The Spiritualilty of Forgiveness, Part 1
A monastic conference published in The Oblate in three parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Introduction
Some years ago there was a movie entitled Sophie's Choice.
Sophie was in Poland during WWII
and was forced by a ferocious Nazi to choose
which of her two children would live.
Years after the war,
Sophie has never been able to get this horrible scene
out of her imagination.
Most importantly for our purposes,
she was unable to forgive this horrible crime against her.
Ultimately she commits suicide,
because in the face of that horror,
no new life seems possible, not even in the United States,
far away from the reality of the war.
It is a good example of the paradox of Jesus' statement
to the disciple in John's Gospel when he appears to them.
In John 20, Jesus says to them:
"Peace be with you! As the father has sent me, so I send you."
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
"Receive the Holy Spirit.
Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them
and whose sins you retain, they are retained."
The paradox is this: if we retain someone's sin, we too are retained.
If we hold them bound, we remain bound.
In another recent film, Dead Man Walking,
a man is on death row awaiting execution.
The families of the two young people who were his victims
believe that they will have some peace from his execution.
However, after the execution, as the dad of one them says,
he just feels this incredible emptiness and in a closing scene,
he is seen in a chapel, praying with Sr. Helen Prejean.
Have you ever found yourself binding someone,
and binding yourself as well?
I want to explore some of the dimensions of forgiveness
and use the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18.
The parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew chapter 18
is situated in the context of a sermon on church order.
Exploration of the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant
This parable is the first major dramatic parable in this Gospel
and it serves as an interpretive guide to all of chapter 18.
The parable is told in response to Peter's question:
"Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me,
and I forgive him? As many as seven times?"
As we shall see, the parable does not really answer this question,
"how often" but deals with the quality of forgiveness,
the business of living as a forgiven man, a forgiven woman.
One way to approach a major parable is to divide it into different acts1
This parable is easily divided into
act one - the King and the servant with the immense debt
act two - the forgiven servant and the fellow servant with debt
act three - the forgiven servant and the king
and this is followed by a summary of Matthew's.
Act one: At the beginning of the parable,
our sympathies are with the first servant.
The king's desire to "settle accounts" has an ominous sound —
this sounds like trouble and we are not comforted
when we told that the servant is "brought" before the king —
he has been arrested and is being dragged there against his will.
And then we hear the reason — he owes ten thousand talents.
How much is this?
The annual income of Herod the Great was only 900 talents —
all of the taxes for Galilee were about two hundred talents a year,
so such a number is staggering indeed.
Who could pay this amount?
Nobody. The king is a tyrannical gentile despot,
since he throws not only the debtor but his whole family in jail.
By Jewish law only the debtor could be thrown into jail.
In v. 26 the servant makes a heartfelt plea:
"Lord, have patience with me and I will pay you everything."
Here we get a clue into this servant's frame of mind —
in fact, he could work for a thousand years and not pay this debt,
but that is what he asks for.
The king, who was portrayed as heartless and cruel,
has compassion - and forgives the debt.
This is an amazing turn of events —
people who are cruel and mean tend not to show compassion
because they have gotten where they are by beating up a lot of people
and always exacting the last penny.
The parable could have ended at this point
and been a good illustration of Mt. 7:7:
"Ask, and it will be given to you"
or an example of praying for forgiveness
even when burdened with the debt of sin.
The parable, however, keeps on going to the second act.
Here we find its major thrust.
The servant is a free man.
He goes out
and happens on a fellow servant who owes him one hundred denarii.
One denarius is about a day's wage,
so this is about 4-5 months wages.
We can do the calculation; this is a payable debt.
In contrast with the first servant where a talent is about fifteen years of daily wages,
multiplied by 10,000, this is a manageable sum.
This second servant is a mirror image of the first.
He falls on his knees and repeats the words,
"Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything."
Again the parable could end here
with the first servant forgiving the debt
or even granting the request for time to pay it back.
It would be a perfect illustration of the golden rule,
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
The exact opposite occurs.
This forgiven servant grabs the guy by the throat,
throttles him, and demands payment immediately.
The man's fellow servants are shocked at this injustice —
so are we - what is going on? How could he act in this way?
The third act begins with the actions of his fellow servants.
They go to the king in the hope of redressing this grievous wrong.
The king summons the first servant,
tells him that he forgave the debt out of mercy
and he should have done likewise.
In v. 34 there is a tragic irony
because now the first servant will have time to do
what he originally requested, time to pay off his debt but in prison.
Why does the first servant act the way he does?
How can he have missed the point so badly?
And if he missed it so badly, could I do exactly the same thing?
The answer is, of course.
When the first servant appears before the king
he asks for what is impossible, time to repay the debt.
He is asking for the wrong thing. Instead of asking for mercy,
he thinks that the way out of his tragic situation is to restore the order of justice.
The king grants mercy, not justice.
The surprise is that the king operates out of the mercy of compassion.
The second act simply plays out the servant's faulty understanding.
When he heads down the street
and encounters the second servant
and hears the request for patience and time,
he hears an echo of his own request,
which was a request for justice.
The forgiveness and mercy that he received
were simply something that happened to him.
Receiving them did not change his way of viewing the world.
The incredible gift of mercy did not change his self-understanding.
The king understands this perfectly:
"Should you not have had mercy on your fellow servant,
as I had mercy on you?"
You are alive because of mercy —
you should have extended mercy to him as well.
Paradoxically, mercy becomes justice
and the "right order" of justice between God and humanity
is maintained through mercy.
Then Matthew adds that mercy must be from the heart —
so we are talking here about changed hearts.
Matthew is warning his community
that unless it understands that it lives by mercy,
it will unwittingly always follow the path of the first servant.
Jesus is calling for a totally new way of understanding the world.
Jesus' understanding of God is that of Hosea 2:19
in whom are joined righteousness, justice, steadfast love, and mercy.
Jesus uses the image of king for this God
who calls us to be forgiving because we are forgiven women, forgiven men.
The parable cautions against a narrow, rigid, legalistic understanding of life
in which we are constantly assessing who owes us what and how much we owe.
Within Matthew's Gospel,
this parable picks up themes from the sermon on the mount,
especially the conclusion to the Our Father,
where Matthew alters the conclusion to read,
"If you do not forgive others their debts,
neither will you Father forgive your debts.
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
September, 2002
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