The Gospel text today presents the standard that Christ sets for the relationship between man and the other, and this standard is derived from God’s conduct with him. The servant today was indebted to the king for ten thousand talents — in today’s value, hundreds of millions of dollars — and his master forgave him when he pleaded with him. There was another servant indebted to this servant for a hundred denarii, that is, a thousand dollars today, and he did not forgive his companion but cast him into prison and demanded his debt. The important difference here is that the king did not merely waive the debt; he set the servant free — that is, the king’s view of the servant no longer saw him as a debtor but as a free man, and he treated him on that basis. Whereas he did not set his friend free, and his view of this friend was not liberated.
The harshness of this servant and his lack of mercy toward his friend go back to his lack of appreciation for the king’s gift. When he looked at his enormous debt toward the king, he considered it a small sum relative to himself, which a king who owns the earth and what is upon it could overlook. He saw the king’s forgiveness as a matter of course. But when it came to his own debt, he saw that he was a poor servant and that this sum constitutes a great difference in his life that he could not overlook. So he dealt with his companion from his own perspective, not from the perspective and the vast generosity of the king who forgave him.
This is precisely our problem with God: the lack of feeling for God’s gift in our lives. We take God’s vast gifts lightly because He is “the rich Able One” who gives generously, but when we are wronged, we feel that we are weak humans who cannot bear an offense even if it is the size of a “needle.” Instead of treating others in the spirit of the mercy we received, we deal with them by our narrow logic and our apparent incapacity.
Here comes Jesus’s harsh phrase: “so shall God do with you.” What is meant here is not that God imitates our harshness, but that the man who does not forgive places himself, by his full will, outside the mercy of God, and He will treat me as I treat the other; God treats me as I ought to treat the other, and judges me as I judge the other. Let us choose how we want God to look upon us.
Here we ask: is it asked of us to forgive with the same capacity as God? This question may truly confuse us, for man sometimes falls into the problematic of giving without limits and so loses. But the standard of Jesus is not that we imitate God in quantity or in inherent capacity, but in the nature of the act. For it is not important whether you forgave a dollar or a thousand; what matters is the act itself. It is not a burdensome duty that we perform; rather it is a natural reflection of one who tasted the flavor of divine forgiveness. For whoever feels that he was born anew thanks to the vastness of God’s mercy, it becomes impossible for him to keep grasping his brother by the neck because of a passing human error.
On the other hand, some see — and they may be right — that we do not have the capacity, like God, to accept anew the one who wronged us, and we cannot return the relationship to its first nature. Is this a problematic that needs a solution? The Gospel is not unattainable ideals, nor does it place upon us burdens under which we collapse. Forgiveness does not mean that I give trust to a person who failed to carry it; it means that I forgive him his sin against me, forget it, and set him free as though he had not sinned. Our problem as Christians is that we see the Gospel and Jesus’s words as fantasy or Platonic ideals, as some say the Gospel is for the angels and the birds. Therefore we lost the words of Jesus, because we could not see them as a standard, and we failed to understand them.
For the Gospel does not demand of us that we receive the one who wronged us with open arms and overflowing love, ignoring our wounds and our human feelings; rather it asks of us what is deeper and purer: that we purify our hearts of the poisons of resentment, hatred, and the desire for revenge, and that we not wait for the other to pay the price of his sin against us, but that we set him free, and become free within ourselves.
As for the form of the external relationship and its outcome, it is governed by man’s reality, his capacity, and what he sees as suitable for his life; there are relationships that can be repaired and return to their former state, others that end completely, and a third that takes a new and different form. The form of the relationship is governed by human capacity and reality, while forgiveness and pardon are governed by the divine standard mentioned in the Gospel.