACING THE BIBLICAL ECHOES
The Brother
When we hear “brother,” we should hear the echo of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, which is the beginning of what might be called “brother problem.” The brother problem recurs throughout Genesis with Isaac/Ishmael; Jacob/Esau; Joseph and his brothers; Israel/Judah, etc.
The Cain and Abel story is short–only 16 verses. Yet, the word “brother” occurs seven times. See how it punctuates the two verses below.
Genesis 4:8-9
Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”
So we want to keep in mind that when Peter uses the word “brother,” which Jesus had used in his process for confronting sin, it is a word with a long, tragic history.
Seven and seventy-seven
The number seven itself is significant. It is the number of the days of Creation ending in rest. It points to how God made the world.
Peter suggests that a reasonable cap on forgiving a brother who sins against him would be seven times. It’s the best number one could think of, but it contains echoes of the Cain and Abel story. Not only is “brother” said seven times in that story, but anyone who killed Cain would be avenged sevenfold.
In Jesus’ reply, we see another connection to Cain. One of Cain’s descendents is Lamech, and Lamech says to his two wives:
Genesis 4:23-24
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold,
then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.
Here’s the really important thing about Lamech’s poem. He killed a young man for hurting him. The retribution was disproportionate to the offense.
To summarize these echoes: we have “brother” mentioned seven times in the Cain and Abel story. Also, Cain is to be avenged sevenfold if he is killed, and Lamech avenged seventy-seven times. In the Gospel of Matthew, we have Peter willing to forgive a brother seven times, and Jesus saying not seven, but seventy-seven times.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Beyond Cain and Lamech
Peter listens to Jesus’ teaching on when a brother sins against you and does some figuring. If I do this, I’m going to have to forgive my brother a lot. But when is enough enough? Won’t my brother just repeatedly take advantage of me, knowing that I have to forgive him every time he does?
We wonder that, don’t we? Isn’t that what gives us pause when hearing Jesus’ teaching?
So Peter uses the number that points to the days of Creation ending in Sabbath rest and says, “If any number points to what God intends for forgiveness, it has to be seven. But as Jesus hears “brother” and “seven,” he remembers Cain killing his brother, Abel.
And Jesus says to Peter, “Well if you’re going to bring up Cain, why not go all the way and surpass Lamech?”
Lamech said, “If Cain’s revenge is seven times, then if someone kills me, may I be avenged immeasurably! May my vengeance never cease but go on and on forever upon whoever does it.”
Jesus says rather than match Cain’s number of curses with forgiveness, go all the way and match Lamech with unlimited forgiveness. Because that is what God has done for you.
The Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees
Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 5:20: “For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The kingdom of God begins where the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees ends. The scribes and Pharisees count. The kingdom of God does not count.
Forgiving seven times—maybe the scribes and Pharisees would do that. Forgiving seventy-seven times? You only do that when you have aligned yourself with God’s kingdom and live within his gracious care.
The Logic of the Kingdom
At which point Peter’s jaw probably plummeted. Unlimited forgiveness? How do you that? What are the safeguards?
So Jesus tells this parable. And when Jesus tells parables about what the kingdom of God is like, we need to recognize that it doesn’t work according to our logic. It works according to the Father’s logic.
And what is the kingdom of God like? How can we describe it? Well, it’s like this king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.
Impossible Debt
And at this point, we need to state something that has probably been in our minds all along: the lesson of this parable is massively obvious.
Here it is on its face: you have sinned against God. You owed Him a debt you could never possibly repay. All your best efforts to be holy, all your service, all your money, all your spiritual disciplines, all your devotion to the church—it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the offense of your sin against the maker of heaven and earth.
But when you cried out for mercy and forgiveness, this king, the highest authority, had pity on you. From his seat, the highest seat in the universe, God forgave your sin according to the blood of his Son, Jesus. And you are free of that debt.
The Unforgiving Servant
We think of that servant walking out of the king’s presence amazed by his sudden good fortune. So when we picture him then choking his fellow servant and demanding payment, we might think, “Naw, nobody would do that. I wouldn’t do that.”
And if you think that, you’ve stepped right into Jesus’ trap.
Because if you think you would never do that, then you must be the kind of person who always forgives his brother from his heart.
You must be the kind of person who recognizes his own depravity and considers his own sin to be far worse than whatever sin is done to him.
But maybe you recognize that you’re not that kind of person. Maybe you recognize that even intense gratitude can be fleeting.
The picture we get in this parable is that the first servant’s gratitude lasted—if he ever had it at all—from the time he left the king until he found his fellow servant. The text says that was, “when that same servant went out.” Not long.
We forget that we were sinners saved by grace. “…God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). We forget. Not that we are to obsess over our past sins, but we must remember how we came to be delivered and who delivered us.
Sitting on the King’s Throne
The words of the king might be paraphrased this way: “I sit on the highest throne there is, and I forgave you your impossible debt. And when you came across your brother, I let you sit on my throne and consider what you would do for him in his need.
“And you did not act as I acted. Instead, you chose to curse your brother. You showed that you do not belong to my kingdom, but that of Cain and Lamech and thus of the devil.”
When a brother sins against you, God lets you sit on his throne. And the calculus is pretty simple: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15).
From Your Heart
So Jesus says with regard to the unforgiving servant, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Does “from your heart” mean you have to feel like you’re forgiving someone?
No, the heart is the executive center of your life. It is where you choose. It is your will.
It is from that choosing place that you forgive your brother. In effect, you write it into law between you and God. You say, “Father, from now on, I have forgiven my brother. And whenever I am tempted to dwell on his sin or throw it in his face, remind me that I have forgiven him. And if he sins against me again, I will tell him his fault. And if he listens, I will forgive my brother and gain him again.”
Rinse, repeat.
Brandt Jean
In October, a Dallas police officer named Amber Guyger was found guilty of murder for walking into a neighbor’s apartment thinking it was her own and shooting him as he ate ice cream.
The jury needed less than six hours to convict her of murder. After the sentence, the victim’s brother, Brandt Jean, said to the woman who murdered his brother, “I forgive you, and I know if you go to God and ask him, he will forgive you. I’m speaking for myself, not my family, but I love you just like anyone else.” And he hugged her, and they cried.
I don’t know if that day there was anyone more free than Brandt Jean. He sat on the king’s throne. He had known God’s forgiveness. And instead of hating Amber Guyger and cursing her every birthday, every Christmas, every family occasion without his brother, he remembered the love of God and said “I forgive you.”
That goes beyond Cain. That goes beyond Lamech. That goes beyond the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. That is a man who lives in the kingdom of God. Jesus calls us there too.
Questions
- If you tend to forget that you have been saved by the infinitely generous grace of God, what’s your plan for improving your memory? You can memorize Scripture. You can write out your testimony and share it with others. But know what God did for you so deeply that you cannot possibly forget when it comes to forgiving your brother.
- Who do you need to forgive? As you sit on the king’s throne, who have you left unforgiven? Don’t wait. Don’t miss the opportunity to be truly free.