The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Over the last two posts, we’ve used the two versions of the Parable of the Great Banquet to transition from Luke’s parables of grace to Matthew’s parables of judgment. But today, we’ll rewind a bit in Matthew’s Gospel and look at a parable that balances these two themes: the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant from Matthew 18.

Text

[18.21] Then Peter came up to him and said, “Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Seven times? [22] And Jesus said to him: I say to you, not seven but seventy-seven! [23] It’s like this: The Kingdom of Heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. [24] When he began the settlement, one man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. [25] The man was not able to pay, so the lord called for him to be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and be paid from the proceeds. [26] So the slave fell down and prostrated himself before him, saying, “Be patient with me, and I will repay you everything.” [27] But the lord felt compassion for that slave and forgave his loan. [28] But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed his throat, saying: “Pay back what you owe!” [29] And so his fellow slave fell down and exhorted him, saying: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.” [30] But he was unwilling, and went out and threw him into prison until he could pay off the debt. [31] When they saw what had happened, his fellow slaves were very upset so they went to their lord to report all that had happened. [32] Then the lord summoned him and said to him: “You evil slave! I forgave all that debt of yours when you pleaded with me; [33] Should you not then have had mercy upon your fellow slave just as I had mercy upon you? [34] And the lord grew angry and handed him over to his inquisitors until he could pay back everything he owed. [35] In this way will my heavenly father also behave towards every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.

Experience

Three things stuck out to me in reading this parable: First, the slave refuses to partake in God’s pay-it-forward economy, which works by passing grace we’ve received on to others. Second, he seems to be motivated by a lack of trust that his own debts have been forgiven; otherwise, he’d have no need to call others to account. And third, while the language of torment is disturbing, once again the hellish scene is completely unnecessary: the only thing he’s punished for is his own lack of compassion for others.

Encounter

In Matthew’s narrative, the parable is told during a conversation between Peter and Jesus. I’d like to look more at what spurred that conversation.

The parable itself has two main characters: a king or lord who turns away from bookkeeping and towards compassion, and a slave who has his debts forgiven but refuses to forgive others in turn.

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Literary Context

This parable is told when Jesus is on the cusp of arriving in Jerusalem, so it’s not unexpected that the preceding chapters bear some resemblance to those we’ve been looking at recently in Luke’s Gospel, also told on his journey to Jerusalem. For example, this chapter begins with the discussion of greatness and humility that led to Jesus telling the Parable of the Lost Sheep. But sandwiched between that parable of God’s joy at finding the lost and this parable about forgiveness, we have a discussion of community discipline that feels a bit out of place (France 699; Capon).*

I think what’s happening here is that our perspective on the community discipline section has been coloured by the Church’s long history of using it to justify both excommunication and the hierarchy’s role in the absolution of sins. But if we come at the text without those in mind, it reads quite differently: it’s not pushing away outcasts, but about doing everything we can to avoid creating outcasts (Talbert 221; Capon). This is heightened by Jesus’ comparing those who struggle to adhere to community disciple to Gentiles and tax-collectors, the latter of which was the symbol of Jesus’ ministry to the lost and the former of which would become the focus of the apostles’ own ministry (and Peter’s especially in Acts 10). Even the line about binding and loosing comes across in this context more as a warning against judgmentalism than a guide to doing it ‘right’: In the parable that follows, the king is freed by his letting go of the debts against him, but the slave binds himself by being unwilling to do the same (Capon).

Narrative Details

The main character is again described as a king, a common image for God in the Scriptures, Jewish parables, and Jesus’ parables (Walton & Keener). The debt the slave owes to him is not only unrealistic but also impossible, representing over 300,000 years’ salary for an average worker; several commentators note that as the Greek here is the highest Greek number of the highest possible denomination in Greek money, it would likely carry the sense of “eleventy bajillion dollars” in English (Walton & Keener; France 706; Brown & Roberts 173). The king’s sale of the slave and his family would have been illegal under Jewish Law and would have barely made a dent in the debt (one talent alone could often purchase twenty slaves) (Walton & Keener). By contrast, while the debt owed to the slave still amounts to several months’ wages, it is just one six-hundred-thousandth the amount originally owed to the king (France 707).

Because of this, efforts by some commentators to explain the parable in terms of such setups as the ‘tax farming’ bureaucracies of Hellenistic kingdoms (e.g., Walton & Keener) seem unnecessary. This whole story is about hyperbole and does not reflect any real-life situation.

Debt Forgiveness in the First-Century

The period surrounding the Roman takeover of the collapsing Hellenistic kingdoms saw a lot of economic uncertainty, including a high debt-to-income ratio (Wilson 128). In this context, partial debt forgiveness was a common tactic (Levine & Witherington 440). As with the Parable of the Unjust Steward, in an honour-shame culture, the reputational gain obtained by forgiving debts could be of greater value than the debt itself — especially in a situation like this where the debt would be impossible to pay off (Walton & Keener). While not the situation described here (in which both debtors are slaves), debt-forgiveness was a matter of freedom for free men, as they could be sold into slavery for being unable to pay their debts. As Blond et al note, “The remission of debt meant restoring an individual’s ability to maintain their status in the social order” (Blond et al.).

Forgiveness of Sins

The parable is set up by a discussion of forgiveness. The use of the metaphor of debt forgiveness to describe the doing away of sins is so common that we forget it’s a metaphor. The Greek verb used to describe it is aphiemi, a common, less specialized, word with a basic meaning ‘let go of, drop, let loose, acquit’. There’s a sense of non-attachment here that’s fitting for both contexts of forgiveness in English.

Peter’s question of how many times he should forgive someone is grounded in actual religious debates of the day. His proposal of seven times is more generous than many; it seems three times was the most common suggestion, before one could write someone off as insincere (Walton & Keener; France 700; Talbert 223). The numbers seven and seventy-seven both play on the idea of seven as perfection in biblical numerology and reverse the curse of vengeance from Genesis 4.24: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Walton & Keener; France 700). Older translations that have Jesus say ‘seventy times seven’ are based in a quirk of the Greek number system by seventy-seven times seems a better translation; either way, as R.T. France points out, “any argument over number misses the point that calculation is not involved” (France 705).

Here in the parable, the king is at first hard and stingy, but then releases the slave and the debt out of compassion for him. This is no cheap pardon; the king is writing off an unbelievable amount of money (Capon; Nuechterlein Proper 19A^). But the benefit forgiveness would provide to the slave was worth it to him. Note that there is no payment of the debt at all; he doesn’t effectively write himself a cheque. He simply absorbs it the loss. As Brian Zahnd notes, this is instructive for how we think of the work of Christ:

The cross of Christ is less the payment of a debt than it is the absorption of injustice. In the parable, the master is not repaid; he simply absorbs the loss. It is only through absorbing the pain of his loss that he is able to offer pardon to the debtor. Indeed, the forgiveness of great wrongs is never cheap but always painful, because someone must bear the loss. (Brian Zahnd quoted in Nuechterlein)

But whether he can’t accept that he’s been truly forgiven, or just because he’s a hypocritical jerk, the forgiven servant refuses to pass that compassion on to his own debtors, and so has his own forgiveness revoked (France 708; cf. Brown and Roberts 174). There is unquestionably an element of judgment in this parable but, crucially, it is a judgment of the slave’s own choosing:

The servant had been invited to a new way of living based on forgiveness but he rejected it. Living without forgiveness, which is tantamount to living by vengeance, is torture. It isn’t God who is unforgiving; it is the servant. (Marr, quoted by Nuechterlein)

As Robert Farrar Capon puts it: “The sole difference, therefore, between hell and heaven is that in heaven the forgiveness is accepted and passed along, while in hell it is rejected and blocked” (Capon). None of this should come as a surprise, since the parable’s ending is nothing other than a dramatization of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: “For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matthew 7.1-2).

Challenge

Debt-forgiveness is always surprising. In ancient times as well as today, it’s an almost unbelievable idea. And, as we saw last year in the United States, when someone actually tries to do it, the reaction is often swift and negative. As much as we might all want forgiveness and mercy for ourselves, it seems we don’t actually like it that much for others. This was the main way the parable subverted the expectation of Jesus’ original audience and it remains challenging for us today. This attack on grace is just as common on the left as the right. The justifiable rejection of empty apologies that are not backed up by changed behaviours, and deep frustration at the injustices of the criminal justice system against women and visible minorities, has led to a widespread rejection of the idea of forgiveness among progressives. But, while we must always affirm the need for genuine justice and for repentance to be more than an empty apology, as Christians, we must never affirm these at the expense of grace.

All told, we are a culture that really and truly does not like grace — and shockingly, professed Christians are leading the charge against mercy, compassion, and empathy. The North American Church, it would seem, is increasingly a community of unforgiving servants.

There is a broader challenge here to power structures. As Blond et al. note, the king’s absorption of the debt is an act not just of empathy but also towards equity, and so:

Practices of social interaction that maintain the dominance of some over others or that liberate some to the detriment of others are to be renounced as immoral and inconsistent with the divine character. It is not enough that God has forgiven us; we must live and act out of that forgiveness in ways that make it meaningful. Without an ethic of mutuality, we cannot truly understand how to be the church… in a world where the masses continue to writhe “silently under a mighty wrong.” (Blond et al; cf. Wilson 131)

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This parable helps us to grow in faith and love by centering empathy and mercy, that is, by focusing on grace. And, once again, in God’s pay-it-forward economy (notice a trend here in these parables?), we demonstrate that we have received grace, mercy and love from God by passing it on to others. There is no bookkeeping here, just grace. This is challenging, but it’s the heart of Christian ethics and morality.

Summary & Conclusions

When asked by Peter how many times he should forgive someone, Jesus replies with a parable, in which a person who has been forgiven much refuses to forgive others and thereby has his forgiveness revoked. It’s a warning as much as it is an instruction: We will be treated the way we treat others. We who have received so much grace and forgiveness from God must offer that same grace and forgiveness to others. ”A community of the forgiven must be a forgiving community” (France 702).

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.

^ All references to Nuechterlein in this post are to his post for Proper 19A.