This week I was tied between two stories. It was between the encounter with the Savior and the woman of Canaan (Matthew 15:22-27) and the parable of the servants debt (18:21-35) If you get curious check out Matthew 15:22-27, but I decided to do my reflection on the parable of the servants debt.
How this story starts off is with a question from Peter- 18:21 "Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?" The first thing that my professor pointed out was this: Peter is asking a personal question. At first I didn't understand what he meant but then it became clear. Each of the apostles were not super humans. They were people with problems and imperfections. It is quite possible that Peter had been offended by someone more than once and was coming to Christ for justification of being unforgiving. He uses the term "brother" which could be used for his actual brother, one of his fellow apostles, or maybe just an acquaintance. We are not sure. However, we can assume that this question came from Peter's personal life.
In response to Peter's question Christ gives the parable of the servant and his debt. If you are familiar with this story you know that there is a servant in a kingdom that owes his Lord 10,000 talents. In class we did the math and 10,000 talents equals about 15 billion dollars in gold! Oh my word. This is a lot of money! We can imagine this debt is not possible to pay off. The servant seems to understand this and he asks his Lord to have patience with him and he will pay it all. The Lord then has compassion on him. That's pretty nice, so the servant should be pretty grateful right? Well instead of this the servant goes and seeks out one of his fellow servants and demands him to pay him back a debt that he owes him. This dept is a hundred pence which equals about 15,000 dollars. This is quite a bit of money, don't get me wrong. But when the fellow servant asks for compassion from this man the man gives none and allows the man to be cast into prison till the debt is paid. As the story goes on the Lord finds out about what this servant did and is upset. In 18:33 it says "Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow servant, even as I had pity on thee?"
As we read this parable the first time we all felt good about it, thinking this was a parable of forgiveness. However, in class we were reminded yet again that all of Christs parables can have more than one meaning. This story is one of the atonement. A servant has an unimaginable debt that needs to be paid to his Lord. Instead of being unmerciful, the Lord shows compassion unto the servant and clears the debt. The Lord would have been willing to do the same for this man who only owed hundred pence. Our Savior has taken upon all of our sins and mistakes, he has paid our debt. We can never repay Him, it's not humanly possible. And we are not expected to be able to pay the debt (only by doing all we can and repenting...) However, we are expected to forgive those around us. These two servants were under the same Lord, the Lord who would forgive both of their debts. It is not our job to inflict justice upon those who have wronged us. We have to forgive people regardless of how many times they sin against us. Our Savior has paid for everyone's debts and it is His job alone to deliver justice.
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