Friday, June 30, 2017

The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant by Lewis Kiger



Forgiveness … Easier said than done.

Every person reading this article has struggled with forgiveness at some point. C.S. Lewis accurately asserted, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”

Would you agree that one of the most challenging things we are ever asked to do, is to forgive someone who has wronged us? It is no wonder why the Bible has so much to say about this subject. Yet, to forgive is Christian. Especially when it isn’t easy. I concur with W.A Ward. who said, “Nothing is more Christian than forgiveness. We are most like God, when we forgive.”

In Matthew 18:21-35 Jesus tells a parable about an unmerciful servant in order to teach us about forgiveness and to assist us in the process of forgiving. The lesson is incredibly simple to understand, but immensely difficult to practice.

In the parable, there is a wealthy king who is “updating his portfolio,” if you will. He is checking his financial records to see if everyone is paying their debts owed to him. So he gathers his accountants and bookkeepers and soon discovers that there is one man who owes him a huge sum of money. In fact, this servant owes the king 10,000 talents. To put this in context, you must understand that Jesus is using this monetary figure to illustrate that the man’s debt was unpayable. The number 10,000 was the highest single number that could be expressed in Greek and a talent was the largest unit of currency in the Roman Empire. To say that this man owed the king 10,000 talents is like saying he owed more than he could ever hope to repay in a thousand lifetimes.

The debtor, having been called before the king and realizing his terrible plight, begs for mercy. He pleads with the wealthy ruler for leniency, stating his intention to pay back every penny if given time. Normally, one would be tossed into prison until the debt is repaid, but this man’s situation was hopeless.

However, to his great surprise, the king is moved with compassion and generously forgives his entire debt. All 10,000 talents. The kind-hearted king erases the servant’s massive debt and allows him to go free. What an incredible story! You would think this man would be so overjoyed that he would be beside himself with thanksgiving and gratitude.

Instead, this same servant after leaving the king’s presence runs into a co-worker who owes him money and refuses to show him any sympathy at all. Curiously, the amount he is owed is comparatively insignificant to the amount he was indebted to the king.

To try and put this in perspective let’s use today’s language. We would say something like this: the first man was forgiven a million-dollar debt, yet was unwilling to forgive a friend that owed him five dollars! And even though the co-worker pleads for mercy, the unmerciful servant has him ruthlessly thrown into prison, and threatens his family and livelihood if he is not immediately repaid.

The compassionate king quickly hears of this hard-hearted behavior and summons his servant back to stand before him. The ruler is angry and rightly so. He has graciously forgiven this man an enormous debt, yet he refuses to forgive another of something far, far less. The benevolent king says, I forgave you all that you owed me, because you asked. You should have forgiven others like you had been forgiven. But because he refused, the king orders that the unmerciful servant be jailed until he can repay all his debt.

The lesson then is quite simple. God is like this benevolent king. He has forgiven us so much, that we must be willing to forgive others.  We are wronged in this life, there is no denying this. We are maligned and mistreated, it happens. Yet gently I will suggest, that no one has ever sinned against us as often or as egregiously as we have sinned against God.  

And if God has forgiven us the mountain of debt we owed him for our transgressions, we must be willing to forgive others for their trespasses against us.

This is the very meaning of the words of the model prayer where our Lord taught us to say: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Did you notice the words “as we forgive?”  Ephesians 4:32 states that we are to forgive one another, even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven us.

I will not suggest that this is easy or instantaneous. Sometimes forgiveness can take a while. Some injuries take years or even decades to heal. Yet we must be in the process of forgiving others. A failure to forgive, does not harm others … it only hurts us.

Reader, has God forgiven you? Then we should also be willing to forgive.


Lewis Kiger
Memorial Heights Baptist Church

svdbygrace2@roadrunner.com

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