03.07. THE UNMERCIFUL SERVANT OR THE UNFORGIVING DEBTOR

THE UNMERCIFUL SERVANT OR THE UNFORGIVING DEBTOR Matthew 18:23-35 The occasion of this parable was a question put by Peter. Our Lord has once again been warning His disciples against that self-sufficient spirit which makes men quarrelsome and implacable and censorious. Their ambitious temper had been again showing itself in the discussion of their favorite topic: “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” They had been betraying their eagerness to be influential and important persons, their proneness therefore to despise the uninfluential and to treat with harshness the “little ones” of the kingdom, those who were weak and erring and always needing forgiveness. Our Lord therefore warns them that the little ones rather than the great ones are His care, and that provision is made in His kingdom not for those who need no forgiveness, not for those who can see only the faults and weaknesses of others, but for those who make constant demands on mercy. But Peter, when he hears the precept that he must gain his brother by forgiving him his trespass, foresees the very probable result, that his brother thus forgiven will repeat his offense, and puts therefore the question whether some different treatment ought not then to be adopted. “How often,” he says, “shall I forgive my brother?” He knew the Jewish rule: Forgive a first offense, forgive a second, a third — punish the fourth. And he seems to wish to meet at once the most liberal sentiments of his Master in expanding this common law to more than double its original measure: “Shall I forgive him till seven times?” But this question was framed in the very spirit of the old law of retaliation. By proposing any limit whatever to forgiveness, Peter showed that he still considered that to forgive was the exceptional thing, was to forego a right which must some time be reassumed, was not an eternal law of the kingdom but only a tentative measure which at any moment may be revoked; that underneath the forgiveness we extend to an erring brother there lies a right to revenge which we may at any time assert. This feeling wherever it exists shows that we are living with retaliation for the law, forgiveness for the exception. But Christ’s law is, that forgiveness shall be unlimited: “I say not unto seven times, but until seventy times seven “— that is to say an untold number of times. Seven was with the Jews the number of perfection. When time has run through seven days, it begins again; the circle is complete. So that no expression could more forcibly convey the impression of endless, ever renewed, eternal iteration than “seventy times seven.” The parable is added to illustrate the hatefulness of an unforgiving spirit. In it the Lord gibbets the implacable temper of the man who refuses to extend to others the forgiveness he himself needs. His own debt of something like two millions sterling indicates that he occupied a position of trust, and had exceptional opportunity of advancing his Lord’s interests. And probably the magnitude of the debt was intended not merely to suggest the vastness of the liabilities of all men to God, but also to hint to the Apostles that men so closely allied to their Lord as they were, might possibly incur a greater debt than those in an inferior position had opportunity of incurring.

It may seem as if there were some inconsistency between the two parts of our Lord’s directions regarding the treatment of an offending brother. In the parable and in His direct answer to Peter’s question He speaks as if the sole duty of an injured person were to forgive. In the preceding verses He speaks as if much more were needful, and indeed He lays down the principles which have ever since governed, theoretically at least, ecclesiastical prosecutions. An injured person is not to act as a strong healthy minded, good-natured man is very apt to act. He is not to say to himself, “What does it matter that so-and-so has called me “cheat” or “liar;” my character will outlive his attacks; what harm has he done save to himself by circulating slanders about me, or by taking me into the extent of a few pounds? I am not going to dirty my hands or bother my head about such a poor creature.” No doubt there are slight injuries of which this is the proper treatment. To notice them at all would be to make them of more importance than is wise. But this may be carried too far; and it is frequently carried too far by the easy-going pleasant-tempered men who are so agreeable an element in society. There are, says our Lord, offenses of which the proper treatment is to go to the offending party and remonstrate with him. There are few more disagreeable duties in life, but sometimes it is a duty. There are matters that come to your knowledge which you cannot pass by — you feel that if you do so, it is because of an element of cowardliness in your nature. Duty requires you to go to the offending party and endeavor to bring him to repentance. But this treatment and all that follows it is in strict harmony with the injunction to forgive, for you are never required to forgive an impenitent person: but you are required — and this is, I think, a duty more difficult and more frequently neglected than even the duty of forgiveness — you are required to do all you can to bring to repentance the person who has injured you. To forgive the man who has wronged you, when he comes humbling himself, admitting he was wrong and heartily begging you to forgive him, in most actual cases makes no great call on Christian charity: but to go affectionately and without a spark of vindictive feeling to the man who has done you a wrong, and strive patiently to make it as plain to him as it is to yourself that he has done wrong, and so to do this as to win your brother — this seems to be about the highest reach of Christian virtue we are likely to meet in this present world.

There is another initial difficulty. Not only do we feel it almost impossible to forgive certain injuries, but some well-instructed Christian writers explicitly maintain that there are injuries which men ought not to forgive.* One who has done much to elevate the tone of modern literature, introduces the following lines in his most celebrated drama:

“Oh sirs, look round you lest you be deceived, Forgiveness may be spoken with the tongue, Forgiveness may be written with the pen, But think not that the parchment and mouth pardon Will e’er eject old hatreds from the heart.

There’s that betwixt you been men ne’er forget Till they forget themselves, till all’s forgot.

Till the deep sleep falls on them in that bed From which no morrow’s mischief knocks them up.”

* On this point, see the remarkable chapter on Forgiveness, in “Ecce Homo,” from which the thought of this paragraph is derived. The Author cites a modern novelist who makes one of his characters say: “There are some wrongs that no one ought to forgive, and I shall be a villain on the day I shake that man’s hand.”

It might seem then as if those who knew human life best agreed that there is a limitation which must be put to forgiveness, that there are injuries which no man can be expected to forgive or can forgive, that there are circumstances in which this rule of Christ’s must be set aside.

Let us test this idea by a very simple instance. Some of the most thoroughly Christian and wise headmasters have been inclined to wink at fighting among their boys, taking care that it does not become too frequent nor go any serious length. And even the most forgiving and Christlike of parents is not altogether comfortable if his boy comes home from school and tells him that he was grossly insulted and struck by a boy somewhat bigger than himself, but that instead of defending himself he forgave the offender. Why then is the parent not quite comfortable, why would most parents be really more gratified to hear that their boy had fought a bigger boy, than that when struck he had turned the other cheek? Simply because most parents might have some suspicion that softness and cowardliness had as much to do with the turning of the other cheek as Christian feeling. If they had unmistakable proof of their boy’s courage and manliness, if they were perfectly sure that fear was a quite unknown feeling to their boy, they would delight in his having forgiven insolence and ill treatment. But unfortunately fear and a craven spirit are so much commoner than high spirit moderated by Christian temper, that wherever gross injuries are forgiven, we are apt to ascribe this apparently Christian conduct to that spirit which is at the very antipodes from the spirit of Christ. The parent does not think his boy ought not to forgive — nay, he is sure that is the highest and manliest, and to many boys the most difficult conduct — but until he is quite sure that in a given case the forgiveness has sprung not from a sham magnanimity thrown over a sneaking and feeble character, he is afraid to commend it. So it is everywhere. There is no limitation to forgiveness; no injury so gross that it ought not to be forgiven. But there are injuries so gross that when men forgive them they are sure to be suspected of doing so from unworthy motives. So little is Christian feeling in its highest reaches and manifestations counted on, so little is it seen or even understood, that when a man forgives one who has deeply injured him, this forgiveness is apt to be ascribed to what is mean, and not to what is Christlike in the injured party. But wherever, as in the case of our Lord Himself there is no question of the power to defeat or the courage to face one’s enemies, wherever forgiveness can be ascribed only to a merciful spirit, there men do admire the disposition to forgive even the greatest of injuries. The parable is intended to enforce the teaching of our Lord regarding forgiveness by exhibiting the unreasonableness and meanness and danger of an unforgiving spirit. The hatefulness of such a spirit is emphasized by two aggravating features: —

1. The unmerciful servant had himself required forgiveness and had just been forgiven.

2. The debt due to him was infinitesimally small when compared with the debt which had been remitted to him.

1. First, the man is not softened by the remission of his own great debt. He goes straight from the presence of his master who had forgiven him all his talents, and lays violent hands on one of his associates who happened to owe him a few shillings. Having just been forgiven, he might have been expected to remember, with humble and softened feeling, that there is a better law than retaliation. He thought mercy a good thing so long as he was the object of it. So long as he was in the presence of a creditor he had much to say of the calamity of debt, a thousand reasons to urge for the exercise of patience, and a thousand excuses for wrongdoing. Five minutes after, in the presence of a debtor, there is to him no law in the world, but harsh and hasty exaction of dues. He is deaf to the reasons which had filled his own mouth immediately before, deaf to everything which was not a promise to pay, and that instantly. This is no over-colored picture. It is over-colored neither as a representation of what naturally occurs in connection with pecuniary debts, nor as a picture of the treatment which sinners give to sinners like themselves. Men who begin to use the money which belongs to others, and to invest on their own account funds which either do not exist at all except in their own hopes, or which belong to others and are only passing through their hands, become deadened with surprising rapidity to all sense of the injury they do. If they prove bankrupt, it is much more their own inconvenience and loss they bewail than the wrong done to others. The enormous debtor of the parable betrayed no sense of shame, no feeling for his lord’s loss, but only craven dread of slavery and personal suffering. No serious humility, no honest and thoughtful facing of the facts, no deep truthfulness have entered his spirit. He is ready to promise anything, if he can only escape present consequences. This is a true picture of the temper in which we sometimes crave pardon. Our iniquities overtake us with a throng of painful and overwhelming consequences, and in terror we cry for forgiveness. But the distress of our own condition blinds us to the wrong we have done, and no true humiliation enters the spirit. Deadened by long self-indulgence to a sense of everything but what directly affects himself with pleasure or pain, the sinner has no thought of the deeper spiritual relations of his sin. He stupidly thinks God withholds punishment because he has made a foolish purpose of paying his dues by amending his ways. There is no deep contrition; no conscience-stricken yet joyful recognition of the relation he holds to God; no intense delight and glorying in a God capable of passing by such transgressions as his; no rising of the spirit to new attachments and new ideas; no “truth in the inward parts,” but only a desire to escape, as selfish and as soft as was the desire to sin. But the forgiving love of God, if it does not humble, hardens us. To carry an unhumbled, self-regarding spirit through such an experience gives the finishing touch to a dehumanizing selfishness. We have a key here to the conduct of those religious persons who act as if they meant to make up for their own deficiencies by charging others with theirs; as if they supposed that the violent and unrelenting condemnation of those who offend them were the fittest exercise of their privilege as persons forgiven of God. The little taste of religion they have had seems to have soured their temper and hardened their heart. They would be more human had they no religion at all. Just as this man proposes to build up his credit again by scrupulously exacting every farthing that others owe him, so do those who have not been thoroughly humbled by God’s forgiveness show their zeal in exposing and reproving the faults of others. So far from being softened and enlarged in spirit by their own experience of mercy, they grow more punctilious in their exactions, more cruel and stiff in their demeanor.

2. Second, the petty amount of the debt he exacts is set over against the enormity of that which had been remitted to himself. You might expect that a man who had been forgiven talents would have no heart to exact pence. You would suppose that one whose eye had been fixed on a kingdom’s revenue would not know how to count farthings. There is something almost incredibly mean as well as savage in this man’s quick remembrance of the few pence due to himself, while he so easily dismisses from his mind the ten thousand talents due by him. But our incredulity gives way as we look at the facts which underlie the parable, and measure the debt we owe to God with the peccadilloes committed against ourselves, and which we are so slow to forget.

What are the offenses which we feel it impossible to forgive, and which alienate us from one another? If other men do not serve us well and fulfil our expectations; if they do not throw themselves heartily into our work and perfectly accomplish what we entrusted to them, we have no forgiveness for them; they must go. Or some one has been so presumptuous as to differ from us, and has opposed the propagation of our opinions on some political, or theological, or practical matter. Or men patronize us, and make us feel insignificant; or they tell some damaging story about us; or they win the prize that we worked for, or succeed in getting possession of a little bit of property we coveted. Or has even some grand exceptional injury been done you? has your whole life been darkened and altered and obstructed by the injustice or neglect or selfishness of some one, whose influence circumstances compel you to submit to? Is there some one whom you cannot think of but with a tumult in the blood and a passionate emotion? Take the injury that is most difficult for you to forgive, and measure it with that for which you yourself need to ask forgiveness of God, and say whether you ought to be implacable and resolved on revenge.

I suppose there are few persons who have not often sat and wondered why it is that they feel so little sense of obligation to God, and so little shame that their sins are sins against Him. It is so difficult for us to have any genuine shame before God, though so easy to feel it before men, that we are sometimes tempted to fancy that a sense of sin must after all be a fictitious feeling, and not a feeling which increases in intensity with soundness of mind and clearness of mental vision. Several considerations, however, combine to show that the representation given in the parable fairly apportions the comparative guilt of sinning against God and sinning against man. All our sins directly or indirectly touch God, while only a few touch any individual on earth. In the injuries done to yourself by other men you may be able to detect more malice, more intention to wound and injure than has entered into any sin you have committed against God. But then, what are the obligations which bind any man to your service compared with the obligations which bind you to God? For whom have you done, or for whom can you do, any portion of that which God daily does for you? Debt is measured by obligation. There can be no debt where there has been no obligation. We are not equally bound to all. We are not bound to educate another man’s children as we are bound to educate our own. We can have no debt to a shopkeeper from whom we have received nothing. And our debt to God is enormous because we have received from Him benefits deep as life itself, and are bound to Him in ways as varied as the manifestations of that life. We cannot sin against one another as we can sin against God. Just as the servant of the parable, in dealing with his lord, had intromissions with larger sums than he could touch in dealing with a fellow-servant, so in dealing with God we are lifted to relations unique in kind and of surpassing sacredness, and are involved in responsibilities of wider and deeper consequence than any that would otherwise attach to our life. There ought, then, to be some proportion between our perception of the wrong done us and the wrong we do. If we so keenly feel the prick of a needle when inflicted on ourselves, we may be expected to consider with some compunction the gaping wounds we inflict on another. Is our shame for sin against God as intense and real as the blaze of indignation, or is it continuous and persistent as the slow-burning hate which an injury done to ourselves begets? In speaking of those who defraud or injure us we express our opinion of what wrong-doing deserves. Is our judgment as explicit, our feeling as strongly expressed in regard to our own transgressions? As strongly? But they ought to be a thousand times more vehement; there should be against ourselves an indignation such as no enemy of ours could excite against himself though his offenses were many times aggravated. And what after all, is our reputation, our happiness, our property, that we should make much wail about injury done to them? Our good name and our advancement in the world are no doubt much to ourselves, but they are of very little moment indeed to the world at large. The fate of the unmerciful servant tells us in the plainest language that the mere canceling of our guilt does not save us. It tells us that unless the forgiveness of God humbles us and begets within us a truly meek and loving spirit, we cannot be owned as His children. The best assurance that we are ourselves forgiven is the consciousness that the very spirit of the forgiving God is working in our own hearts towards others.

“Tis not enough to weep my sins, ’Tis but one step to heaven; When I am kind to others, then I know myself forgiven.”

“He that revengeth shall find vengeance from the Lord, and He shall surely retain his sins. Forgive thy neighbor the hurt that he hath done unto thee, so shall thy sins also be forgiven when thou prayest. A man beareth hatred against another, and doth he seek pardon from the Lord? He showeth no mercy to a man who is like himself: and doth he ask forgiveness of his own sin?” (Sir 28:1-4) “If ye forgive not men their trespasses neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” If you are hard, unrelenting; always chiding; slow to recognize merit, quick to observe faults; admitting no excuse and making no allowances; cherishing ill will; still feeling resentment on account of injuries done you ten years ago; if there are persons from whom you would if you could exact the uttermost farthing — then you have reason to fear for your own forgiveness. Can you humbly beseech God, and with tearful eyes look up to Him for pardon while you have your foot upon your brother’s neck or your hand at his throat? The very fact that you are proud and unbending should itself convince you that you have never been humbled before a forgiving God. The very fact that you can be overbearing and exacting should prompt you to question most seriously whether you have in very truth let your heart be flooded with God’s undeserved pardoning mercy. The very fact that in any relation of life you can carry yourself in a haughty, imperious, and unchastened manner should bid you ask whether in very truth you are at heart lowly before God as one who day by day needs His forbearance and pardon. Every bitter word you speak, every unmerciful, inconsiderate act you do, every relentless, cruel, exacting thought you have, casts suspicion on your Christianity, and makes it seem possible that your Master may yet have to mete to you with your own measure.

Thus then does the Lord lay down the law of unlimited forgiveness as a law of His kingdom. The kingdom or society He came to form, that new. grouping and association of men which He means to be eternal, cannot be held together without the observance of this law. This is one of the essential laws of His kingdom. Men are to be held together and to work smoothly together not by external compulsion, not by a police agency, not by a criminal law of alarming severity — it seems ludicrous to speak of such forces in connection with an eternal and perfect society — but it is to be held together by the inward disposition of each member of it to forgive and be on terms of brotherly kindness with every other member.

We lose an immense deal of the power and practical benefit of Christ’s teaching by refusing to look at things from His point of view, and to listen as cordially to what He says of His kingdom as to what He says of individuals. We are not perhaps too much but we are too exclusively taken up with the saving of our own souls. We neglect to consider that the Bible throughout takes to do with the Church and people of God, with the kingdom, and with the individual only as a member of the kingdom. It is not for the individual alone that Christ legislates. He does riot point out a path by which one man by himself can attain to a solitary bliss; but He founds a kingdom, and lays down as its fundamental law the law of love, a law which shows us that our individual happiness and our individual perfection can only be won in fellowship with others, and by truly entering into the most enduring bonds with them. To unite us again individually to God, our Lord recognizes as only half His work: to unite us to one another is as essential. Salvation consists not only In our being reconciled to God, but also in our being reconciled to men. When we attach ourselves to Christ we become members of a society, and can no longer live an isolated life. We must live for the body we belong to. Until we catch this esprit de corps we are poor Christians. The man who is content if he is sure his own soul is safe has great cause to believe it in danger; for there is no surer mark of a healthy Christian than his practical acknowledgment of the claims of other men and his interest in the kingdom to which he belongs. But how are we to attain to that thoroughly healthy state of spirit to which it shall be natural to forgive until seventy times seven? This parable indicates that the most important step towards this is taken when we learn to accept God’s forgiveness in a right spirit. The true way to a forgiving spirit is to be forgiven, to go back again and again to God, and count over our debt to Him. The man who thinks justly of his own wrong-doing has no heart to make much of the injuries done to himself. He always feels how much more he has been forgiven than he can ever be called upon to forgive. His soul gladdened, softened, and humbled by a sense of the great compassion that has remitted his great debt, loses all power to be harsh and damnatory.

We must therefore begin with the truth about ourselves. It is not required of us that we go out of our way to make an ostentatious display of our guilt, but it is requisite that we let the conviction of our great debt so sink into our minds that we shall go softly all the days of our life. It is required of us that we discover and recognize the truth about ourselves, and that we abide and walk in the truth and not in the unreal world of our own self-satisfied fancy. It is required of us that we have a character, and that this character be founded on and grow up out of God’s forgiving grace. We need not proclaim to every man we meet the reason, but we must let all men see that we have a reason for loving-kindness, for humility, for gravity, for tender consideration of others, for every quality that banishes hatred from earth and welds men closer into one community.