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Scripture Reflection 

Matthew 18:21-35

Find ways to win others over; prayer shall be answered.

Gospel Reflection

This gospel passage follows directly from last week’s passage. It concludes the whole of Matthew Chapter 18 that deals with sin, forgiveness and reconciliation. Peter’s question to Jesus and suggested answer is a reflection of the view that there is a limit to the number of times we should forgive someone. Seven is a significant number in scripture and implies a ‘perfect’ amount. Even though by his use of seven, Peter is suggesting that he should forgive someone many, many times, Jesus quickly corrects Peter and says not seven, but seventy-seven times (or seventy times seven). Jesus plays on the use of the number seven and multiplies it to indicate that one should forgive as many times as is required – without keeping count; without keeping score.

The story of the unforgiving servant is a familiar one of forgiveness and mercy being shown but not passed on. The sting in the tail of this parable is Jesus’ final warning that, ‘So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.’ This is an unsettling statement, as we believe God’s forgiveness to be without measure and without end. Jesus warns that unless we seek to imitate God’s forgiveness and forgive others ‘from our heart’ (with compassion) then we are not going to recognise the forgiveness of God and will cut ourselves off from it.

The whole idea of forgiving from the heart is a powerful contradiction of a popular concept: ‘I can forgive, but not forget.’ Is it really possible to forgive but refuse to forget? Surely holding on to a memory of hurt is holding on to the hurt itself and does not display that any forgiveness has occurred at all. To forgive but not forget is to keep count. How many times should I forgive the one who has hurt me? As many times as it takes!

Have you thought?

The parable sees the unforgiving servant putting his fellow servant in prison ‘until he paid back the debt’. This is almost exclusively what prisons were used for until only a few hundred years ago. When a person could not repay a debt, they were held in prison until the debt was paid. Of course, being in prison, they had little opportunity to repay the debt themselves and relied on friends and relatives to repay the debt on their behalf. To pay someone’s debt was to ‘redeem’ them. The earliest ideas of Christ as a ‘Redeemer’ were based on the idea of Christ paying a debt on behalf of humankind.

Gospel Focus – How many times?

Peter asks, ‘How many times should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Peter probably thought that he was being pretty generous. The religious law of his time required people to forgive three times, so by suggesting seven times, Peter would have thought that he was really going the extra mile. To forgive someone seven times is a pretty big call. But the number seven has great significance in scripture; it is regarded as a number of perfection. Peter is suggesting that there is an ideal number of times that one should forgive. Jesus blows this out of the water by saying, take that perfect number of times and multiply it by seventy. There is no perfect number of times to forgive.