Summary: Although Christians are asked to forgive, the whole process is difficult to get right. Indeed, sometimes it simply can't be done. But that doesn't let us off the hook. In fact, Jesus urges us to offer forgiveness in an almost unlimited way. Can we really do that?
Don't raise your hands when I ask this question. Rather, simply answer quietly to yourself. How many of you are in debt?
The business services company Experian last year reported that the average American debt for individuals had reached $104,755.1 And here's how the company said Americans' average debt breaks out by generation:
At the same time, a foundation that keeps track of U.S. national debt reported that as of the end of 2025, the federal government was more than $38 trillion (with a t) in debt.2
My, owe, my. And when I say "owe," I'm spelling it o-w-e.
If we read today's Gospel of Matthew story in a literal way, should all this personal and national debt be forgiven? To answer that, let's think about what's really going on here in this teaching of Jesus as Matthew records it.
To understand what the four Gospels say about Jesus, it almost always helps to remember the Jewish context in which Jesus lived under Roman rule. One way to do that is by reading the footnotes in a version of the Bible called The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by the New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine and her colleague Marc Zvi Brettler, a professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University.
Levine and Brettler point out that the story from Matthew we read today is found only in Matthew and that "the 'debt' in question probably has nothing to do with material wealth."
Rather, they write, "the talents refer to spiritual goods rather than physical ones. Hence, Matthew is linking debt to sin."3
And in doing so, these scholars point out, the translators are simply recognizing that the Aramaic word hob can connote both debt and sin.
So let's not get overwhelmed by the idea that the king in the story was being generous to forgive a huge financial debt someone owed him. Rather, let's think of how he had been somehow wronged by his slave but was willing to forgive him for that. When that slave then failed to forgive wrongs done to him by another slave, the king learned about that and, as the text says, "handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt."
Jesus then adds that God will treat us that way if we don't forgive others -- not seven times, as Peter first suggests, but 77 times. As the late Catholic scholar, Fr. Raymond E. Brown, writes, that means "an infinite number."4 Brown adds this: "Christian forgiveness, then, is to imitate the unlimited range of God's forgiveness ...."5
However, the idea of forgiveness is complex. Forgiveness can be risky. It can be painful. It can be -- and often is -- necessary, but if you imagine it's always an easy matter, you are mistaken.
Perhaps that's why, in this Matthew passage, Jesus might sound a bit like an angry parent who threatens dire consequences if a child won't forgive.
It can be dangerous to simplify the process of forgiveness, which often can be complicated. And Jesus is right to tell us that forgiveness -- and, later, even reconciliation -- is desirable and should be our goal. But if we don't appreciate the complexities of forgiveness, we can quite easily injure an already injured person even more.
As I say, this whole business of forgiveness is not simple. For instance, no one but the victim has a right to offer forgiveness to the person who injured that victim. You cannot, for example, be the one to offer forgiveness to the thief who broke into your neighbor's house. More than that, forgiveness can't be received effectively if the perpetrator has not done the required preparatory work, including acknowledging that what he or she did was wrong and why.
And sometimes it takes an enormous amount of work on the part of the victim to be able to get to a point at which offering forgiveness is even possible.
You may know about or even remember the almost-instant forgiveness that the Amish community offered to the man who murdered five Amish girls at a school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006.
Indeed, once people understood a foundational motive for that immediate forgiveness the act became even more problematic. That's because the Amish believed that if they didn't forgive, they themselves would not be forgiven by God and that would jeopardize their chances for an eternal relationship with God.
A harsh way of putting it is that they didn't forgive as an act of charity but as an act of self-interest. In other words, they forgave so as not to risk a chance of going to heaven.
In the case of the long-running priest abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, however, something even more complicated is at work. For not only must forgiveness be a transaction between the victim and perpetrator, but it also necessarily needs somehow to involve the whole church. It was church leadership negligence, after all, that created the circumstances under which continued abuse was possible -- moving the offending priests to new assignments within the church.
So somehow the leaders of the church must become part of the forgiveness process -- and, indeed, we have seen some efforts by church leaders to take on the responsibility to express regret and seek forgiveness.
No doubt there are victims of various crimes who find it easier to hold on to their wounds, even treasuring them. But this is an indication of ineffectual healing and not final proof of a twisted and recalcitrant nature of the wounded party. In such cases, it's incumbent on the perpetrators to try harder to warrant forgiveness.
Forgiveness can and should be liberating, but not if we do it on the cheap. In the end, there's no iPhone app for it.
What Jesus is teaching his followers in this story is that forgiveness plus even reconciliation is the goal, but it's no easy task because human sinfulness can and will make it more difficult and complicated.
Think, for instance, about the nearly 3,000 families who lost someone in the 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks. Were they supposed to forgive the dead terrorists? How were they supposed to accomplish that? Were they to offer forgiveness to the people who orchestrated the attacks and who later wound up incarcerated for years and years and years in the prison on Guantanamo Bay? And how could they offer forgiveness when there was no formal and final judgment of who was guilty of what?
All of that said, Jesus asks us to forgive others even as he modeled doing that from the cross by asking God to forgive the people crucifying him because, as the Gospel of Luke quotes Jesus, "they do not know what they are doing."
Jesus also knew that true forgiveness is a generative, healing act both for the one being forgiven and for the one doing the forgiving. Carrying grudges around can be a heavy burden for all of us, and if we can find a way to set that load down, we will be healthier and stronger.
One way to give ourselves permission to offer forgiveness is to think about the people who hurt us the way God thinks about them.
Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle in his 2024 book, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times, asks this question: "Is the God of love looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?" As Boyle notes, "A bad diagnosis can't ever lead us to a good treatment plan."6
So he urges people to focus not so much on what's sinful in people but, rather, on what's broken and needs to be treated to restore the person to health and wholeness.
That, in fact, is what forgiveness can help people do. It can help victims see that nobody who is whole and happy and well would have done what he or she did. And it can move perpetrators to seek the very forgiveness they need to become the people God created them to be -- loving, forgiving, generous, happy and wholesome.
Even if the passage we read from Matthew today about forgiveness sounds harsh and hard, maybe that's just Jesus trying to get us to pay attention so that we can both give and receive the enormous gift of forgiveness in a way that is truly healing.
We don't give forgiveness as an act of "cheap grace."7 No, that does no one much good. Rather, we are moved to offer forgiveness because we ourselves are forgiven people who want to share with others that remarkable state of being whole and well and healed. Will forgiveness be easy? Almost never. But can it be healing? Indeed, that is its true gift.