At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.’
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
We might think that the servant was insincere if, after pleading for mercy, he was able to so quickly turn and refuse mercy to his fellow servants. But what if he was just quick to forget? After such an embarrassing affair, wouldn't he be eager to put it behind him? Perhaps by the time he came across his fellow servant he had already put the incident far from his mind.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
The servant the master had forgiven had been in need of much greater mercy than this fellow servant of his. Had he really acknowledged that he needed the mercy of the master, known deep within that he did not deserve it, yet was given it anyway, and had he been thankful for it his life might have been transformed by it. But by ignoring it, by burying it in the past, he was able to see himself as deserving, as one who owed nothing but to whom others owed a great deal.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
‘Pay back what you owe.’
The point is that this servant is each of us. We are the ones who have received incalculably great mercy which we could never deserve. Forgiving our debts was no arbitrary wave of the hand for God. It was the gift of the suffering and death of his only Son that paid the price for our sins. We pay lip service to this great sacrifice. But secretly we don't fully own it. We would be reluctant to say 'Lord Jesus, because I am a sinner, I needed you to suffer and die to save me.' We don't really think we're bad enough to need that. We don't properly grasp the magnitude of the rebellion against God in which we ourselves have been complicit. But if we don't own our need for his mercy we risk missing the transformation his mercy is meant to bring about in us. If we receive it once and then forget we will quickly backslide, becoming little despots, more and more demanding, holding our fellow servants responsible for every imagined debt of theirs.
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
But he refused.
Why do we hug wrath and anger tight even though they are hateful things? Why are we so slow to show mercy to even the slightest faults of others? It can only be because we forget how much we stood and continue to stand in the need of the same mercy that we fail to show. And it is precisely in this resistance to show mercy that our own desperate need for mercy reveals itself. When we see wrath, anger, and unforgiveness rear their ugly heads in our lives we should recognize a clear indication that we ourselves need to return to the fount of mercy, to acknowledge our need of it, and to be thankful for it. When we are rooted in God's mercy we ourselves can become merciful. Without it, giving in to desperation is only natural, since by doing so we try to fill a gap that only God's mercy can fill by human and therefore futile means.
How might our lives look different from the unmerciful servant if we truly knew our need of mercy and were thankful that, somehow, it was given us? Rather than being self-centered and self-protective, rather than trying to demand of ourselves and others enough to establish our own righteousness apart from God, we would be free to live for the sake of the one who gives us mercy. In him, we would become like him, vessels of mercy for the sake of our fellow servants.
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.
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