The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant

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Peter asked Jesus a question about limits. "Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?"¹ Jewish teaching of the period commonly bounded the duty of forgiveness at three offenses, appealing to the recurring formula in Amos of a transgression counted and a fourth added to it. Peter's seven already doubled the ordinary standard. "Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."² The number is not a new ceiling set at four hundred ninety. It removes the ceiling altogether, and the parable that follows explains why a count was never the right instrument for measuring forgiveness to begin with.

The Reckoning of an Impossible Debt

"Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents. But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made."³ A talent was already the largest unit of currency in common use, and ten thousand was the largest number the language readily supplied for a countable sum. Jesus reached for both extremes at once, and the combination was deliberate. Nothing about the size of the debt was incidental to the story. A single talent was worth about six thousand denarii, itself a full day's wage for a laborer, so that ten thousand talents came to some sixty million denarii, the wages of one man across roughly two hundred thousand years of labor. No servant in that position could ever close the account by his own effort, however long he worked or however little he spent, and the law of the time allowed the debtor and his household to be sold to recover whatever fraction of the sum such a sale might yield.

"The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt."⁴ The promise to pay it all was not a plan; it was the plea of a man with nothing else to offer, and both the servant and the king must have known it could never be honored on the terms given. What answered the plea was not a payment schedule but compassion, and the king cancelled the entire sum without negotiation and without partial credit toward the balance. Nothing in the man's plea explains the king's mercy. The mercy explains itself.

A Debt Forgiven and a Debt Demanded

"But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest."⁵ A hundred pence, a hundred denarii, was a real debt and a small one, something near four months' wages rather than two hundred thousand years of them. The man who had just been released from an unpayable sum seized a fellow servant by the throat over a debt he could have absorbed without noticing, and he did it before he had left the presence in which his own account had been closed.

"And his fellowservant fell down at his feet, and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt."⁶ The plea is word for word his own plea to the king, and he had just seen what that plea was worth when compassion met it. He answered it with imprisonment instead, which foreclosed the very repayment he claimed to be demanding, since a man in prison earns nothing toward what he owes. The refusal was not a mistake in accounting. He had been given forgiveness, and he refused to give it.

The King’s Judgment

"So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done. Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?"⁷ The king's charge names the connection the servant had broken. He had received mercy and owed mercy in turn. That return was never a repayment measured out to balance the account. It was the shape a forgiven life is expected to take once the debt behind it has been cancelled.

"And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses."⁸ The sentence is severe, and Jesus does not soften it before applying it directly to His hearers. The debt had truly been forgiven, and it is here treated as standing again, because the man who received the king's mercy refused to pass any part of it along. The measure of forgiveness he gave his fellow servant became the measure of forgiveness given to him. The closing words fix the location of the test. It is not a matter of speech but of the heart, and it is aimed at every servant listening, not at one man in a story told long ago.

Forgiveness That Flows From Having Been Forgiven

Paul draws the same line from the same direction. "Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you."⁹ The forgiveness commanded of believers is measured against the forgiveness already given them, not against the size of the offense committed against them by another servant. Colossians states the same rule in the same form: "Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye."¹⁰ In both passages the standard offered is not proportion but likeness. The forgiven forgive as they were forgiven, which the unmerciful servant had every means to do and no will to do.

Jesus ties forgiveness to prayer directly, and the connection is not incidental to His teaching on either subject. "And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses."¹¹ This does not make forgiveness a currency a man earns by extending it first. It states what the parable has already shown: the measure of forgiveness a man gives others is the measure of forgiveness God gives him. Luke records the same demand in the form of an imitation rather than a transaction. "Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful."¹² "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven."¹³

The two debts in the parable were never close in size, and the parable does not ask its hearers to weigh them carefully before deciding whether forgiveness is owed in a given case. It assumes the weighing has already been done, on the day the ten thousand talents were cancelled, and it treats every later refusal as proof that the lesson of that day was never learned in the heart, whatever was said with the mouth at the time. The servant's fault was not that he remembered the hundred pence. It was that he had already forgotten the ten thousand talents, and forgotten them so completely that a debt four hundred thousand times smaller than his own looked, to him, like an unbearable weight.