When I was working at Myers Park Presbyterian Church, I had the opportunity to work alongside their children’s minister, Becky Davis.  One day, Becky was teaching the kids about forgiveness.  As she was teaching that day, one little boy’s face just exuded skepticism, like he was sure that Becky was selling him the Brooklyn Bridge for a song.  Eventually, Becky acknowledged the little boy’s s doubt, asking him if he had any questions. The little boy replied: “So, if someone hits me, I don't get to smack him back?”  Before Becky had a chance to answer, he added, "I mean, it doesn't seem right for someone to hit you and you don't get to hit them back."  Becky rephrased his words, she said, "So what you’re thinking is if this kid hits, then you absolutely owe him a hit back, right?”  "Yeah!  Then we're even. That's more fair!" he said, he’s eyes lighting up.  "Well," she reminded him, "Jesus said we have to forgive and not get even.”  She allowed him to process that for a few seconds, then Becky asked “What are we going to do about that?"  The boy thought about it for a moment and then he asked her, "What if I hit him back really quick and then we both forgive each other?  God would like that best, wouldn’t he?”

  My guess is this was a pretty smart little boy.  At six, he’d clearly mastered some very adult thinking when it comes to forgiveness. I think it’s fair to say we all have great difficulty with Jesus’ teaching on forgiving others.  Throughout the gospels Jesus makes it crystal clear that we Christians should be easily forgiving people.  In fact, right there in his prayer it is.  We pray it every Sunday as we say “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”  And then we get to this particular passage from the Gospel of Matthew, the one which strikes us as the most challenging. 

  Seeking some clarification, Peter comes to Jesus with a question about forgiving others.  Peter wonders about the point at which forgiveness could end and retribution could begin.  So, he comes to Jesus asking, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?"  I admire Peter for coming up with a number at all.  And seven seems good, doesn’t it?  Seven captures the idea that Peter’s willing to forgive but he won’t take it so far as to degenerate into what might be considered lunacy.   

  Jesus, however, has another number in mind.  Jesus said to Peter, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.”  The number would be 490, in case you were wondering.  It’s funny, I knew a student pastor at Duke who was keeping a chicken scratch list of the number of times he’d forgiven a particularly vexing person in his congregation.  One day he came into class and announced the number on that list had officially reached 245, what he called the half-way point of his forgiveness for her.  He was only kidding of course.  He knew that Jesus isn’t working here in the realm of simple arithmetic.  Here he’s using a Scriptural allusion. Jesus alludes to a passage from the ninth chapter of the Book of Daniel in which the kingdom of God is said to be coming in a period of time marked by seventy times seven.  In recalling these verses of Daniel, Jesus essentially tells Peter that Christians are to keep forgiving one another until the Kingdom comes…that there isn’t to be a limit on their forgiveness.

  Then, by way of an illustration of this matter, Jesus tells a parable.  Now it’s important to keep in mind that a parable isn’t quite an allegory.  Allegories are stories which have one to one equivalent.  If we were to take this story as an allegory, God would be the king and a person like you or I would be the unforgiving servant.  And that would all work fine well and good until God as the King handed us, the servant, over to the torturers for not being as forgiving as He is.  So, it’s not an allegory Jesus tells but a parable.  Jesus' parables all convey a far deeper message than the story initially reveals.  These parables seem simple yet the messages they convey are central to the teachings of Jesus. Think of parables as internal analogies where the story becomes a witness to the Kingdom to come.  We can gather new ideas, new ways of thinking about things.  In each parable, there are these items which defy expectations.  Oftentimes, it’s in those details where we’re given the key by which we see the parable on a different plane.  In this particular parable, Jesus speaks of a King who wished to settle some accounts, so one of his servants is called before him.  Now this servant owes the King ten thousand talents.  Just so you know, this is an astronomical amount of money.  One denarius would’ve represented a day’s pay for an ordinary laborer.  So, let’s say in today’s terms, one denarius would have been worth approximately $80.  Here’s the thing though, just ONE talent was worth somewhere between 6,000 to 10,000 denarii.  Using the lower figure, this servant owed his king the equivalent of $4 billion dollars.  In the enormity of the debt, we pick up a glimmer of one of those deep truths which the parable exposes.  It’s the kind of debt which is so large as to be utterly and wholly unpayable.  No matter how hard you try, none of us would ever be able to pay off a $4 billion dollar debt.