Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• In Leviticus 19:17-18, the command to reason with your neighbor is followed by the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Similarly, Jesus follows up the rules for dealing with sin in the community with this requirement for forgiveness. Only a congregation who reacts with this expansive understanding of forgiveness can correctly apply the practice set in Matthew 18:15-20.
• Peter’s offer to forgive seven times is itself generous, reversing the sevenfold vengeance of Genesis 4:15 [“Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.”]
• The Greek number Jesus gave (hebdomekontakis hepta) can just as correctly be translated “seventy-seven” as “seventy times seven.” The difference between Peter’s offer and Jesus’ response is not numerical, but is about the very nature of forgiveness. Namely, if you’re keeping count, you’re missing the point.
• As is regularly the case in Matthew’s retelling of the parables, Matthew seems to have put his own gloss over this one to make it apply more closely to the church. It is important to read Matthew’s lesson, but also to look past it to the disorienting message of the kingdom of God that Jesus shared.
• The servant in the story is not a household slave but a subordinate official. The NIV’s translation of “servant” is better than the NRSV’s “slave.”
• Boring indicates the debt was probably incurred through the mismanagement of the king’s resources or contracting to raise taxes, rather than by personal expenditure. However, even with this, the debt stated is unrealistic. A talent is the largest monetary unit (20.4 kg of silver), equal to 6,000 drachmas, or the income of a manual laborer for fifteen years. “Ten thousand” (Greek myrias¸ from which we get the word “myriad”) was the largest possible number. So it is the largest number of the largest unit of money. To put it in perspective, the annual tax income for all of Herod the Great’s territories was 900 talents per year. 10,000 talents would exceed the taxes for all of Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria. The debt is unpayable and despite his claims in v. 25-26, the servant’s situation is hopeless. Prison is a punitive measure, punishment for his mismanagement, but it doesn’t change the impossibility of repaying the debt.
• The debt of the second servant, while minuscule compared to the incalculable debt of the first, was still substantial. A denarii is about a day’s wages for a laborer.
• The thrust of the parable is the contrast between the undeserved mercy the servant received from the king and his failure to show even less mercy to his fellow servant. The other servants, and the reader, are outraged, and share their outrage with the king.
• Scholars are divided if v. 34 was part of Jesus’ original words or was added by Matthew to shift the focus to be more about forgiveness than the mercy of the kingdom of heaven. Ending the parable with a question aligns with the style of Jonah, where God ended with the question to Jonah if the people of Nineveh deserved mercy. Most scholars however, believe v. 35 was definitely an addition by Matthew to drill the point in further.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
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