The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Mt. 18: 21–35) obviously teaches us to forgive one another as God has forgiven us, or we’re really going to get it. End of sermon? Not quite. The excessively harsh treatment of the servant who does not forgive his fellow servant the debt owed him is deeply unsettling. The king who hands the unforgiving servant over to the torturers doesn’t come across as all that forgiving. Is being unforgiving the unforgivable sin? Let’s look at this again.

It is often assumed that the king in the parable stands for God. But curiously, although some translations don’t catch this, it actually says “A man, a king.” This creates some distance between God and the man who happens to be a king. This allows the parable to open up several dimensions that make it hard to pin down.

Most importantly, we end up with a cycle of vengeance. That is precisely what lack of forgiveness causes. The king’s act of clemency had the potential to stop the cycle, as one act of forgiveness makes further acts of forgiveness easier, but the opportunity was lost when the forgiven, but unforgiving, servant demanded what was owed by the servant under him. An unforgiving act makes forgiveness harder than it was before. One could see the violent ending, not as an act of divine vengeance, but the natural consequences of unforgiving behavior.

That the second servant owed a much smaller sum of money to the other servant than what the unforgiving servant owed the king, reminds us of Jesus’ admonition to remove the log in our own eye before removing the speck in the eye of another. (Mt. 7: 3–5) Perhaps the greater our own sin, the better we can see even the small sinfulness of others, but correspondently do not easily see what is good in another. This makes forgiveness harder.

In another brief parable, Jesus asked Simon the Pharisee if the debtor, who was forgiven a larger amount than another debtor, would love the master more. (Lk. 7: 42) Simon assumed he would and Jesus agreed. The Woman Who Was a Sinner, who had been washing and kissing Jesus’ feet at the time was a perfect example of this supposition, but in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, that is not the case. The unforgiving servant fails to rise to the challenge of grace as did the Woman Who Was a Sinner. This suggests that although being a great sinner can make one aware of one’s need for mercy and forgiveness, being a great sinner can also so harden a person that mercy and forgiveness are knocked off the table.

We also would do well to examine our reaction to the comeuppance the unforgiving servant receives. We tend to think people like that should come to a bad end, so we feel satisfied, perhaps smug, about what happens to the unforgiving servant. If that is the case, what grounds do we have for criticizing the man, a king, who hands the unforgiving servant over to the torturers? This gives us cause to reflect on how forgiving we are, or aren’t, and how difficult forgiveness can be.

It is also worth noting other parables where a Master or King acts in an unforgiving way. The King who acts violently against the invited guests who don’t come to the banquet is one example. (Mt. 22: 1–14) The Parable of the Evil Workers in the vineyard is another. (Mt. 2-: 1–16) But, as Raymund Schwager points out in Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, these unforgiving acts in the parables are NOT what happened in real life when Jesus rose from the dead after being tortured and put to death. Instead, Christ acted in a much more profoundly loving manner. In the preface to the parable, Jesus tells Peter he should forgive someone who wronged him, not just seven times, but seventy-seven times. I get the impression that, unlike us, God doesn’t use a calculator for forgiveness.

So perhaps the parable doesn’t establish a Law: Thou shalt forgive. . . . or else. Rather, the parable gives us a rich sampling of the human muddle on the subject, but puts it in the comforting context of God’s initiating of forgiveness. Since God initiates forgiveness, we don’t have to come up with forgiveness all on our own. God does it for us. Let us treat the parable as an invitation to a world of forgiveness that, foreign as it seems now, is destined to become our native land.