The Debt You Could Never Pay

Most of us keep a ledger we’d never admit to. It has names in it. The brother-in-law who said the thing at Thanksgiving, the priest who brushed us off, the coworker who took credit, the parent who never apologized. We don’t call it a grudge. We call it “just being realistic about people.” And then on Sunday we walk up the aisle, receive the Body of Christ, and pray “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” without hearing what we just asked for. Today’s readings hear it for us. Sirach asks how a man can nurse anger against his neighbor and then go to God looking for healing (Sirach 28:3). Jesus tells a story about a man who was let off a debt he could never have paid in ten lifetimes and then choked a coworker over a hundred days’ wages. And today the Church remembers Saint John Chrysostom, who preached on this very parable and told his congregation that remembering an injury does more damage to the one remembering than the injury ever did. So the question is a simple one. Who’s in your ledger, and what are you going to do about it before you pray the Our Father again?

The Readings

First Reading: Sirach 27:30-28:7

Anger and wrath, these also are abominations, and the sinful man will possess them. He that takes vengeance will suffer vengeance from the Lord, and he will firmly establish his sins.

Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does a man harbor anger against another, and yet seek for healing from the Lord? Does he have no mercy toward a man like himself, and yet pray for his own sins? If he himself, being flesh, maintains wrath, who will make expiation for his sins? Remember the end of your life, and cease from enmity, remember destruction and death, and be true to the commandments. Remember the commandments, and do not be angry with your neighbor; remember the covenant of the Most High, and overlook ignorance.

Gospel: Matthew 18:21-35

Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.

“Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began the reckoning, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents; and as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But that same servant, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ So his fellow servant fell down and besought him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison till he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

Scriptural Analysis

Sirach was written in Jerusalem around 180 BC by a scribe named Jesus ben Sira, and the book reads like a grandfather’s notebook: proverb after proverb, most drawn from ordinary life, all aimed at teaching people how to avoid sin. Today’s passage comes at the end of a long run of sayings on anger and vengeance, including the man who digs a pit and falls into it (Sirach 27:26). Then chapter 28 opens with three tight groups of sayings on one theme, and the Navarre commentators lay them out cleanly: verses 1 to 5 are about forgiveness, and the logic is that you have to forgive to be forgiven; verses 6 and 7 give the reasons for dropping a grudge, which come down to remembering who you are; and verses 8 to 11 warn against picking fights because fights only make everything worse.^[1]

The first group is a series of questions meant to embarrass you. “Does a man harbor anger against another, and yet seek for healing from the Lord?” (Sirach 28:3). “Does he have no mercy toward a man like himself, and yet pray for his own sins?” (Sirach 28:4). Notice “a man like himself.” The person you can’t forgive is made of the same flesh you are and will stand before the same Judge. Verse 5 says it out loud: “If he himself, being flesh, maintains wrath, who will make expiation for his sins?” Ben Sira’s answer is nobody.

Verse 2 is the hinge of the whole reading, and it should sound familiar. “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray” (Sirach 28:2). That is the fifth petition of the Our Father two centuries before Jesus taught it. The Navarre editors think Our Lord may well have had this saying or one like it in mind when he taught the disciples to pray “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12), and the Catechism draws the same line, calling forgiveness “the fundamental condition of the reconciliation of the children of God with their Father and of men with one another.”^[2] Saint John Chrysostom, today’s saint, quoted these very verses in one of his treatises and turned them into a warning: even if you never lift a finger against your enemy, if you refuse him goodwill and leave the wound open in his soul, you’re disobeying Christ’s commandment, and you have no standing to ask God for the mercy you won’t extend.^[3]

The second group is built on the word “remember,” used three times. Remember the end of your life. Remember destruction and death. Remember the commandments and the covenant (Sirach 28:6-7). This is Ben Sira’s medicine for a grudge, and it works because a grudge lives on forgetting. You forget that you’re going to die. You forget that you’re a sinner under the same covenant. You forget that the man who wronged you may have done it out of ignorance, which is why the passage ends with “overlook ignorance.” Barsanuphius and John, two sixth-century monks of Gaza, taught that the man who keeps his own mortality in front of his eyes learns to do good by free choice rather than out of panic.^[4] Chrysostom went further. In his homilies on Matthew, he said that nothing preserves love so well as refusing to remember those who’ve sinned against us, and then he said something that sounds impossible until you’ve tried it: “it is sweeter to love someone who does us wrong than to hate him.”^[5]

The Gospel places the same teaching in Christ’s mouth, with a story attached. Peter has just heard Jesus lay out the process for correcting a brother who sins (Matthew 18:15-20), so his question is a natural follow-up. How many times do I have to do this? He offers seven. Some later rabbis capped it at three, so Peter probably thought seven was generous.^[6] Saint Thomas Aquinas suggests Peter had Naaman in mind, who washed seven times in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:10), and reasoned that up to seven offenses could be chalked up to weakness while anything past that was malice.^[7] Jesus blows the number up. “Seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22), or seventy-seven, depending on how you read the Greek. Augustine took it one way and Jerome the other, and Thomas lands where they both land: whichever number you pick, we’re to pardon the whole, “just as Christ pardoned all things” (Colossians 3:13). In Jerome’s phrase, a man can forgive more than the other man is able to do wrong.^[8] And there’s an echo behind the number. In Genesis, Lamech boasts that if Cain is avenged sevenfold, Lamech will be avenged seventy-sevenfold (Genesis 4:24). Cain’s line kept a ledger of unlimited vengeance. Christ’s disciples keep a ledger of unlimited forgiveness.^[9]

Then comes the parable, and Chrysostom says Jesus told it so that no one would think seventy times seven was a heavy burden.^[10] A king settles accounts with his servants, who in this setting are more like high officials than field hands. The first one owes “ten thousand talents” (Matthew 18:24). The Greek is literally “a myriad of talents.” A myriad was the largest number the Greeks had a word for, and a talent was the largest unit of money, worth about 6,000 denarii, with one denarius being a day’s wage. So a single talent was roughly half a working lifetime, and ten thousand of them was meant to sound like infinity to a first-century ear. Harrington calls it “like a billion dollars for us,” and he adds a detail that’s easy to miss: under Jewish law, a man’s wife could never be sold for his debts, so the king is a Gentile king, and the order to sell the whole family, which couldn’t cover the debt anyway, is punishment, plain and simple.^[11]

The servant falls down and begs for time, which is ridiculous; nobody pays off a myriad of talents with an extension. But watch the king. He is “moved with pity,” and the Greek is splanchnistheis, the gut-level compassion Matthew uses for Jesus himself when he sees the crowds. He forgives the entire debt. Chrysostom saw the extravagance: “the servant asked only a brief respite, but he gives him more than he had asked, a full remittance.” He also noticed why the king took the accounting first. He wanted the servant to know exactly how much he’d been let off, so that at the very least he’d be kinder to his fellow servants.^[12] Thomas adds a point that matters for the confessional. The forgiveness came from the lord’s mercy, and from that alone (Romans 9:16); the servant’s sorrow was the occasion for it, never the cause. God gives more than a man dares to ask, and the parable even has the king call the debt a “loan,” the only time that word appears in the New Testament. He is gentle with the man’s dignity even as he cancels what the man could never repay.^[13]

Then the servant goes out. Thomas says Jesus loads five things into the next few verses to make the ingratitude as ugly as possible. First, the timing: this happens the same day, while the pardon is still ringing in his ears, like a sinner who walks out of confession and back into the sin. Second, the pretense: he was humble in the king’s presence and showed his real face the moment he left. Third, the victim is a fellow servant, a man “like himself,” which is exactly Ben Sira’s phrase, and Thomas quotes Sirach 28:3 right here to prove it. Fourth, the size of the debt: a hundred denarii, a hundred days’ wages, which the Catholic Commentary works out to be 600,000 times smaller than what the first servant owed. Fifth, the cruelty: he grabs the man by the throat.^[14] Origen noticed that the second debtor uses the very words that had saved the first one, “Have patience with me,” and the forgiven man doesn’t even respect the sentence that set him free.^[15]

The fellow servants report it to the king, and Remigius reads them as the angels, or the faithful, who grieve when they see a forgiven brother refuse to forgive.^[16] The king summons the man and, for the first time, calls him wicked. Chrysostom points out that when the man owed ten thousand talents, the king never insulted him; “wicked servant” comes out only when mercy has been received and refused.^[17] Thomas notes the same about the anger. The first order to sell carried no anger, because a warning is an act of mercy. Now the lord is angry, because now it’s judgment.^[18] And the servant says nothing. We read no answer from him at all, which Remigius takes to mean that on the day of judgment every excuse we’ve been rehearsing will be cut off.^[19]

He is handed over “till he should pay all his debt” (Matthew 18:34). Since he can never pay it, “till” means forever. Thomas is blunt about why: punishment doesn’t stop until satisfaction is made, nobody can make satisfaction without grace, and the man who dies without charity has no grace to make it with.^[20] Then the last verse, which is the whole point: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35). Jesus has said this before, gently in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:7) and plainly after the Our Father (Matthew 6:14-15). Here he says it with a prison attached.^[21] And “from your heart” closes the loophole. Jerome says it rules out fake reconciliations. Augustine says it’s better to be rough with your mouth and forgiving in your heart than smooth with your mouth and unrelenting underneath, because the surgeon is rough with the wound precisely so the man can be healed.^[22]

Daily Application

Here is where the two readings and today’s saint should speak to your heart. The parable is about a forgiven man, and that’s what makes it frightening. The servant had already been to confession, so to speak. He’d fallen on his knees and been released; the debt was gone. And the very next thing he did with his freedom was collect on a grudge. Ask yourself how often you’ve done exactly that: walked out of the confessional at 4:30 and by dinner been chewing on the same resentment you just had absolved.

The interior movement this Gospel demands is remembering, in Ben Sira’s sense. Before you can forgive anyone, you have to remember the size of your own debt. Chrysostom told his people that sins against God and sins against men differ like ten thousand talents and a hundred denarii, and then he said the gap is bigger than that because of everything God has already given us: existence, a rational soul, his Son, an open heaven, adoption.^[23] Thomas says it more sharply. Striking a king is graver than striking a member of your own household, and every sin you’ve ever committed was a strike against the King. The person in your ledger owes you a hundred denarii. You owed the myriad, and it’s been canceled. Hold those two numbers side by side, and the grudge starts to look absurd, which is exactly what Jesus wanted Peter to see.

But I want to be clear about what forgiveness “from the heart” asks of you, because people carry real wounds and the Church never asks you to pretend that they don’t. The Catechism says plainly that “it is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense.” What it asks is that “the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.”^[24] That’s the practice. Warm feelings toward the person who hurt you are optional. Praying for them, by name, is required, and you keep doing it until the memory of the injury has become a memory of praying for a sinner like yourself. And Augustine’s surgeon leaves room for firmness. A parent can still discipline, and a pastor can still correct, provided the heart underneath is set on the other person’s healing rather than on collecting the debt.

Chrysostom is the saint to take with you today because he had every human reason to keep a ledger. He was made archbishop of Constantinople against his will, preached against the luxury of the imperial court, and was slandered, accused of secretly gorging on rich food, deposed by a rigged synod, and exiled twice at the urging of the empress and a jealous rival bishop. He died on the road in 407, still in exile.^[25] A man like that could have spent his last years cataloging his enemies. Instead he spent them writing letters of encouragement to the widow Olympias and the friends he’d left behind. He’d preached this parable years before in Antioch and told his people that remembering injuries is “the part of a soul that exercises itself in evil,” and that whatever your enemy did to you, you’ll do worse to yourself by holding onto it. When the exile came, he practiced what he’d preached. That is the golden mouth: the words were backed by the life.

So today, before the next Our Father, open the ledger. Pick the name that’s been there longest. Remember the end of your life, remember the covenant, remember the myriad of talents that God already tore up for you. Then take that name into prayer and ask God to bless the person, mean it as far as you can, and let the Holy Spirit carry it the rest of the way. Do it today, while the pardon is still ringing in your ears. Forgive the hundred denarii. You’ve already been forgiven everything else.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible, commentary on Sirach 28:1-11 (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2004), 477-478. ↩
2. Navarre Bible, on Sirach 28:1-11, 477; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2844. ↩
3. John Chrysostom, De compunctione 1.5, quoted in Navarre Bible, on Sirach 28:1-11, 477-478. ↩
4. Barsanuphius and John, Book of Letters 639, in Sever J. Voicu, ed., Apocrypha, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 15 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 313-314. ↩
5. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew 79.4-5, in Voicu, Apocrypha, 313. ↩
6. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 234. ↩
7. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute, 2013), no. 1529. ↩
8. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1530; Augustine and Jerome, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), on Matthew 18:21-22. ↩
9. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 234; Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 269. ↩
10. John Chrysostom, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
11. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 234; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 270. ↩
12. John Chrysostom, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
13. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1536; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 270. ↩
14. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1537; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 235. ↩
15. Origen, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
16. Remigius, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
17. John Chrysostom, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
18. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1541. ↩
19. Remigius, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
20. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1541; Remigius, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
21. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 235-236. ↩
22. Jerome and Augustine, Sermon 83.7, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35. ↩
23. John Chrysostom, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 1, on Matthew 18:23-35; Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1537. ↩
24. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2843; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 236. ↩
25. Franciscan Media, “Saint John Chrysostom,” Saint of the Day, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-john-chrysostom/. ↩

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Wisdom Books, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2004
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
• Sever J. Voicu, ed., Apocrypha, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture OT 15 (InterVarsity, 2010)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (The Aquinas Institute, 2013)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)