I have met many people whose debt was crushing them: farmers brought to their knees by drought and unpayable bank loans, facing the end of the line; unemployed fathers desperate to keep providing for their families, but drowning in an ocean of unpayable bills; young people with maxed-out credit cards and no way to escape the exponential growth of debt from wicked interest rates. To be in debt to an institution is one thing, but to be in debt to a person adds elements of shame and guilt to the equation. Debt is one of the invisible killers that drives people to despair and beyond. To be helplessly in debt is to be hopelessly down and out.
To be in debt to an institution is one thing, but to be in debt to a person adds shame and guilt. To be helplessly in debt is to be hopelessly down-and-out.
Debt is the way Jesus often describes the effect if sin. He taught us to pray to God, ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’ (Matthew 6:12). When we sin against another person, we usually feel a sense of debt—we owe them. We may owe them an apology, a coffee, a restitution – something to put the relationship right. Similarly, when we sin against God, we become debtors to God.
Debt and the Kingdom
Jesus uses the idea of debt to illustrate life in his kingdom on a number of occasions. In Matthew 18, Peter asks Jesus how many times he needs to forgive his fellow Christian if he sins against you—up to seven times (v21)? Peter seems to think seven times is way too much to ask. Jesus’ reply is 77 times! It seems Peter finds that totally unreasonable and unbelievable. And it is in normal circumstances. Imagine a friend misses an arranged catch-up, then rings and asks for forgiveness for forgetting. You reschedule, but they fail to make it again. You call and they offer no excuse; just ask for forgiveness. And again. Do you just keep forgiving them and forgiving them? Even three times is unreasonable, isn’t it?
Jesus launches into a story about the kingdom of heaven (v22-34), and a king, and a servant who was deeply in debt to the king. He owed him 10,000 talents, which is about 350 tonnes. In silver it would be worth maybe $20b, if gold much more. It is an unbelievable amount for a servant to owe. He begs for time to pay the debt—as if! Then comes the most astonishing twist to the story: the king has compassion on the grovelling servant and forgives the debt. The whole 350 tonnes! It doesn’t matter how rich you are, that is a huge hole in the bottom line for the king.
The story continues. In the next scene the forgiven, now free servant finds a fellow servant who owes him a mere 100 silver coins (maybe $20k) and violently tries to extract the money owed. When the debtor pleads for time to pay the debt, he refuses and throws him into prison. When others witness his actions, they are outraged, and report him to the king, who now turns in anger on the servant and orders his torture till he repays the original debt. And Jesus thinks you and I will be just as outraged at his action.
But why the outrage and anger? What the servant does is (on its own) completely legal and moral. He has a right to justice. The guy does owe him, and should pay it back. But as the king explains, what makes his behaviour outrageous is the context of his action: ‘I cancelled all that debt of yours … Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’
This story of Jesus exposes so much about the kingdom he invites us to enter. It begins with the reality that ordinary humans like Peter and us owe God big-time. We owe so much we haven’t got any hope of repaying it even if we tried. But our hopelessness is met by God’s compassion. He freely forgives the whole debt. We don’t do anything to earn this forgiveness, he just gives it. It costs us nothing, but is very expensive to him because he bears the cost of our huge debt. The weight of debt is lifted from our shoulders and we walk free.
We owe so much we haven’t got any hope of repaying it even if we tried. But our hopelessness is met by God’s compassion. He freely forgives the whole debt. We don’t do anything to earn this forgiveness, he just gives it.
But it seems from the story that the forgiven servant is not entirely free. He now has an obligation to forgive others. But we need to think about this obligation carefully. Is it that, by being forgiven, he now owes the king? Is he in debt again, and he pays off the debt by doing costly things like forgiving others? No, that is not how the story works. When the king forgives him the debt, it is all forgiven and he owes the king nothing. But it is tempting think about God’s forgiveness the wrong way: if God has paid the enormous cost of my forgiveness (the death of his Son) then I owe God big time. So the Christian life is a life of repaying my enormous debt to God—by sacrifice and commitment. It is a debtors’ ethic.
Grace before Obligation
But the story paints the opposite picture. The life of a disciple starts by God eradicating our debt to him. There is nothing I need to pay back. God’s grace really is grace. And the sequence of events in Jesus’ story shows clearly that we don’t earn God’s forgiveness by forgiving others.
So where does this obligation to forgive others come from? In the story it comes from the foundational experience of being forgiven by God. Jesus points out the inconsistency between enjoying the merciful forgiveness of God and not extending mercy to others. If I want a kingdom in which mercy triumphs over justice then I must treat others with mercy. If I want a kingdom of justice in which others get what they deserve, so will I. The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of mercy, but the world is a place of fighting for my rights to justice, and I must choose which I want to inhabit.
This story reveals so much about how Jesus understood the kingdom he brought. The foundation is the mercy of God to hopeless and helpless debtors, freely wiping their debts and setting them free. But being forgiven is not simply a free ticket to heaven, it revolutionises how we live. There is a gospel ethic created by our experience of God’s forgiveness. There is a gospel lifestyle that is not simply doing what is right and moral and legal, but which extends grace and forgiveness to others. The weight of the obligation to forgive others comes from the difference in scale—our debt so far outweighed what anyone may owe us as to make it trivial. No wonder Jesus warns us so severely about having unforgiving hearts (v35).
I reckon that forgiving others even once is one of the most difficult actions imaginable. If you have been deeply hurt by someone’s words or actions, you will know how hard it is. It requires relinquishing the desire to see them suffer like you suffer. It means letting go the pride of self pity. Our families and our churches need the healing of forgiveness so much. And in our forgiveness by God we have the resource to do it, even up to seventy seven times.
