His Forgiveness: Pay It Forward

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| Forgiveness series |

• His Forgiveness: Pay It Forward
• His Promise to Repay
• How to Forgive

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When He asks us to forgive, He invites us first to receive His forgiveness so that we are empowered to simply pay it forward.

I love the disciples.  So often they do exactly what I would picture myself doing or ask the very question that’s on my mind.  Take Matthew 18 for example; starting in verse 15, Jesus explains how to handle conflict with other Christians.  He details how you make every effort to genuinely help someone who sins against you so that they can repent and be reconciled.  He even identifies a role for boundaries if they refuse to listen (a topic for another day).  Once Jesus finished, I just imagine watching the disciples nod their heads as they are walking.  A little further down the road, you can see the wheels turning as Peter remembers his old fishing buddy who had a knack for being rude and selfish.  There were many times where Peter had followed Jesus’ advice to the letter, confronting him when he’d gone too far.  But no matter how many times he apologized, he eventually just did it again.  Peter could recall this happening on seven different occasions.  At least that’s what I imagine preceded Peter’s question in verse 21 – “Lord how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?  As many as seven times?”  To Peter’s disappointment, Jesus called us to a higher standard of seventy-seven times (or seventy times seven, that’s 490 times, in some translations).  Now I could hardly imagine actually keeping track of either number.  Even if I could, it would seem difficult considering the whole “keep no record of wrongs” thing.

Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t leave us with a law against which we keep score.  He is kind enough to help “write the law on our hearts”.  After answering Peter’s question, He goes on to tell a parable about a servant who was forgiven an unimaginable debt that he owed the king. However, the servant then refuses to forgive a comparably small debt that another servant owed him. Knowing this parable, I usually feel compelled to quickly say that I’ve forgiven someone.  However, my experience of forgiveness is more like a trick candle – shortly after I’ve blown it out, I find that it’s still burning.  If I’m totally honest, after I’ve “forgiven” someone, my emotions the next day/week/month will usually betray where I’m really at.  I’ll catch myself getting a little worked up while I’m thinking about what they did.  Or perhaps I’m having some less than loving thoughts when I’m talking to them.  Worse yet, maybe someone is bold (or should I say audacious) enough to help me sympathize with the other side of the story.  It isn’t all that easy to “forgive your brother from your heart”.  Thankfully we aren’t left to do it on our own.  God has given us stories like this parable to help put these situations in context.

What I find particularly meaningful in this parable is the size of the debts depicted. The second servant owed the first a debt of 100 denarii. A denarius was a day’s wages for a laborer; so, that represented 100 days’ worth of work. To translate it to dollars, $7.50 per hour (minimum wage in the US) times 12 hours (the length of the workday in Jesus’ time) times 100 days would imply that a debt of 100 denarii was worth about $9,000. Whether you think of it as $9,000 or as 100 days’ worth of work, this was not a small debt. In other words, this parable does not diminish the pain that we feel when someone wrongs us or the size of debt we are asked to forgive. However, the passage does put this debt in the proper context by comparing it to the debt Christ paid for us on the cross – illustrated as 10,000 talents. As a translation, a talent (of gold presumably) would represent about 30kg; at today’s price for gold, 10,000 talents would represent a debt in the billions.  God understands how badly it hurts and how much it costs to forgive. In this parable, He acknowledges that, on our own, it is quite difficult to forgive someone who has really hurt us.  However, when we think in terms of how much God has done for us it becomes easier. Forgiving even the largest offense can become a small matter when we think in terms of His budget for forgiveness rather than our own.  When He asks us to forgive, He invites us first to receive His forgiveness so that we are empowered to simply pay it forward.

There is another story in the New Testament that helped to bring this parable to life for me. It honestly transformed my perspective on forgiveness. More to come next week!