As We Forgive Our Debtors

¹“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12). When Simon Peter tried to pin down Jesus on how much debt his brother could rack up that he would have to forgive before enough was enough, Jesus told Him a story. In the story a certain man owed his lord 10,000 talents. It’s hard to say exactly what that amount would be in our day, but the estimate for the weight of a talent of gold in ancient times was about seventy pounds, and a pound of gold today is about $30,000, so it’s possible that the man owed something like twenty million dollars. Inexplicably, the lord forgives his servant of all that debt. Now that the man had that huge weight off of his shoulders, it freed him up to think of other things, like how a fellow servant owed him one hundred pence, which they say was about one day’s wages, or to put it in our terms, maybe about a hundred bucks. The lord found out that the servant whom he had forgiven such an astronomical fund was trying to get someone else thrown in jail for a value that was two hundred thousand times smaller than the one of which he had been forgiven. If the unforgiving servant had paid down every day the same one hundred over which he was hounding his brother, it would take him about 550 years to pay off the debt he had owed. I don’t think that the Savior was trying to convey the message that what we did to Him was hundreds of thousands of times worse than what others may have done to us, although that is basically true. I think He was trying to help us understand that we have enough problems of our own to be wasting time and energy keeping a mental tally of every slight and harm and microaggression that every other person we come into contact has inflicted upon us. Yes, it’s not fair the way some people treat us. In fact, some of us have been subject to evil and cruelty and malevolence for which there is no excuse and for which no amount of justice or retribution can possibly make right. I think the Savior’s point is that whatever injury someone inflicts upon us in the present moment is just a tiny blip on the balance sheet compared to all of the blood and violence and depravity and injustice that have reverberated through the ages and have tarnished and weighed upon everyone else’s soul. Compared to all of the biological and genetic and historical and societal and economic and political consequences of a billion billion souls that have failed to live up to everything that they could be, why should we even concern ourselves with a hundred pence here or there when we have ten thousand talents to reckon with. We make things 200,000 times harder for ourselves if we deny the Lord’s forgiveness and try to go after each and every hundred pence of debt owed to us by our brothers and sisters. The Savior is able to bear the burden of the sins of the whole world. He forgives us of all our debt, and the debts of our mothers and fathers before us. He is doing everything He can to lift us up out of the hole we’ve been forced into, either by forces outside of our control or because of our own stupid choices. The very least we can do is work with Him and climb up the lifeline He is throwing to us, and not go haring off after every other poor and benighted soul that’s down at the bottom of the pit with us and sometimes accidentally pokes us in the eye as they are engaged in their own struggle to climb their way out of the hole. The Lord has commanded us to love one another as ourselves. We can’t love our neighbor if we don’t love ourselves, and we can’t love ourselves if we don’t love our neighbor. Forgiveness is a part of love, perhaps one of the most important parts. We can’t forgive our neighbor if we don’t forgive ourselves, and we can’t forgive ourselves nor can the Lord forgive us if we won’t forgive our neighbors. I hope we will choose the path of forgiveness for our own sake and for everyone else’s.