There is a unifying story arc in Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18. He started by noting that the greatest in the Kingdom are willing to be in the kind of humbled state children had in that society. Second, he noted that we dare not cause the ‘little ones’ to sin or despise the ‘little ones’ in the church. The rest of the chapter, including today’s section, builds on this.
· Finding the Lost Sheep: believers should, like Jesus, take care of the ‘little ones.’
· Handling sin in the church (a lost ‘little one’ and the rest of the flock)
· The parable of the Unmerciful Servant (illustration of prior points).[1]
“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. For the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost.
What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
That is God’s heart for the little ones, the lost and perishing sheep. That’s meant to be the hearts of us, the ‘undershepherds’: to seek and save those who are lost, wondering, and perishing. No mention is made of the rescued responding the right way or not wandering off again. The shepherd simply seeks the lost sheep and restores it to the flock, and we may assume that he does it again and again and again. Now, here’s an illustration of how to go after lost sheep.
“If your brother or sister sins,[2] go and point out their fault,[3] just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.
I had not thought of this before, because this chapter is often chopped up into neat presentations, but I think this is a ‘people’ example to explain the ‘sheep’ example. It’s seeking and saving the lost. Just like The Shepherd is not willing that any sheep perish, we should not be willing that any of our herd wander away. And we see right away what the goal is: restoration.
[4] But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’[5] If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.[6]
So this was recorded by Matthew, who was a tax collector. Gotta ask: how did Jesus treat pagans and tax collectors? He pursued them as if they were lost sheep. This isn’t about writing people off. It’s likely about not sharing the communion meal with them, which was where the heart of church community took place. You can’t let a sinfully toxic person poison the flock. But you also can’t ignore a lost and wandering sheep. More on that later.
“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.[7] Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”[8]
This is an image from Old Testament law. Truth was established by the testimony of two to three witnesses. This is the process by which things are ‘bound and loosed’ on earth as it is in heaven. On this process, God gives His stamp of approval (“there I am with them”).
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.[9]
Peter’s like, “Excuse me? What if it’s the same person over and over? And what if it’s against me? What if that little sheep punches me when it starts wandering? Would seven times of forgiveness be enough?” The rabbis only required three times; this probably seemed generous to Peter. But Jesus responds with a number that the disciples had heard before from the story of Lamech (Adam and Eve’s greeaaatt grandson).
One day he said to his wives, “Wives of Lamech, I need to tell you something! I killed a man who struck me. Surely Lamech must be avenged seventy-seven times” (Genesis 4:23–24).
Lamech was bragging that his vengeance would never end. Jesus takes his unending vengeance and converts into unending forgiveness.[10] Then Jesus tells a parable to illustrate the importance of forgiveness.
“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand[11]talents was brought to him.
Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.[12]At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’
“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’[13] In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”[14]
The entire purpose of this parable is to answer Peter’s question, “How many times should I forgive my brother who sins against me?” Jesus is making a point about forgiveness in the church, between sisters and brothers in Christ. We have been forgiven much; we must forgive much.[15]He’s making a point (using a common Roman scenario) about the extravagant way in which we are to forgive others[16] – and the stingy way we are not.
We just read a parable in which we only took one part literally/seriously (Jesus doesn’t leave us to go and save the one). We have to be careful that we don’t make parables say more than they are intended to say. I don’t think we are to read this parable as if the King/Master cleanly correlates with God or that other details are meant to represent precise theology. I have several reasons.[17]
· After just telling his disciples to forgive without end, this King forgives once.
· God wouldn’t sell family members to appease a debt.
· The second servant just disappears from the story, apparently languishing in jail. You’d think the king/God would set that right.
· God doesn’t need people telling him what his people have done wrong.
· The parable doesn’t offer a “picture” of a repentant worshipper asking for forgiveness. A dude gets caught and tries to panic bargain his way out of it.
Let’s not ask the parable to carry more weight than its main point: those who have been forgiven must forgive.
It might be as specific as addressing the scenario Peter just brought up. If that’s the case, Peter would be the arrogant servant not wanting to forgive someone who has wronged him far less than Peter has wronged others. It reminds me of taking the beam out of our own eye before taking the speck out of others (Matthew 7:5). We all carry beams. We can’t forget that. We can’t forget how often and how much we receive forgiveness.
I also don’t think we should read too much into the ‘torturer’.[18] Jesus’ audience would have known that the Gentiles who could not pay their debt were cast into debtor’s prison. There is a principle of sowing and reaping here. If you do not forgive others, you will be the one in miserable bondage,[19] not them.[20]
What is clear is that there are consequences to unforgiveness. It cannot go unaddressed. This is necessary to protect those around the one sinning, as well as to get his attention. And those who refuse to forgive will be miserable in their unforgiveness.
“It temporarily delivers a believer to the power of Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 5:5). The purpose of this is to bring him to his senses and cause him to confess his sin.” (Believer’s Bible Commentary)
My final note for unpacking the story: Jesus says that his Father in heaven would do the same thing in the kingdom of heaven. It’s worth asking the question: why does God punish/discipline/prune those who are in the Kingdom?
“If God doesn’t discipline you as he does all of his children, it means that you are illegitimate and are not really his children at all… our earthly fathers disciplined us for a few years, doing the best they knew how. But God’s discipline is always good for us, so that we might share in his holiness.” (Hebrews 12:8-10)
This is what Jesus explained was the point of church discipline – “winning a brother over” is about the restoration that follows repentance.
FIVE POINTS OF APPLICATION
1. The entire purpose of this parable is to answer Peter’s question, “How many times should I forgive my brother who sins against me?” Just as there are no limits to the actions we should take in avoiding sin (‘cut out your eye’), so also there should be no limits to the extent of our forgiveness from the heart for others.
“The kingdom comes with limitless grace in the midst of an evil world, but with it comes limitless demand…God searches out those who stray and wills that none be lost, and the community can lay no bounds to its forgiveness or forget that its forgiveness is modeled on God’s forgiveness of its members’ own much larger debt.”[21]
The ability to extend forgiveness is evidence of having truly understood that beauty of the forgiveness God (and others) extend to us.
2. I think there is a human tendency to want to be forgiven much while at the same time forgive little. We want people to ‘take up their cross’ to forgive us, but we don’t want to put that kind of effort into it. We want people to cover a multitude of our significant sins or remarkable flaws with their love and forgiveness, but the minute we are hurt by someone else, the gloves come off and the walls go up. And then, the tendency is to exaggerate what others have done to us and minimize what we have done to them. This parable fundamentally reminds us to do unto others as we would have done to us, to give to others what has been given to us.
3. When the other servants were “greatly distressed,” the word (λυπέω) can refer to emotional/physical pain or “offense” in this context.[22] The king responds when ‘the little ones’ have been hurt, as a good king would.
“The kingdom cannot be present if evil is not being named and defeated…the judgment language is hyperbole…but it assures people there will be a reckoning and that God will vindicate the oppressed.”[23]
The confrontation of sin is not just for the sake of the perpetrator; it’s for the sake of the victim and potential victims. Caring is both/and, not an either/or. Confrontation is care when done with grace and truth.
4. Forgiving “from the heart” needs a scriptural context. Remember the verse, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7)? Notice what the heart is doing – thinking. The word “brain” in never used in the Bible. “Heart” covers both emotions and thoughts. Forgiving someone requires a commitment of the mind. Forgiving from the heart begins as, among other things…
· deciding to absolve them of the personal debt they owe you
· deciding to pray for their repentance and restoration
Forgiveness may eventually become a feeling, but it starts as a decision.
5. Restoration. Relational restoration can and often does happen on the other side of genuine repentance and genuine forgiveness. Situational restoration is trickier.
Forgiveness from the heart does not necessarily shield people from the practical consequences of their sin. If someone robs your house, assaults you on the street, hijacks your credit card, or crashes into your car while DUI, you can forgive them from the heart yet still testify against them in court. Like love, forgiveness can cover a multitude of sins. But it doesn't erase them, it doesn’t enable the harmful activity to continue, and it doesn’t mean we should release people to continue their harm.
It is an act of love to forgive from the heart someone who has wronged us. It is also an act of love for everyone around that person to ‘bind and loose’ in such a way that those around them are spared the pain we went through.
Tim Keller gets the final word.
“Most of the wrongs done to us cannot be assessed in purely economic terms. Someone may have robbed you of some happiness, reputation, opportunity, or certain aspects of your freedom. No price tag can be put on such things, yet we still have a sense of violated justice that does not go away when the other person says, ‘I’m really sorry.’
When we are seriously wronged we have an indelible sense that the perpetrators have incurred a debt that must be dealt with. Once you have been wronged and you realize there is a just debt that can’t simply be dismissed— there are only two things to do.The first option is to seek ways to make the perpetrators suffer for what they have done.
You can… actively initiate or passively wish for some kind of pain in their lives commensurate to what you experienced. There are many ways to do this. You can viciously confront them, saying things that hurt. You can go around to others to tarnish their reputation. If the perpetrators suffer, you may begin to feel a certain satisfaction, feeling that they are now paying off their debt.
There are some serious problems with this option, however. You may become harder and colder, more self-pitying, and therefore more self-absorbed. If the wrongdoer was a person of wealth or authority you may instinctively dislike and resist that sort of person for the rest of your life. If it was a person of the opposite sex or another race you might become permanently cynical and prejudiced against whole classes of people.
In addition, the perpetrator and his friends and family often feel they have the right to respond to your payback in kind. Cycles of reaction and retaliation can go on for years. Evil has been done to you— yes. But when you try to get payment through revenge the evil does not disappear. Instead it spreads, and it spreads most tragically of all into you and your own character.
There is another option, however. You can forgive. Forgiveness means refusing to [personally] make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them.
You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death. Yes, but it is a death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of bitterness and cynicism.
As a pastor I have counseled many people about forgiveness, and I have found that if they do this— if they simply refuse to take vengeance on the wrongdoer in action and even in their inner fantasies— the anger slowly begins to subside. You are not giving it any fuel and so the resentment burns lower and lower…
There are many good reasons that we should want to confront wrongdoers. Wrongdoers have inflicted damage and… it costs something to fix the damage. We should confront wrongdoers— to wake them up to their real character, to move them to repair their relationships, or to at least constrain them and protect others from being harmed by them in the future.
Notice, however, that all those reasons for confrontation are reasons of love. The best way to love them and the other potential victims around them is to confront them in the hope that they will repent, change, and make things right. The desire for vengeance, however, is motivated not by goodwill but by ill will…
Forgiveness…leads to a new peace, a resurrection. It is the only way to stop the spread of the evil... only when you have lost the need to see the other person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing. You have to submit to the costly suffering and death of forgiveness if there is going to be any resurrection.”
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[1] Thanks for pointing out this progression, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3987/0a89d9e22b8cb51863d874718b5060bc4472.pdf
[2] The earliest manuscripts (Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus) lack the addition of “against you”; the later Byzantine manuscripts include it. It was likely added because Peter will soon apply this teaching personally, and adding “against me” at the beginning here would match what he asks later.
[3] “Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.” (Leviticus 19:17)
[4] “As throughout the NT, the goal of all Christian discipline is restoration and rehabilitation, not retribution.” (NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible)
[5] Follows the guideline in Deut. 19:15.
[6] “ To whom thou art, as a Christian, to owe earnest and persevering good will, and acts of kindness; but have no religious communion with him, till, if he have been convicted, he acknowledge his fault.” (Adam Clarke)
[7] “When a congregation acts in accordance with Scripture to promote God’s glory and the good of an erring member, heaven backs up the church.” (Tony Evans Study Bible)
[8] “It temporarily delivers a believer to the power of Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 5:5). The purpose is to bring him to his senses and cause him to confess his sin. Until then, believers should be courteous but should also show by their attitude that they do not condone his sin and cannot have fellowship with him as a fellow believer. The assembly should be prompt to receive him back as soon as there is evidence of godly repentance.” (Believers Bible Commentary)
[9] “Christ’s reply lifts the subject out of the legal sphere (seven times - a hard rule), into the evangelic: times without number, infinite placability.” (Expositor’s Greek Testament)
[10] Tony Evans Study Bible
[11] The highest number in Greek arithmetic.
[12] There were no prisons in Jewish culture, but there were in the Roman world. “The Roman Constitution, known as the Laws of Twelve Tables (Table III, Laws IV-X), has a series of detailed laws… [debtors] may be taken to court, put in chains, and forced into various arrangements to pay off their debts as slaves…others can come to pay off their debts on their behalf and they can be released from prison. Debts that could not be repaid were to be enslaved by creditors or sold in the slave market.” (“Parable of the Unforgiving Servant.” https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/parable-of-the-unforgiving-servant)
[13] “"Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get" (Matt 7.1-2).”
[14] “Those who know God’s mercy must operate on the principle of mercy. If they do not show mercy but insist on justice, they will not receive mercy, but justice.” (ESV Reformation Study Bible)
[15] I don’t think it is meant to be read as a teaching on atonement theology or final judgment Klyne Snodgrass’ book Stories With Intent: A Comprehensive Guide To The Parables Of Jesus does an excellent job explaining this.
[16] The parable’s conclusion sounds a lot like a teaching in Sirach 28:2-4 “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he had done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbor anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord? If one has no mercy toward another like himself, can he then seek pardon for his own sins?”
[17] “The king in the parable surely does not live up to Jesus’ saying on repeated and unlimited forgiveness. Moreover, when the king in the parable is seen as a metaphor for God (based on Mt 18:35), the picture of God painted in the parable is quite unflattering in that God is pictured as ‘a vindictive person whose mercies are dependent on human behavior.’” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3987/0a89d9e22b8cb51863d874718b5060bc4472.pdf
[18] “Just as we don’t take [the money figures] literally, neither ought we take literally Jesus threatening torture and jail for withholding forgiveness (the very things he criticized the unforgiving servant for doing)…I hear him using holy hyperbole to say, “God forgave you your debt and you won’t forgive another? How would you like it if God did the same to you – didn’t forgive you, called you wicked, and handed you over to be tortured in a debtor’s prison for 160,000 years?” I think he would answer, “I wouldn’t.” https://readingacts.com/2022/01/19/the-parable-of-the-unmerciful-servant-matthew-1823-35/#
[19] “There are many poor souls who are tortured by their own unforgiveness toward others.” (“Matthew 18 – qualities and attitudes of kingdom citizens.” enduringword.com)
[20] Shari Abbot, “What is the Meaning of Jesus’ Parable of the Ungrateful Servant? (Matthew 18:23-35).” reasonsforhopejesus.com
[21] Stories With Intent: A Comprehensive Guide To The Parables Of Jesus, Klyne R. Snodgrass
[22] https://readingacts.com/2022/01/19/the-parable-of-the-unmerciful-servant-matthew-1823-35/#
[23] Stories With Intent: A Comprehensive Guide To The Parables Of Jesus, Klyne R. Snodgrass