Matthew 18:21-35

Matthew 18:21-35 Forgiving others; giving and receiving mercy

In this parable, Jesus tells a story that has multiple layers.  But it starts with a question from Peter.

What does Peter ask Jesus and what is he really asking?

Let’s remember the context for this parable.  In the previous passage, Jesus has just said that if your brother sins against you, you should approach your brother about it; and if your brother listens to you, you will have regained a brother.  But Peter is thinking ahead.  He is saying to himself: Suppose my brother apologizes and admits he was wrong, and I forgive him; but then he goes and does it again.  How many times do I have to forgive him?

What is Jesus’s initial answer?

Jesus says either 77 times or 70-times-7 times, signaling a number larger than one would try to count: an unlimited number of times.

Here is why scholars disagree as to whether Jesus said (70 plus 7) times or (70 times 7) times.  In English, we have a word for two times (twice) and a word for 3 times (thrice), but we don’t have words beyond that.  In Greek, there is a word formation that can be used for any number: five-times, seven-times, ten-times, etc.  Peter uses that word formation to ask, Seven-times?  Jesus uses the same word formation with seventy (seventy-times) and then follows it with the word seven.  So in the Greek, Jesus’s answer is: Not seven-times, but seventy-times seven.  Is “seventy-times seven” equivalent to our “seventy-seven” (i.e., seventy and seven, 77)?  Or is it equivalent to our seventy times seven (490)?  Scholars don’t agree on the answer.

But the specific number isn’t the point.  The key is that it is a large number.

How do you think Jesus wants Peter to interpret Jesus’s answer?  Is he saying Peter can count 77 times (or 490 times) and then stop forgiving, or is he saying something else?  What is the point of Jesus’s answer?

Jesus may be remembering an exchange in Genesis 4:23-24.  In Genesis 4:15, God says, “If anyone kills Cain, vengeance will be taken against him sevenfold” or “seven times as much.”  In 4:24, Lamech says, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, / then Lamech [will be avenged] seventy-sevenfold.”

The Jews did not have a word for infinity, and seven was seen as a number representing perfection, so seventy-seven might have suggested double-perfection, unlimited perfection – or in this case, unlimited revenge.  Jesus turns it on its head, using the concept of seventy-seven for unlimited forgiveness.

What does this exchange say to us?

What does it say to the church?

This interaction between Peter and Jesus follows immediately after the instructions about how to deal with someone in the church who is doing something wrong, and the giving of the binding and loosing power to the church.  How are the previous passages and this passage related?

Jesus tells a parable to bring his point to life, and he chooses numbers that make it extreme.  We miss his extreme exaggeration in the translations.

What happens in the first part of the parable?  What does the king do, what does the slave request, and how does the king respond?

Although many translations say “servant,” Matthew uses the Greek word for a slave (doulos), not the word for a servant (diakonos).  At the time of Christ, perhaps 20% or more of all the people in the Roman Empire were slaves.  Slaves in the Roman Empire often performed very high-level jobs with a great deal of responsibility, unlike the situation in the American and European colonial slavery systems.

In the second part of the parable, what does the slave do, what does the fellow slave request, and how does the first slave respond?

In a parable, the key elements of the story stand for something else of a spiritual nature.  Parables often use an everyday human situation as a metaphor for a spiritual truth about God or God’s interaction with people.

In this parable, who does the king represent?

Jesus tells this parable when Peter asks how many times he must forgive someone.  Matthew is trying to use Jesus’s teachings to guide his community in how it should handle conflicts.  Considering that context, who does the first slave stand for?

In our own lives, who does the first slave stand for?

The slave owes 10,000 talents.  A talent was worth 6,000 denarii, where a denarius was roughly a day’s wage for a laborer (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Matt. 18:24 fn., p. 1773).  This means that the value of one talent was the value of nearly 20 years of wages for a common laborer or soldier.  If we translate that value to our time, the value of one talent, translated to the wages of low-skilled workers in the United States today, would be somewhere between $275,000 and $600,000 (as of 2025; the range is so wide because different jurisdictions have widely varying minimum wages).  But this slave owed 10,000 talents.  That is a sum of money comparable to something like $5 billion today.

How does the meaning of this story change when you understand that the first slave owed $5 billion in today’s economic terms and was forgiven?

What does the forgiveness of such an enormous sum say to us?

The second slave owed 100 denarii.  A denarius was the standard wage for a day’s work for a common laborer (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Matt. 18:28 fn., p. 1773).  In terms of the minimum wage scale in the United States in 2025, 100 denarii would be somewhere between $5,800 and $12,000.

The second slave owed something like $10,000 in today’s economic terms.  When you understand that, you realize that the debt was not trivial, even though it was tiny compared to the first slave’s debt.  What does the king expect the first slave to do, when he is owed $10,000?

Now remember the context for this parable: Jesus is talking about forgiving others who have hurt us.  Even when the offense is big, what is he telling Peter and us to do?

According to the parable, why should we forgive others?

What happens to the first slave?  What do his fellow slaves do, and what does his master do?

Recall from our work in Matthew 13:1-23 that there is a difference between a parable and an allegory: “A parable is not an allegory; an allegory is a story in which every possible detail has an inner meaning; but an allegory has to be read and studied: a parable is heard.  We must be very careful not to make allegories of the parables, but to remember that they were designed to make one stabbing truth flash out at a man the moment he heard it” (Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 2, p. 63).

This parable is not a theological exposition on how God judges people.  Jesus is describing what an ordinary, human, perhaps cruel and sinful king would do.

In that human scenario of a king, the slave might be tortured for two reasons: to get the truth out of him as to where he is hiding the money he claims he does not have; and perhaps to extort payment from family members who would not want their loved one tortured.  God doesn’t act like that.

But we have to ask:

How do you think God deals with people who fail to show mercy, and why?

Why might it be impossible to live with God in heaven if you do not forgive others?  How is forgiveness a fundamental characteristic of God, making it impossible to be like him and live with him if we lack that characteristic?

Are there other Scriptures that echo this teaching that God does not forgive those who do not forgive others?

Yes.  Consider these passages:

• Matthew 6:12,14-15 (forgive us our trespasses; if you do not forgive, neither will your Father).

• Matthew 7:1-2 (with the judgment you make, you will be judged).

• Mark 11:25 (when you stand praying, forgive, so that your Father may forgive you).

• Luke 6:37-38 (forgive and you will be forgiven; with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you).

• James 2:13 (judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy).

Read these passages on forgiveness.  Why does God care so much about whether we are merciful and forgiving?

We are called to be like God, and he is merciful and forgiving.  We owe God a big debt that he has chosen to forgive.  Yet we are often harsh and unforgiving toward those who sin against us, as the slave is harsh and unforgiving toward those who owe him money.  God wants us to be like him.

In Matt. 18:35, Jesus tells us to forgive “from the heart.”  What do those extra words “from the heart” mean, and why are they important?

When have you forgiven someone who has hurt you, when it might have been difficult?  How did it happen?  What difference did it make?

What does this parable suggest about how we should deal with those who sin against us?

What is this passage calling you to do differently, or how is it calling you to think in a different way?

Now let’s connect this parable to the previous passage about dealing with someone who has done something wrong to us.

If we take this parable to heart and apply it to the cases where we have been sinned against, how often would we be likely to take an offender before the entire local Christian community?

How would Jesus want us to deal with situations where we think someone has done something wrong to us?

Consider again Peter’s original question: How many times must I forgive someone who sins against me?  What do you think Jesus’s response is?

Take a step back and consider this:

Just because a person is a Christian doesn’t mean they find it easy to take Jesus’s teachings about forgiveness to heart.  According to a survey of Christians conducted by the Barna Group in 2019, 27% of practicing Christians can identify someone who they don’t want to forgive, and 23% can identify a person they can’t forgive (Barna Group). The offenses against them may have been great, so I am not judging them. Yet forgiveness appears to be a fundamental attribute of God that he wants us to embrace.

For many people, merely receiving a command from God to forgive does not make it easy to do so.  Perhaps we can become more like God in this attribute if we try to think like God and be like God all the time, not just when we hit a point where it is difficult to forgive.  It might also help if we can see the invitation to be like God as a great privilege, rather than as an order or a requirement that we must fulfill in order to be forgiven or to get to heaven.

God has sent each of us a personal invitation to be like him and to receive his Spirit to empower us so that we can think, speak, and act in ways that are in accord with his character.  It is a gift to get to be part of Team Jesus: the people who are invited to live, moment by moment, in the presence of God.  How can we embrace that opportunity more fully?

How does it feel to be invited to live a life that is always united with God?

Is there someone you struggle to forgive?  How would Jesus like to help you forgive that person?

What is one step you can take to allow God to further transform your mind and heart so that you are more like him in everything you think, say, and do?