Forgiveness

As I prayed with this passage, a few things stood out to me. First, I wondered just how much ten thousand talents actually was. I looked into the original Greek and found μυρίων—ten thousand, but also a number that could convey an unimaginably enormous quantity. The debt Jesus chooses is deliberately staggering. It is a debt the servant could never realistically repay.

Then I noticed something I had never really paid attention to before. The words spoken by the first servant to the king are almost exactly the same as the plea the second servant makes to him: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.” Neither man actually asks for forgiveness. They ask for patience and more time.

But the king gives the first servant something far greater than he asks for. He doesn’t simply give him more time. Moved with compassion, he forgives the entire impossible debt. Yet when that servant hears essentially the same plea from someone who owes him far less, he grabs him by the throat and eventually has him thrown into prison.

For me, the message becomes more than simply that I must forgive because God has forgiven me. The king’s mercy is given before the servant even knows enough to ask for it. That makes me wonder whether I sometimes wait for someone to apologize before I am willing to forgive them. Christ seems to call me to something more difficult: to have a heart already disposed toward mercy, even when forgiveness has not been asked of me.