The Math of Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35

September 13, 2026

 

            I am not a math person. It’s not just that I don’t like math, it’s that I have math anxiety. Sometimes that anxiety can feel crippling. I have dealt with math anxiety for years and years. The last time I remember not having math anxiety was third grade. But as I recall, multiplication tables were beginning to test my early math calm, so third grade may have been the gateway grade to my mathematics challenges.

When I was in junior college, I took college algebra and was struggling to understand and struggling to deal with my anxiety. My teacher was a very kind, very patient woman, and she tutored me outside of class. When I was sitting with her working through the equations, they made some sense. I could figure them out. I didn’t stop working when the tutoring ended. I studied at home too. But the minute I sat down to take the test any comprehension I thought I had about algebra was gone. I couldn’t figure out the equations. I didn’t know what I was doing. I remember how panic would just well up in me. It was awful. Even today, if you were to ask me to do some calculations beyond any basic math, and you insisted on watching me do the work, I would probably start to cry. Even if I don’t full on cry, I will definitely be fighting back tears. Ask me to write an essay, and I can write rings around anybody. But ask me to do math, and I’m a hot mess.

            This is why whenever we come to these verses from Matthew’s gospel, I get a little panicky. In the verses we read last week, Jesus gives the disciples a way to handle conflict when it arises in the community, because Jesus understood that conflict would arise. The community of the faithful is not immune to conflict, so when it arises here is a way to work through it. This conversation continues in our verses this morning. Peter takes the next step from resolving conflict to forgiveness of someone who has wronged him. He asks Jesus just how many times he is required to forgive another member of the church who harms him. Lord, should I forgive this person as many as seven times? And Jesus responds,

            “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

            The seventy-seven can also be translated as seventy times seven, which for the math people out there is 490 times. (I used the calculator on my phone.) But I don’t think that Jesus was trying to make the point that there is an exact number for forgiving someone. I think that Jesus was trying to get to the heart of what it means to forgive someone and what forgiveness and forgiving is.

            To explain this, Jesus turns to a parable. He tells the disciples a kingdom parable which is more than just a clever way to begin the story. When Jesus began a parable making a comparison to God’s kingdom, then the people listening needed to take heed because the kingdom of God is everything. So, the parable begins with the kingdom of heaven may be compared to … fill-in-the-blank.

Jesus fills in this blank with the story of a despot king who decides to settle accounts with his enslaved laborers. While it is unlikely that any king would ever lend a laborer one coin, this particular ruler has lent this particular person an enormous sum of money. The enslaved man owes 10,000 talents. This huge debt would roughly equal 150,000 hours of labor. In other words, the laborer is never going to be able to pay it off in his lifetime. It was ludicrous on the king's part to even think that would be possible. Of course, the man can't pay. In response the king ordered him to be sold, along with his entire family -- wife, children, everyone. The man falls down in front of the king and pleads for mercy. In what appears to be a total contradiction of character, the king grants it. He forgives the debt. 

            You would think that this enslaved man who has been forgiven such a great debt, who has been shown so much grace and mercy, would immediately want to bestow the same grace and mercy on someone else. You would think wrong. No sooner than the laborer leaves the king’s chambers, he runs into another laborer who owes the first one money. This debt is relatively small. Especially in comparison with the original debt owed to the king. But when the second indebted slave asks for mercy, the one who had been shown so much grace refuses to extend it in return. Instead, he has this fellow thrown into prison. The other workers witnessing this are horrified, and they report it to the king. The king becomes furious and demands to know why the first enslaved man, having been shown mercy, denied mercy to someone else. Then the king hands the enslaved man over to be tortured until he can pay his debt. Knowing that his debt to the king is insurmountable, this is really a lifetime sentence.

            This is a disturbing parable indeed. We must be careful to read this as parable and not allegory. If we look at it allegorically, then each aspect of the story correlates to God and heaven exactly. Yet I cannot see God as a despot sultan whose first response is to not only condemn the one who owes so much, but also his family. However, saying that does not lessen the parable’s unsettling challenge to the disciples and to us. We are shown great mercy. We have our debts wiped out. Shouldn’t we also show that mercy to others?  As we are forgiven, should we not also forgive? 

            Technically the answer to these questions is “yes.” Yes, we should forgive as we are forgiven. Yes, we should show mercy because we are shown mercy. Yes, yes, yes. But as theologian, Debie Thomas, wrote, if we are going to talk about what forgiveness is in light of these verses, then we must also talk about what forgiveness is not.

            Forgiveness does not negate accountability or justice. Forgiveness does not make everything better nor does it wipe every slate clean. The truth is that passages like this one, especially this one, have been weaponized against people who have been abused and harmed. Telling an abused spouse, woman or man, that they must forgive the abusive spouse because that’s what Jesus requires yet never holding the abuser accountable harms the abused all over again.

            Forgiveness does not automatically mean relationship or reconciliation. In the verses preceding these, Jesus lays out the steps for confronting someone who has sinned – go alone to confront the person first, then take one or two other people with you, then involve the whole community – and if none of those work to bring the one who has sinned back into the fold then that person should be treated as a gentile or a tax collector. To our contemporary, western ears, we may hear that as shunning. Well, I’ve done everything I could to make it right with this person but nothing has worked. Therefore, I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee.

            But how did Jesus treat gentiles and tax collectors? Did he shun them? Or did he treat them with love, did he recognize them as neighbors? Even if they refused to reconcile or be in relationship, Jesus never treated them as Other, as anything less than children of God. We may not wind up being in relationship with someone we have tried to forgive, but they’re still a neighbor.

            If forgiveness is not all of the above, then what is it? It seems to me that forgiveness is a choice rather than a feeling. If I wait to feel forgiving before I forgive someone, then I will probably wait the rest of my life. Forgiveness is liberating, sometimes for the one who is being forgiven but equally if not more often for the one doing the forgiving.

            Over the course of my life, there are people who I have had to make the choice to forgive; not because they have asked for it or even owned up to doing anything wrong. But I have chosen to forgive because life is too short. It is too short to bear grudges. It is too short for bitterness. It is just too short. And I suspect that there are people who have made the same choice about me.

            But does that make forgiveness cut and dry? No. Forgiveness is as messy and as complicated as the humans who are trying to achieve it and those who make it necessary. Which is all of us. We started off these verses with a strange equation, which should be straightforward. Isn’t math straightforward? 2 + 2 always = 4. That’s about as straightforward as you can get. But it seems to me that when it comes to the math of forgiveness, Jesus understood that it was not easy and not clearcut and not simple. It requires resolve and recognition of the other’s humanity, and it may require repetition to get it right. How many times do I forgive someone who has wronged me? Seven times? No, seventy-seven times. Or seventy times seven times. You forgive until you lose count. And then you forgive some more. We forgive because we have been forgiven, just as the parable about God’s kingdom reminds us. But we also forgive because even the gentiles and tax collectors are our neighbors in this kingdom of God. And what place does vengeance and hatred and bitterness hold in the kingdom of God? I don’t think any of that is meant to be there. It is forgiveness that can liberate us from the cycle of vengeance we find ourselves in. It is forgiveness that has the power to transform enmity into amity, foes into friends. It is forgiveness that liberates those who forgive. Forgiving someone who has caused you great harm does not erase the harm, but it can change the dynamic. Forgiving someone who harms you can change you.

            The math of forgiveness is not simple. It can challenge us in ways we cannot imagine. But forgiveness is part of agape love, and forgiveness has the power and the potential to transform the world into the kingdom of God. So, how often should we forgive someone? What is the magic number? Jesus said, do the math. Let’s do the math. Thanks be to God.

            Let all of God’s forgiven children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.