When I became a pastor, I was surprised about the questions I sometimes get out in the world meeting new people. Apparently, sometimes oddly serious questions that break the rules of chit chat. The number one topic of these sorts of questions is forgiveness and mostly people wonder whether they are required to forgive when they’ve been deeply hurt. Given how often I hear this question, it makes me wonder if almost everyone has someone or something to forgive, which may also include ourselves.

Jesus’ parable today appears to tell us that we need to forgive or we’ll be punished, as if it’s a choice we make. But I have found in my conversations with people about forgiveness, it’s not so simple. We don’t just choose to forgive like we choose laundry detergent. I don’t think it works like that. And we are already tortured by the lack of forgiveness in our lives. After all, if we’re the ones not forgiving, well, we’re also the ones likely lying awake night ruminating while the other person is just doing their thing…which may very well be ruminating over how someone else wronged them. Or maybe they are sleeping soundly, without a wrinkle in their conscience, regardless of how you feel. People are complex and are often quite oblivious.  

The truth is, we can say we forgive someone because we know that’s what we’re supposed to say, but that doesn’t make it so.

So, I’m not sure it makes a ton of sense to focus on how we need to forgive. Indeed, holding on to old grudges or just being cruel out of spite doesn’t serve anyone and it is super not a good look when we ourselves have been blessed by God’s forgiveness and inclusion…and we know it. I think we all get that. However, knowing that’s true doesn’t get us any closer to being able to forgive the big stuff that’s not so easy to forgive. So, what else might this parable be teaching us?

In response to Peter’s question, Jesus tells a story of hyperbole and exaggeration. It starts with a king who wished to settle his accounts with a slave who owed him money. How much? 10,000 talents. How much is a talent? One talent is roughly 20 years of labor! So, if we do the math, this slave owed the king 200,000 years of labor. This is an un-payable debt and yet it’s forgiven. There is no such thing as sufficient patience for paying this off. The cost of the slave’s life, his family’s lives, and all that he owns wouldn’t cover even a small fraction of the debt here. This is BIG debt and it’s forgiven.

What does this tell us about God? It suggests to me that our well-being and our relationship with God is what is important. God is actually uninterested in tit-for-tat justice. He’s not really concerned if we even the scales, because we can’t do it. So, I wonder if this parable is telling us that our tendency towards transactional relationships is not God’s way.

Transactional relationships are relationships that require us to live up to expectations in order to for that relationship to continue. They are conditional. So, for you to belong, to fit in and have a place at the table, you have to measure up in one way or another.

Well, this slave was not going to measure up. Not if he gave every penny he earned forever. Not with his life. Not with his entire legacy. And yet it didn’t matter at all.

This is what God does for us. God lifts us out of our transactional thinking about our worth, belonging, and how the world works. The kind of thinking may sound like:

• If I were smart enough, wealthy enough, successful enough, pretty enough, creative enough …I would be enough.
• Or if I just hadn’t made that mistake, that choice, or been in the wrong place at the wrong time … I would be OK.
• Or if I just didn’t have that health problem, that disability, that childhood … I would be good.
• Or if they weren’t so awful and untrustworthy … I would be at peace.

There is an unending list of if, then statements we make about our worthiness or our sense of OK-ness of ourselves, our lives, and each other. This makes our lives transactional in the same way we know that we can go to the store and get what we want for the correct amount of money. It works at the store, but if we think about life that way, it all becomes an unwinnable game. Our lives and worthiness becomes a debt of 10,000 talents that we don’t have a prayer of paying.

So, thankfully, God just says that game is dumb and throws out the debt. The slave is made right and whole. The unwinnable race was won, not because of the slave, but because of God and that makes it true for us all!

But that is also the rub, because this gift is given to us all. God sees everyone in a way that transcends this transactional view of life. We love that for the people we love. We love that for ourselves, but we don’t love that as much for the ones we struggle to forgive, such as someone who may owe us 100 denarii.

The rub is the gospel is the gospel for everyone. God’s love is fundamentally not transactional and all people are beloved. However, if we want some people to be in the circle of God’s good graces while others are out, such as the slave with the 100 denarii debt, then all of a sudden our understanding of God’s grace, God’s non-transactional love for us becomes transactional again in our minds. Then the question of who is in and who is out becomes important and relevant not only for others, but for ourselves because if it exists for others, it exists for ourselves.

Then the question becomes, where is that line? What do I have to do? Pretty quick we’re worried about our increments of sin and how we’re going to measure up. Well, Jesus’ parable here is the opposite. The exaggeration makes the point. There is nothing incremental here.

We can and often do function transactionally in the world. It’s a game we will never, ever win. Not fully. Not with deep peace running through our veins. You can’t suck in your gut to look better in those new jeans while being deeply at peace. These are different ways of being in the world.

So, the slave in our story, who was relieved of his debt, was lifted out of this transactional bind that he could not escape on his own, then turns around and reconstitutes a transactional way of being in the world. There is a binary of sorts we’re being presented with here. Do you believe that people are made in the image and likeness of God and are therefore precious beyond measure? Do we believe that regardless of how we get lost, God will indeed bring us back into relationship with open arms like the Prodigal Son? Or do we believe in a transactional world where we earn our place at the table, like our anti-hero was forcing onto his fellow slave?

If we cling to our transactional thinking, we will always be worried about the increments of sin in us and how we are living up to God’s standards or not. When we insist on transactional relationships, the good news of God’s mercy for us may indeed begin to melt like an illusion in the desert, and we find ourselves back in the torture of our minds about our sufficiency. We are back in debt, back playing a game we have zero chance of winning.

Now, we’re not Jesus and so I don’t think God expects us to be as generous or magnanimous as God. He doesn’t expect the debt we forgive to be beyond our human scale. The debt in the story that the slave refused to forgive was large, about 100 days’ worth of work. It’s large. It’s a lot, but it is still on a human scale. If we are forgiven a debt of what amounts to $10 billion dollars, we can indeed be asked to forgive 15k. This is about the scale of difference we’re shown.  

We are being asked, within the limits of our humanity, to live our lives outside the game of transactional relationships. It is a way of seeing others that can be so hard to do when difficult people in your life have done damage. Remember, this parable is not about allowing damage to continue. It’s about letting the stuff go that we can let go and to see one another through the eyes of Christ, with love and without the need for measuring up. Again, that doesn’t mean we allow ongoing violence or hurt. These are different things, right?

For the wounds in us that seem to exceed our human capacity, I’ll offer you a suggestion from a woman I read about this week who is a hospice worker. She suggests imagining the heart of God residing behind your own so that when you receive pain or anything that is too much to bear, you let it flow through your own heart and into God’s heart. And when you need to give love that is beyond your own capacity to give, you let the love of God for the person or situation flow through your own heart and let it go where it needs to go.

We are never without support. God knows we’re small, but we are indeed mighty with God.

This capacity of moving beyond our transactional, tit for tat ways may be beyond us some days, particularly for the difficult, painful people or situations in our lives and in the world. But we are never alone in this. We are not asked to do what has not been done for us. This is the path of the disciple, is it not, to let the reality of God’s gift for us to sink into our bodies and our souls so that we know it and feel it so that we can pass the gift along as God’s gift that is given through our own lives for the sake of all?

AMEN