This week, we are reflecting on the extravagance of God’s forgiveness. Jesus tells a parable about a king who forgives an insurmountable debt from one of his subjects.
Speaking of extravagance: in Jesus’ day, a denarius was about a day’s wage, and one talent
was about (more or less) 6,000 denarii. Ten thousand talents would be about six million denarii — six million days’ worth of labour! This astronomical amount functions in at least two ways in the story: first, it signals that this is a hyperbolic parable, a rhetorical form painted with broad, vivid, symbolic strokes. Second, it serves as an icon for “an incalculable amount,” an amount beyond measure.
I
remember the first time I tried to quantify God’s forgiveness. I was about 15 years old and had just learnt that all my sins were forgiven because of Jesus’ incarnational commitment to love and reconciliation. I decided to list all my wrongdoings to see precisely what I was getting out of this deal. Needless to say, I had barely recorded my shortcomings from the previous week, and I had already filled out an entire page. It is true what the Psalmist says: “Lord, if you kept a record of my sins,
who could ever survive?” (Psalm 130:3). But in the same way that we cannot comprehend the immensity of our sins, we will never get near to understanding the limitless of God’s forgiveness. To quote Cady in the hit movie Mean Girls: “The limit does not exist!”
Forgiveness isn’t something you can quantify; in practice, both “seventy-seven” and “ten thousand” are essentially uncountable quantities. Instead, Jesus
calls each of us to leave the quantities behind and embrace forgiveness as a quality of mind and heart, an ongoing bearing, a way of walking, a skill set for living, seventy times seventy times seven.
When did you last reflect on the forgiveness God offers you through Christ? Take a moment to consider the extravagance of Jesus’ love for those who hurt him, even to the point of forgiving them as he hung
on the cross.
Reflections by Rev Joe Taylor
