My father had a lot of wonderful qualities, and he passed some of them on to me, I guess. And one of them is the old Benjamin Franklin saying, neither a borrower nor a lender be. He didn’t think you should owe money to anyone, that borrowing money was never a situation you wanted to be in, it made you vulnerable. You should stand on your own. And even though yes, I at one time had a mortgage, I have kind of always tried to live this way, feeling pretty independent, very upright in a way, even if not very adventurous. Maybe your parents brought you up the same way.
If that’s the case, then this story Jesus tells about the unforgiving servant is hard to process. Because it says that this servant we hear about owed his master what is called here in this translation “a huge amount,” but the original says that the slave owed him ten thousand talents, which if you go back and look at what a talent was, ten thousand of them is such a ridiculously huge sum, many, many times what anyone could earn in many years, that it’s like Jesus said that this servant owed his master a zillion dollars, something that no one could pay back, possibly, ever. So the idea that this master to whom he owes this money just says, well, since you could never pay it anyway, just forget this hole you’re in, be on your way, it’s almost impossible to see what a huge gesture this is, it’s crazily generous, it’s like this slave has his whole life given back to him. He has been saved from a mess of his own creation, and he did nothing to deserve it. So of course that makes it even more awful to think that this same slave who has had everything forgiven, he walked away from a staggering debt, now he is refusing to make a tiny fraction of that same gesture to someone else.
In this gospel Jesus is asked how forgiveness works, and as in so many other places in the gospel he doesn’t give us a rule, he tells a story. And like all of Jesus’s parables, this is not a a story about someone else, it’s a story that we are in, and whether we like it or not, the servant who was in all that debt, and had it all forgiven, is us.
This gospel asks us why there is so little real forgiveness in the world, so much concern about who gets more than they deserve, so much lack of mercy and generosity for people whose lives are in a mess. And the answer is that so many people, so many of us at times, are this servant, and forget how much how much we have been forgiven ourselves.
Now this idea, the idea that we should be aware of our own brokenness and how much we stand in need forgiveness, this isn’t about reviving Catholic guilt. This is the opposite of guilt. What we should realize when we hear this story is that through no effort on our part we have all been redeemed, like that servant, and redeemed from a lot. We have been redeemed from all those things we said we were going to do and didn’t, things we said we were going to stop doing and haven’t, all the promises to ourselves and to others that we have forgotten about. Only you know the corner of your heart where you realize what kind of debts you have run up in life, what you have received that you did not earn. We all have them. And despite all that debt, here we are this morning in this place, God is here for us, ready to forgive, ready to give us a new beginning, give us this eucharist to sustain us, a new beginning when we walk out this door, surrounded by blessings we didn’t do anything to get. We are people who have been rescued, and yet we forget, or think it hasn’t really happened, or that we did it ourselves.
The point today is that if we felt as forgiven as this servant should have felt, then that feeling of liberation would overflow into how we see the rest of the world. That’s what this parable is about. People who acknowledge and remember how much they have been forgiven are the ones who can almost by reflex show mercy to others. And people who don’t feel forgiven, or who forget how freely God gives out mercy, it seems that people like that can’t bend into forgiveness themselves, instead they’re resentful at what other people get away with, they are people always doing the math on who deserves mercy and generosity.
This gospel actually starts with a math question like that, doesn’t it? It tries to pin forgiveness down. How many times do we need to do this, seven times? How far does this go exactly? How much debt do you write off, how much do you bend the rules to give people a break they don’t deserve? These aren’t academic questions, how we answer affects how we think about all sorts of people, from all the difficult people in our own lives who fail over and over, to everyone from prisoners to the homeless to people who are here in this country illegally. We have complex feelings about where to draw the line giving a clean slate to someone who hasn’t earned it.
We don’t get an easy answer today, but we do get an answer. Forgiveness does have its limits, we find that out at the end of this gospel, when the unforgiving servant is sent off to be tortured, and he’s not forgiven again. But of course the thing to notice is that his unforgiveable sin was not forgiving. For someone who had been shown as much mercy as he was, it was a terrible error. For the rest of us wondering about how far to go forgiving, and how many times, his situation gives us the answer: take what the average person does and add, maybe, about a zillion.