Seventy times seven

A word for the week

Peter thinks he is being generous. How many times should I forgive someone who keeps wronging me, he asks; as many as seven? The teachers of his day said three times was plenty, so Peter doubles it and adds one for good measure. He is expecting to be praised. Jesus blows the roof off the number: not seven times, but seventy times seven. Which is to say, stop counting. The moment you are keeping a tally of someone's offenses, you have already missed the point. Then, because Peter needs to feel it and not just hear it, Jesus tells a story.

A king decides to settle accounts, and a servant is dragged in who owes him ten thousand talents. The number is absurd on purpose; a single talent was many years of wages, and ten thousand was the largest number the language easily held. It is a debt no human being could repay in a hundred lifetimes, a cartoon of hopelessness. The man begs, foolishly, for patience, promising to pay it all back, which he never could. And the king, moved with compassion, does not grant the delay the man asked for. He does something far larger. He cancels the whole thing. The unpayable debt, gone, in a breath, out of nothing but mercy.

Now that same servant walks out, still warm from being forgiven a fortune, and finds a man who owes him a hundred coins, a real debt but a small one, a few months' pay, the kind of thing that could actually be repaid. And he seizes him by the throat. Pay me what you owe. The man gives the very same plea the first servant gave the king, word for word: have patience with me. But the forgiven man will not hear it, and throws his debtor into prison.

You are meant to feel the outrage, and Jesus lets the other servants feel it for you; they are appalled, and go and tell the king. And the king calls the man back in with the question that is the whole point of the parable: I forgave you all that debt when you begged me; should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you? The man forgiven the unpayable would not forgive the trivial. And it costs him everything.

Here is the sentence to carry home. The debt God has forgiven you is the ten thousand talents. The debt anyone owes you is the hundred coins. This is not to make light of what was done to you; some of those hundred coins are heavy, and real, and cost you dearly. But held up against what you yourself have been forgiven, against the whole weight of your own life's wrongs wiped clean, it is the smaller debt, always. We forgive not because the wound was nothing, but because we ourselves have been carried, and we know it, and the one thing a truly forgiven person cannot then do is stand over someone else with a ledger.

That is why Jesus ends it so severely, saying the Father will hand us to the tormentors if we will not forgive our brother from the heart. It is not that God is hunting for a reason to withhold mercy. It is that a heart clamped shut against everyone below it has closed the very door mercy comes through. The measure you refuse others is the measure you are asking to be used on you. So stop counting. You were forgiven past all counting first.