Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
The master's compassion was greater even than a huge, unpayable debt. But the servant seemed to miss this critical point. He seemed only to realize that he had been let off the hook, that he had narrowly dodged a bullet. An event that ought to have made him thankful and made him come to love and trust his master only seemed to make him fearful and desperate. Having had a close brush with judgment it seemed that the possibility of judgment now consumed his thoughts. He had failed to stand alone, had not truly been self-sufficient, and it no doubt seemed to him that the most important thing was for him was to ensure he could do so in the future.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
'Pay back what you owe.'
Because the servant did not learn the correct lesson from the master's compassion he himself remained at the center of his own narrow universe. And from that vantage point all he knew was how precarious his position was. He wanted to accumulate enough, extracting it from the debts of others, to ensure that he was never again exposed to the danger of his own debts. But this could not work because what his fellow servants owed was a trivial amount compared to the debt he had managed to accumulate.
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
But he refused.
The servant, since he himself remained at the center of his own universe, could not recognize his own cry for mercy ("Be patient with me, and I will pay you back") on the lips of his fellow servant. He could not hear this cry for mercy because his own fear imprisoned him. It locked him inside of himself numbed him to the needs of others. It ought to have gone quite differently. He should have been able to recognize his own words on the lips of his fellow servant and responded with compassion as his master had first responded to him. But having taken for granted his master's mercy he himself had not been changed for the better by it in the way he should have been. Instead, he became much worse and more dangerous.
But he refused.
Instead, he had the fellow servant put in prison
until he paid back the debt.
In putting his fellow servant in prison it was as though he was trying to force him to experience what his own fear already caused him to feel. He felt the inescapable urgency of his own liability as a debtor as prison walls pressing in from every side. He would therefore insist others felt this as well. What he ought to have shared instead was the mercy of the master, but since that mercy didn't sufficiently even register with him all he had to share was his own insufficiency, his own prison.
His master summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant!
I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant,
as I had pity on you?'
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
The master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back to entire debt. What can this mean accept that the master threw the servant back entirely upon himself and his own resources, as the servant himself seemed to insist, and left him no escape from the prison which his own ego had constructed. The debt remained unpayable, but he insisted on having it extracted from him, as by torture, rather than truly allowing mercy to set him free. He clung to unforgiveness just as the book of Sirach warns against in today's first reading.
Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
The vengeful will suffer the LORD's vengeance,
for he remembers their sins in detail.
Forgive your neighbor's injustice;
then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.
The master was not about to allow this wicked servant to inflict his own issues on his fellow servants indefinitely. They cried out to him and he answered them. This cry of theirs for justice was something we too can imitate when we see oppression and unforgiveness in the world. But before we do so we should make sure, as much as possible, that we are selves are not a part of the problem. Have we truly recognized the magnitude of the mercy the Lord has poured out upon us? His that mercy led us to a posture of trust and thanksgiving, or has it only left us fearful and desperate? Are we still, consciously or unconsciously, try to extract the much smaller debts we perceive ourselves to be owed by others? Or are we rather agents of forgiveness and mercy ourselves, having been transformed by the mercy we ourselves have first received? Apart from mercy there is nothing for us but our own self-imposed prisons. But we are not meant to struggle alone, apart from mercy.
None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself.
For if we live, we live for the Lord,
and if we die, we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.
For this is why Christ died and came to life,
that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
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