The Unmerciful Servant

"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made.
So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.' And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.
But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, 'Pay what you owe.'
So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you.' He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.
When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt.
So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." Matthew 18:23-35



One of Paul’s most fabulous lines is in his letter to the Ephesians: “Be imitators of God”.

If there is anyone in the universe whom it should be impossible to imitate, surely it must be God?

Can we summon a mountain out of the sea or make the red hills of Mars sprout with trees? How many of us never figured out how to program a video recorder? I struggle to open milk cartons.

But Paul was ready to urge a gaggle of first-generation believers to imitate the source of all creation. He said, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

Forgiveness is no less amazing a concept than any of God’s other creations. It is perhaps both His greatest gift and challenge to humanity.

The amazing gift of grace is the fact that God has decided to forgive us for our sins. He has acted out of his own free will to make peace with us - to spare us from punishment.

But he expects us to follow his example. There it is in the Lord’s Prayer - “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”.

That a line like that is in the heart of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples suggests that forgiveness isn’t something we need to give and receive once a year, like a Christmas present. No, it should be as much a part of our lives as our daily bread.

On a superficial level, Christianity can seem one of the easier of the world religions. We’re not asked to pray a set number of times each day, there’s not much ceremonial washing and no obligatory pilgrimages.

But, actually, wouldn’t it be easier to travel to a shrine on the far side of the globe rather than forgive a family member or a friend who’s caused us to shed tears or thump a door in anger?

Yet the Bible tells us that God’s Holy Spirit is living in each one of us, making possible things that would, yes, be completely impossible otherwise.

We also have a God who wants to make Himself known to us. He desires that we may know every aspect of His glory and mercy. And while our minute human minds can never hope to grasp the magnitude of his world-forging power, we can experience Him working through us if we let Him.

Furthermore, He wants to be seen to be working in our lives. He has chosen to make us His ambassadors, and He desires that people in this world will be able to look at the Church and catch a glimpse of His love at work.

Religion becomes stale and boring when we forget how amazing a task God has set us. Christians are not supposed to come together to talk about God. They are supposed to together experience God’s power and forgiveness.

The difference is as great as going to the cinema to see The Perfect Storm and actually getting on a fishing boat and setting out into a hurricane force storm.

Jesus was adamant that we realise the fullness and wonder of this new kingdom he had come to establish. The problem was (and is) that humans have a hard time living as if His kingdom is real. As children, we learn that there isn’t a Santa Claus and that dragons are not going to burst into our bedrooms. And as adults, when a bible passage asks us to do something seemingly staggeringly unnatural we start looking for loopholes.

This is what people did when Jesus started laying down the rules of His kingdom. Jesus told the parable of The Unmerciful Servant to shock his audience into taking his words seriously.

You can almost sense the exasperation Jesus might have felt when he told the story. The passage in Matthew is flanked by examples of people looking for loopholes.

The disciples were struggling with the concept of humility, asking who was going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. This seems to have been a recurring question, but it was as daft as walking into a vegetarian restaurant and asking, “What’s the biggest hamburger you’ve got?” And in the passage just after the parable the Pharisees are checking when it’s possible for a man to divorce his wife.

The actual prompt for the telling of the story is Peter asking how many times he should forgive a brother or sister who sins against him.

This seems like a fair question. Peter wants to do the right thing and is trying to nail down the specifics of forgiveness. He wants to know when he can say, ‘Woah! You’ve gone too far!”

Each aspect of our lives today is defined by contracts and constitutions, rights and responsibilities. When we start a new job, we immediately want to know what rights we have.

And Peter is an enthusiastic and loyal disciple. He just wants to know what the ground rules of the new kingdom will be. Suggesting that he should forgive somebody seven times seems entirely reasonable and generous.

The problem is, he’s still locked into a way of thinking that says religion is about accumulating points for doing good things. Christ’s method is so revolutionary it cannot be packaged into a neat list of new rules and regulations.

It’s not just another belief system. It can’t be placed alongside another religion like a product comparison. God’s love is limitless, His capacity for forgiveness is as infinite as His nature is eternal, and this is what we have to imitate today and tomorrow.

When Jesus replies to Peter’s question, he says, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, 77 times.” He is telling the fisherman that there is no point at which our willingness to forgive should be exhausted. You can imagine how high Peter’s eyebrows must have arched.

Back in Genesis, God told Cain that anyone who killed him would suffer a sevenfold vengeance. Lamech warned his wives that anyone who killed him would be avenged 77-fold. Jesus is teaching his disciples that Christianity is about the opposite of revenge, and that the love which powers forgiveness is just as powerful as the wrath which channels vengeance.

Forgiveness does not mean stopping taking sin seriously. Jesus taught this lesson shortly before he would be nailed to the cross to die for our sins. And Peter had been moved to ask the question because Jesus had just explained what to do if a church member persistently refused to acknowledge their sin: they should be treated “as a Gentile or a tax collector”.

But even this stern instruction was told in the context of the parable of the lost sheep. It’s a story of earnest and arduous searching for the 1% which goes astray and the mighty rejoicing when it is brought home.

This aspiration that the prodigals will come home and the lost will be found is almost completely absent from our culture. Our tabloids want criminals locked away and immigrants locked out. Politicians lobby for votes with the catchphrase “Three strikes and you’re out”.

But God invented the church and taught us to live by a different law. We are told to love the type of people we previously wouldn’t have wanted as our next-door neighbours, never mind our brothers and sisters. Grace is about transforming and redeeming the wretched of the Earth - us. It’s the possibility of restoration when punishment is deserved.

We like to think of ourselves as good people, but the only reason we can look beyond death with hope is that we have been forgiven. We are the servant in the story who owed a king 10,000 talents and has had his debt wiped out.

To Hebrew minds, the idea of owing 10,000 talents in debt would have been mindboggling. It’s like being told you owe the Inland Revenue a gazillion pounds - a completely unpayable debt.

Motivated by nothing but pity, the king does something which seems irrational and the opposite of fiscal prudence - he pardons him.

God has persistently pardoned humankind. Do the angels roll their eyes when time after merciful time He spares us the punishment we really deserve?

When Adam and Eve engaged in their illegal fruit-picking in the Garden of Eden, God could have destroyed the Earth as if He was popping a pea between his thumb and index-finger. He would still have been able to enjoy the wonders of the expanding universe and could have breathed life into the nostrils of another creature.

Imagine if Noah and his brood hadn’t been told to build an Ark. If the story of the human race had come to a full stop shortly after the flood water began to rise there would have been no Holocaust, no Gulag, no Rwandan genocide - God’s creation would have been spared such stark expressions of evil. But God’s commitment to seeking and saving the lost sheep of the universe is so powerful and so complete He would rather share in such suffering than lose the possibility of our redemption.

This work of mercy is the message the Church has been given to proclaim. We witness to His forgiveness and the new life He has given us when we share communion and when we are baptised. Regardless of whether we look forwards or backwards in our lives, we can see forgiveness.

The church, which is made up of human beings, often proclaims some very odd things instead. But if we cease to express the mercy of God it’s very hard to see how we can really call ourselves Christians. The devil wants us to doubt the power of forgiveness. Then communion and baptism become meaningless rituals, our joy is snuffed out and our freedom is stifled.

Whenever we’ve inched closer to positions of power we’ve seemed more keen on expressing God’s judgement on sin, rather than His mercy on the sinner. In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, he portrayed the horror of the witch trials in Puritan America. The people who had fled religious persecution in Europe had, within generations, become the persecutors.

Something similar happens in this parable. When the forgiven man meets a fellow servant who owes him the equivalent of a few pounds he grabs him by the throat and throws him in jail. It’s no surprise that the rest of the servants consider this gross hypocrisy.

Jesus knew that this type of failure would happen, and that the church needed a parable as hair-raising as The Unmerciful Servant to warn of this temptation. There are few scarier lines than when Jesus says that just as the king then threw the unforgiving servant into jail, “So my heavenly father will also do to everyone of you, if you do not forgive your brother or servant from your heart.”

This should make us gulp. It’s humbling to think of how much we have been forgiven, and it’s daunting to think of the mission of forgiving which may stretch ahead of us. But what’s encouraging is how serious God is about forgiveness.

Why is he so worried about Christians refusing to forgive each other? It’s because he has founded a church, a holy people, and He can see the potential they have to shine brighter than a star across all the dimensions of His creation.

One of the lies we are told is that God is not interested in the little details of our lives - our petty grudges and our secret fears. But the story of the Gospel is that Jesus joined us in the mud and mess of Palestine to prove how deeply he loved these bundles of atoms called human beings. He knew that these people could one day be united with the Creator who brought them into existence. This love is what makes miracles happen in the church. It is the gift he was giving us.