Prayer and Retribution
“So shall My heavenly Father also do to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.” Matthew 18:35
Not Forgive – Jesus’ parable of the wicked servant who refused to forgive the little owned to him after the king forgave an enormous debt is a chilling story. It begins with a question each of us asks. “How many times am I required to forgive someone?” Peter suggests seven, the perfect number of completion. Certainly if I forgive someone seven times, I have done my duty! But Jesus responds with a humanly impossible answer. No, not seven times but seventy times seven. Then Jesus tells us the story of this ungrateful slave. What is the result of the slave’s unwillingness to shed forgiveness on others? He is handed over to the torturers until the debt is paid in full – in other words, for the rest of his life.
We nod our heads, agreeing that this ungrateful slave needed to be punished. And then we come to this verse. It scalds our hearts. Jesus says that God will deal with us in the same way, delivering us to the torturers, unless we forgive from the heart. If this doesn’t make you shudder, then you aren’t listening.
The words in Greek are ean me aphete (if not you forgive). The construction is important. This is forgiveness conditioned upon real circumstances. Jesus is not offering a hypothetical example. This is not hyperbole, as we are usually led to conclude. Jesus is quite literally saying that, in real life situations, you are required to forgive over and over and over, just as God, the King, has forgiven. Why? We see the answer in the middle of the parable (verse 32). “I forgave,” says the King, “because you entreated me.” We know this word. It is a prayer word. The slave begged to be released from his obligation and because he begged, the heart of the King was moved to compassion. The King does not forgive for any other reason. But here is the twist. To forgive from the heart is not to forgive simply because compassion compels me to do so. To forgive from the heart is to forgive because I stand in a relationship with God. I am asked to act as God does. I do not forgive because it is the right thing to do. I forgive because God forgives.
How difficult it is for us to respond like God does! We have built-in personal advantage tendencies that we must deliberately set aside. In fact, if we find that we are calculating before forgiving, we will not fulfill Jesus’ requirement (and the torturers will await us).
There is another implication in this parable that cannot be ignored. Forgiveness is not conceivable without retribution. Do you understand this? Buchsel points out that love is not opposed to retribution. To claim that the God of love is incompatible with judgment and punishment is to misunderstand the entire gospel. It is the expectation of retribution that fuels the need for the good news. And when we forgive, we must never lose sight of this connection. There is no forgiveness without the possibility of retribution. To pray for forgiveness is to ask that inevitable retribution be set aside. God does just that. So should we.
