Saint Matthew 18:21–35
“Forgive Us Our ?”
Whenever I am leading worship and we arrive at a particular sentence in the Lord’s Prayer I am always hoping that people are not listening or watching too carefully. I usually bury my head in the bulletin or just move my lips along with the congregation, not out of any sense of disbelief or theological disagreement on my part, but for another far more mundane reason.
Watch my eyes and you will see that I am not looking up to engage the part of my brain where memory is stored but looking around the room to determine exactly where I am.
My confusion comes, not from senility or even my overall well-honed sense of forgetfulness, but the need on my part to figure out what church I am in. I realize the last part of the last sentence may be even more frightening to you than anything else so let me explain.
Several times during the course of the month funeral director friends of mine will call me and ask if I can officiate a memorial for someone who, we euphemistically call in the trade, “has died without benefit of clergy” and is looking for a person to say a few prayers over them at their demise. I’m that person and on these occasions when it comes time to pray the Lord’s Prayer I revert to the default setting in everybody’s heads and say, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us...” Easy. Simple. Sweet. And all the people, even those who haven’t been in church in ages, join in.
However, as you know and as our guests will soon find out as they join me in our mumble-fest, here the words are different. In a church that is steeped in more history and tradition than few others in Christendom, suddenly the old familiar words are replaced with “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”
This is arguably a better transition than trespasses which can be something so benign as venturing into a crabby neighbour’s yard to retrieve your baseball while sin connotes something spectacular. Trespassing is a minor offence, a venial sin, while sin is, well, sin.
To make matters worse, for years, one of my favourite places to worship in Chicago was Fourth Presbyterian where, because they are Presbyterians after all and very formal ones at that, they use the words: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Every Sunday for the months between my retirement and my first full time interim those were the words that tripped easily from my tongue.
Now, when I am a guest preacher somewhere and we get to that magic moment, I have to think hard. “Trespasses?” “Debts or debtors?” “Sin?” Which one is it now? All the while I am sure there are people in the congregation thinking: “Seems like a nice chap. Too bad he doesn’t know the words to The Lord’s Prayer.”
However, I submit to you that if there is one sentence in this prayer that should trip us up it is this one. And, I feel much better that it is the basis of Peter’s question to Jesus too.
While Peter’s question is a little like the stuff you can find in an advice column “he seems to be demonstrating to Jesus how much he has learned under the Master’s tutelage.”1
If he would have approached the question in the usual way, he would have said, “Shall I forgive as many as two or three times?” This would have been the rabbinic approach: to forgive, yes, but prudently. To forgive once is generous. To be let down by the same person and forgive a second time would be exemplary. To be fool enough to get hurt by the same individual a third time and to forgive even then: this is bordering on the obsessive.”
Depending on what translation you are reading Jesus either says 77 times or seventy times seven times. Either way that is a lot of forgiveness for one person. Seventy-seven is a considerable number but (for those of you who did not bring your calculators to church or can’t do challenging math in your heads) seventy times seven is 490.2
Most preachers I’ve read leave it there. Don’t keep score. Be forgiving. Then they’ll throw at their listeners some examples of people who are more forgiving than they will ever be. Like a magician they cause us to conjure up in our minds all the gruesome details of those times when we have not been forgiving. They conclude with “God loves you and so do I” and send their people on their way. No matter how hard they try says Dr. James Howell, this kind of preaching “makes forgiveness feel like a duty under which you might chafe than a liberation from the afflictions of brokenness.”
This passage may also be used to carry this duty to forgive into very dangerous places.
The spouse who is verbally or physically abused by their partner ... forgive them.
The child who is sexually abused by an adult ... forgive him. Or at least don’t tell anybody.
The member of any group abused by their government to the point of having to flee their country. If you can’t forgive bear your burdens with grace and above all don’t seek to be a refugee in a land where all of us, as the sign in the back of our church reminds us, were all immigrants once, refugees.
To stop all this misuses and abuses in their tracks Jesus tells a story. It is about a king whose ability to forgive is no higher than the number one. To his credit however, when this guy forgives he does so in a big way.
He calls in a servant who owes him more than a tidy sum of money. What is owed is the equivalent of the provincial debt. Ten thousand talents? The entire budget for the province of Judea for a year was 600 talents. This guy must have been quite the high roller. Cue Edie Adams for a chorus of “Hey big spender, why don’t you spend a little time with me.”
It would take a lot of time, effort, and moxie to come up with that kind of money. It is the stuff of which at least a half-a-dozen corporate bankruptcies could be made. And for a minute there we might think that the guy has learned his lesson.
With a jail sentence looming over not only his head but the heads of his wife and children he throws himself at the mercy of the king. “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’"3
Considering the amount of the debt load what the servant is promising is impossible. This isn’t a promise, the guy is just blowing smoke. There is no way he is going to be able to come up with that kind of cash.
Jesus doesn’t give us any hints about what the king was thinking.
Did the king honestly think that the servant would turn his life around? Did the king really believe that the servant would be so chastened and embarrassed at being called out that he would mend his ways? Or, did the king start an office pool with “overs and unders” as to how long it would take the servant to get in trouble again.
Those who had “less than a minute” in that office pool are the winners.
This guy had just walked away absolutely free of debt. He owed nothing to anybody. He could start his life all over again. All those worries he might have had at night about his tremendous debt were gone.
I’d like to think I would have sailed out of the king’s palace happier and more relieved than I had ever been in my life. I’d like to think that coming upon a fellow slave that only owed me a paltry sum by comparison I wouldn’t have attacked him but invited his and his whole family out for dinner and drinks. I would have been walking on air and would have gathered all my friends together to share my good fortune.
Instead of celebration this guy practices retaliation. The newly liberated man doesn’t even make it to the sliding-doors before he finds a slave that owes him a paltry sum of money in comparison, grabs him by the throat and yells, “pay me what you owe.”
And this poor guy uses the exact same words to him that the servant used before the king. “Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’”4
Instead of lifting his fellow slave to his feet, hugging him, and telling him: “Hey! The most unbelievable thing happened. That miserly king we are all so afraid of he just relieved me of all my debts. He’s not such a bad guy after all. And you, you, you lucky devil you, I’m going to share my good fortune with you. Where is that loan statement? Let me tear that puppy up and let’s go have a drink together and celebrate. First round is on me. Second round is on you.”
Tears, joys, smiles, all around. But no, that’s not how Jesus ends the story. Instead, the forgiven servant is anything but forgiving. He presses charges and has the poor guy who owed him a paltry sum has him thrown in prison until he could repay the entire debt which, by the way, he couldn’t because he was in prison.
Word gets back to the king who is hearing nothing of this seven times, or seventy times, or 490 times. He’s forgiven once and that was it. I love the picture Eugene Peterson paints of their second encounter in The Message: “The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt."5
We all may be experiencing “whiplash as the narrative swings back and forth between extreme mercy and severe judgment. Underneath it all, perhaps, is a simple reality: forgiveness is not easy.”
It is not easy to forgive someone who abuses you even if the only extent of that abuse is leaving us down, disappointing us, time and time again. It is not easy to forgive someone who is not only consistently but is ever and always a jerk.
While Jesus “emphasizes the importance of forgiveness in the lives of individuals and for the health of communities. Yet justice matters too. There is and needs to be accountability for harmful actions and abuses of power.”6
We can’t have it both ways. There can be mercy for us and mayhem for others.
I think is was Dr. Michael Lindvall, the former pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, who summed up our human condition best when he observed:
Life together is hard. The are no perfect husbands, no perfect wives, [no perfect partners,] no perfect children. No perfect mothers-in-law. Life in family, life in any community, is both our sorest test and our sweetest joy ... the only thing harder than getting along with other people is getting along without them..
That’s why forgiveness is necessary and why it is so hard.
So maybe the best we can do is pray “Forgive us our sins.” Or is “trespasses?” Or, is it “debts?”
No matter. Just do what I do. Pray one of those choices and pray that no one is watching as we fumble over the words but pray also that they can see the way we have lived out the forgiveness we have received in the Holy Cross of Jesus Christ our Lord.
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1. William H Willimon, “‘Hyperbolic Grace,’” Pulpit Resource, Year A, 39, no. 3 (2011): 45–48.
2. Clayton Schmit, “Commentary on Matthew 18:21-35,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-24/commentary-on-matthew-1821-35-3.
3. St. Matthew 18:26. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]
4. St. Matthew 18:29. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
5. St. Matthew 18:32-35. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The New Testament Palms and Proverbs [Colorado Springs,, CO: NavPress, 1998]]
6. Audrey West, “Commentary on Matthew 18:21-35,” Working Preacher , November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-24/commentary-on-matthew-1821-35.
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