Some of Jesus’ parables are enigmatic, puzzling. They seem to defy interpretation, like the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, that we will hear next Sunday. Some are familiar, so familiar that their interpretations seem fixed for all time. Some seem to be obvious, stories with a single point that gets hammered home. Then there are parables like the one we heard this morning, a story that we can all connect with but that has some twists and turns that may make us uncomfortable.

On the surface we get it. Though it’s set in an ancient context, in slavery, with a lord or master who demands accounting from his slaves, debt is something we all know about. We’ve heard about the effects of crushing medical debt, incurred through no fault of one’s own, the product of illness, or injury, the random attack of cancer, but caused above all by a medical system that seems designed to draw profits from people at their most vulnerable and weakest. We know about student loan debt, again incurred in the effort to improve one’s lot in life, but thanks to federal policy, and a higher education system more interested in profits than learning, it can become crushing and impossible to pay off, with interest often far exceeding the original amount of the loans. 

So when we encounter a story about debt, and the forgiveness of debt, we think we’re in territory we know. But wait a sec. Let’s consider the numbers. What is a talent (and no, it’s not a God-given ability; in fact, our word talent derives from the Greek word that’s used here). A talent was a unit of measure, of weight. It was about 130 lbs, and in monetary terms, used of silver, and was roughly equal to 15 yrs of an ordinary worker’s wages. So 10,000 talents would be worth 150,000 yrs of work. To put it another way, about equal to 3000 lifetimes. An astronomical sum, isn’t it?

And so the questions start popping up. How could a slave incur so much debt? Well, say for a moment it’s hyperbole. The point is that it is an amount that could never be repaid in one’s lifetime—there, that brings it back down to earth, and to a place we’re familiar with. We have all heard the stories of people saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt; and the only way out from under that debt is to declare bankruptcy.

We get all that. We can even imagine pleading with a debt collecting agency for mercy. We can see our selves down on our knees, begging to be given relief from that staggering debt. And we can imagine also the joy when we hear the response: “Your debt is forgiven.”

But then comes the twist. Having received mercy, his enormous debt forgiven, the slave goes out and encounters another slave who owes him a debt. It’s not as big a debt as the first; only 100 denarii—a denarius being roughly a day’s wages for a laborer. We hear the very same words from the second slave, “Have patience with me and I will pay you everything.” 

But the first slave reacts differently than his master did. Instead of offering mercy, he has the second slave imprisoned. But he gets his comeuppance. The other slaves, having seen all this, probably having heard about what their master had done for him, his sudden good fortune, his freedom from debt; having heard all this, they go back to the master and tell him what happened. He ends up in the same place where he had sent the second slave, in prison being tortured for his lack of mercy. 

One of the challenges of this parable is that it is so easy to allegorize it—to equate the master, the lord with God. But if we do that, we’re left in a very uncomfortable place at the end of the story—with a master, a God, who retracts his mercy, punishes the slave for his actions and his debts. What was it Jesus said in the intro to the parable? To forgive as many as seventy seven times—hardly what the master did, is it?

I think there’s something else going on here. In the Roman empire as in our own day, debt was ubiquitous. It was hard to imagine a world without debt, an economy that didn’t rely on debt. In the end, neither the master, nor the slave could break free of those assumptions, that worldview that saw debt as essential, as all-pervasive.

But in the Jewish tradition, in the Biblical tradition there was an alternative. The Torah imagines a debt-free society; a day of rest when one has no work obligations; a sabbatical year when the land lies fallow; and the year of Jubilee, the 50^th year, when all debts are erased, slaves freed, land that was sold returned to its original owner. 

You may be thinking of the Lord’s Prayer—In Matthew, the text reads, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” To be free of debt; to live in a society that is debt-free, what would that even look like?

I was fascinated and saddened this summer as I watched the debate over student loan forgiveness unfold. Countless people spoke of their experiences, attending college without accumulating any debt; or working hard for years to pay it off as they criticized the president’s plan to forgive student loans. It wasn’t fair, they said. They rarely pointed out that when they were in school, the price of tuition was much lower, interest rates on student loans were much lower. They didn’t point out that all of those billions of dollars of payroll protection loans made during COVID were forgiven. Like the first slave, we may rejoice if our debts are forgiven, and we may be reluctant to forgive the debts of others.

The parable leaves us with questions, even though its meaning is quite clear. We should forgive those who owe us, just as God forgives us. But the questions—why does the king not forgive the slave a second time? After all, Jesus has told Peter to forgive not seven but seventy seven times. The parable invites us to think of forgiveness as a calculus—there exists, somewhere a finite number of times, beyond which it is not necessary to forgive. But that’s precisely the wrong way of thinking about things.

To think about forgiveness as a debt suggests that we understand it in terms we comprehend—mathematics or economics, and given all the talk of debt in our culture, we are sorely tempted to go down that route. That’s overlooking something that is crucial in understanding Peter’s question: “How often should I forgive my brother? For that question implies there is relationship between the one forgiving and the one owed. Including that in the equation changes everything. 

We ask God to forgive us and we experience God’s forgiveness, rich, unbounded, unmerited. It is that relationship and that experience that should shape our own forgiveness. That is the point both of Jesus’ answer to Peter and the parable itself.

I have lived long enough and served as a pastor long enough to know that pain and anger from hurt can last a very long time. We process things quite differently; in different ways and at different speeds. Even the same hurt inflicted on two different people can linger in very different ways in those who have been affected. That’s true not only in our personal lives, but also when we think about events like those we commemorate today. Forgiving others may be difficult, even, at times, impossible. Yet our God, who has forgiven us so deeply and so completely, invites us, not only to be forgiven, but to forgive in the same way, richly, unboundedly, and totally. Thanks be to God!