At our pastors text study group this week, one of our members shared about a skit he read in a book a long time ago. The skit featured a married couple who kept track of their grievances with each other and how many times they had to forgive each other by making tally marks on a blackboard. You see, the wife’s mother and father had done the same thing. In Matthew 18, when Peter asks how many times a person ought to forgive, Jesus answered, “70 times 7,” which equals 490 times. Because it would be impossible to remember all the way up to 490, the wife’s parents had decided to make a mark on the blackboard each time they said, “I forgive you” to one another. Once they got to 490, the marriage was over. They had done what the Bible required, and it was time to go their separate ways, so they reasoned.

The wife in the skit, having learned this from her parents, decided to teach the idea to her husband. It made sense to him. After all, who could possibly keep track of 490 “I forgive yous” in their head? Over the course of their marriage, disagreements happened, trust was broken, hurts were shared. Each time one of them said, “I forgive you,” they made another tally mark on their side of the blackboard. 

Eventually, one of their sides had 489 tally marks. Not wanting #490 to be the end of their relationship, they went and studied the words of Jesus in Matthew 18. Did he really intend a person to forgive 490 times and then walk away no matter what? After lots of study and prayer, one of them realized that the point of the story wasn’t to provide a number for how many times a person should forgive, but to remind people they aren’t supposed to keep track of a number at all. After all, in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul writes, “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” The point wasn’t the correct number of times we should forgive; the point was that we are to become forgiving people. And so, dramatically, the blackboard is erased. Maybe Jesus didn’t choose a big number to set a limit. He chose a big number because we aren’t really supposed to keep track.

Directly before this passage, Jesus lays out the method for dealing with sins against one another. He says, “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If you are listened to, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you…” If that doesn’t work, bring the matter to the whole church. And if that still doesn’t work, then you’re to let the person go. You’ve done what you could, and hopefully in letting them go, the person will realize what they’ve done wrong, and will decide to make amends. 

I imagine Peter was sitting there listening to Jesus and thinking, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of work. How many times do we have to go through that?” It wasn’t really a hard and fast rule of the day, but some religious leaders of the day believed that forgiving a person more than three times was unnecessary. In the book of Amos, God offers to forgive a long list of nations three times each, but not four, and because of this, some thought forgiving someone three times was plenty. We have similar ideas in American culture, only we tend to think we should only forgive someone once. We say things like, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” So, Peter, may have been listening to Jesus and wondering how often he would have to go through the lengthy process of holding people accountable and offering forgiveness. He wondered if three times was plenty, but just to be safe, he offered a bigger, holier number: “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

Seven! Wow, Peter, that’s so holy and forgiving of you. (At least maybe that’s what he thought he would hear?) Instead, Jesus responds, “Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times” – or even seventy times seven times. Peter must have been shocked by the answer. Who could possibly manage to forgive someone that many times, whether it was 77 times or 490 times? It seems like an impossible ask. But them to make the point further, Jesus tells a story about a king who forgave his servant a debt of 10,000 talents. One talent was the equivalent of 15-20 years’ wages. 10,000 talents is an incomprehensible amount of money. In today’s money, 10,000 talents would be billions of dollars–probably somewhere between $6-10 billion dollars.

The servant who owed this much money would never be able to repay the debt. It would never be possible. The king decides to sell the man, his wife, children, and everything the man owns as repayment to the king for the debt. But surprisingly, when the indebted man pleads for mercy, the king decides not just to hold off on collecting the debt for the time being, but to cancel the debt altogether. Can you imagine the man’s tremendous relief? He has been set free from a burden he would never be able to repay! 

So, what does he do? He goes out and lives a generous and forgiving life, right? Hardly. In fact, before the newly liberated man has scarcely left the king’s courts when he comes across a man who owes him some money. The man was owed 100 denarii, which would be somewhere between $4-10 thousand dollars today. That’s a lot of money if you have very little, but compared to the unfathomable, unpayable debt he has just been forgiving, 100 denarii doesn’t seem like anything to be too upset about. Instead, he demands repayment. The person who owes him begs for mercy, but instead, he throws the man in prison to be punished until the amount was paid.

Why do you think Jesus tells Peter this story right after Peter asks how many times he has to forgive someone? I think it’s because Peter is asking the wrong question. Peter is focused on, “How many times do I have to forgive?” when the better focus is, “How incredibly forgiven am I?” Peter, who would question Jesus and rebuke him for suggesting he would have to go to the cross and die–Peter, who would question Jesus as he walked on the water, ask to walk on the water too, and then immediately doubt, Peter, who would react impulsively and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant–Peter, who would deny Jesus three times in Jesus time of deepest need… he wanted to know if he could forgive someone seven times and be done with it, rather than take a look at how deeply he needed to be forgiven. It’s so much easier to forget our own sins and focus on the sins of others, isn’t it?

As we look at Peter’s question, Jesus’s answer, and the parable of the unforgiving servant, we are challenged in a couple of ways: first, we are challenged not to fall prey to sin comparison; second, we are invited to release our desire for keeping a running record of wrongs; and third, we are encouraged to remember how deeply we have been forgiven.

First, we are challenged not to give into the temptation to compare our sins with those of others. It’s so easy to look at someone else’s sins and think, “At least I haven’t done that.” I may have told a lie once or twice, but I never killed anyone. Or, I may gossip here and there, but at least I never broke any of the ten commandments. Or, pick whatever minor thing you’ve done and hold it against something major. First of all, most of us are pretty good at minimizing what we’ve done. We don’t like to think about the worst things we have been capable of. But, even if we have managed to make it this far in life without doing something majorly wrong, every one of us is still a sinner. Every single one of us owed a debt that was impossible to repay. Every single one of us could have been like the man who owed an unfathomable amount, but when all seemed lost, God forgave us and set us free. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think when I fall into the trap of comparing my sins to those of others, it’s because I want to convince myself I’m a pretty good person and don’t need to worry about my salvation. It’s a way of making myself feel safe. 

We are challenged not to compare our sins with those of others, and we are invited to release our desire for keeping a running record of wrongs. This is not only tough to do, it requires us to work against our own brains. The human mind remembers negative things much more easily than it remembers positive things. Think about it for a minute. If I ask you to tell me something hard you had to go through, I bet you could quickly come up with an answer. I know I could. But, if I ask you what you’re grateful for, it might take a minute for the gratitude to come to mind. It’s not because we’re ungrateful. It’s because our minds hang onto negative things. Our brains are like that couple standing at the blackboard making tally marks every time we are wronged and say, “I forgive you.” When we are wronged, we don’t easily forget it. And in some ways, that’s a good thing. We don’t want to let ourselves be hurt over and over again by the same people. We know there’s truth in what Maya Angelou once said, that, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Jesus didn’t call us to be doormats. 

But, when we love one another, we are called to let go of our internal compulsion to always be right and keep track of when the other person is wrong. When Jeff and I were first married, every time we would argue, I would want to bring up the 20 other times he had done or said the exact same thing. He’d apologize, and I would want to say, “Oh yeah, but what about the other 15 times?” as though he could go back in time and apologize for those, too. When we keep a record of wrongs, we keep ourselves–and the other person–prisoner to a life where there’s no freedom. This doesn’t mean we have to tolerate being mistreated, or that we should close our eyes when people do harmful things to us. It doesn’t even mean we have to stay in relationship with the people who a hurting us. What it means is that we set ourselves free from keeping track of how many times we’re wronged. By freeing ourselves from it, we can move forward from what’s wrong towards what’s right.

We are challenged not to compare our sins with others. We are invited to release our desire for keeping a running record of wrongs. And we are encouraged to remember how very deeply we have been forgiven. Peter focused on the wrong question: “How often do I have to forgive?” Jesus urges Peter to remember instead how much he has been forgiven by God. If we begin with our own stories, our own sins, our own need for forgiveness, we will be much less quick to condemn others, to write them off as unredeemable, or to treat them harshly and without compassion. I am reminded of Jesus’s words about the woman who washed his feet with her tears. When people took offense at her, Jesus said that the one who has been forgiven much, loves much. When we remember and know how vast God’s forgiveness for us is, we will respond with deep love and compassion, rather than judgment and condemnation.

Friends, it’s not about which of us has sinned the most or the least. All of us stand in need of the love and forgiveness of God. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the memory of an elephant who never forgets, or if you can’t remember what you ate for breakfast, we’re all called to release ourselves from keeping a record of wrongs. In the end, the question we are called to ask is not, “How many times must I forgive?” Instead, we ask, “How forgiven am I?” and then we are moved with gratitude to share the same love with the world. May God remind us daily of God’s amazing grace so that we might be vessels of God’s love in the world. Amen.