A Ridiculous Economy of Forgiveness: Two Servants in Need of Mercy (Week 37, May 7)
Reading
Matthew 18:21–35
Silent Reflection
Remarks
“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ ”
Matthew 18:29 (NIV)
The first thing to remember when Peter said “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” is that Peter’s brother Andrew was also a disciple, and so it’s at least possible that Peter literally meant him when he said “brother.”
“Lord, how long do I have to put up with Andrew’s crap?” Perhaps Peter was at the end of his rope with someone in his own family. Anyone with a family can sympathize. We know how the ones who are closest to us are the ones who are able to hurt us most and most often, even seven times over.
What Peter was essentially asking was, “When is enough enough?” It’s an ever-present question for the wounded. How many times do I have to forgive, especially when the person who hurt me isn’t even asking for forgiveness?
How long, O Lord?
Forgiveness is a difficult subject to engage for some of us. For some, maybe we haven’t been wounded in any particularly strong way, but others have been deeply wounded. The world we live in preaches that condemnation is acceptable and even demanded when others wound us. Though we may never get back what someone else took from us, we may as well get what we can or at least ensure nothing good can come their way. It’s understandable. Forgiveness isn’t rational—it seems to only expose us and make us more vulnerable when what we so desperately want is safety and security. We can only take so much.
“How many times do I have to forgive?” Peter asked, and Jesus answered him with a story about servants and kings and debts and forgiveness. We could say much about many aspects of this parable, but I want to focus on only one thing here—to me, it is the key to grappling with how we go about starting down the path of forgiveness once we understand what it is and why it’s necessary. We can know everything about forgiveness but still not know how to find it within ourselves to desire to step into it. I think verse 29 is that key.
Read it again now. What do you notice about the words the second servant pleads to the first?
They are almost exactly the words the first servant pleaded to the king when he was in need.
In his anger against and demands of his fellow servant—literally as he is choking him out—he hears his own words spoken back to him. What are we to make of this?
I think the first servant was being given an opportunity to recognize himself in the face of his debtor and enemy.
For this moment, victim and perpetrator become one. When I am wounded, sinned against, offended, or wronged, I have an opportunity to see myself in the face of my enemy, to know them as my twin. Because what do I see when I look at myself?
If I am honest, I see that I am not entirely a monster, nor am I entirely innocent. I am someone who has both wronged others and been wronged. I have at times been a victim in need of justice, and other times have been a perpetrator in need of mercy. I do not mean to draw a tie of equivalence between all sins—of course some things we do to one another are far worse than others, and not everyone commits the most atrocious offenses.
But when I look at my own wrongdoing and ask, “Why do I do this?” I know it is not true of me that I am simply a wicked person acting out of pure evil. I have a history, a past, where something was done to me or taken from me or I was deceived or twisted in some way, and then my perception became twisted as a result. I don’t always see or do what is good and true, and the chain of “who is responsible” for that is more complex and nuanced than simply, “I am completely responsible for anything I do.”
This parable, and the words of the two men begging for mercy, is an invitation to see my enemy in a new way: like myself. I am invited to remember that they, like me, are someone who has both wronged and been wronged. They, like me, are both a victim in need of justice and a perpetrator in need of mercy.
Surely this is a hard teaching. Who can accept it? But surely the life of the resurrection is marked by radical forgiveness, hard as it may be. And when I recognize that we share this in common at the core of our humanity, it suddenly becomes possible to let the anger I’ve long held melt into compassion—and then the desire to forgive and set right, no longer blocked by the prison walls of bitterness, can begin to grow.
Silent Reflection
Response
Forgiveness is a very difficult act. What makes it so difficult?
In what way is forgiveness an act of weakness?
Is there any sense in which we can consider forgiveness as an act of power?