Encounters With Jesus Намуна

A Weight Lifted  

Upon graduating from college in May of 1996, I was staring at some debt I had accrued in addition to my school loans. This additional debt of $13,000 consisted of two credit cards I had maxed out, a used car loan, and a loan from one of my best friends. The credit card debt was basically $7,500 of unwise, wasteful spending. I’m embarrassed to say that I would then take out cash advances in order to make the minimum monthly payment. I was one of those suckers whom credit card companies salivate over.

After returning home that following summer, my dad asked me a question that caught me off guard: “Aunt Vera wants to know if you need anything.” I had a hunch this question might mean more than a few pairs of socks since she had recently blessed Dad with a brand-new 1996 Toyota Tacoma pickup. So I half-jokingly responded, “I sure could use about $13,000 to pay off some debt.”

The next day, my seventy-nine-year-old aunt told me to stop by her house, which was only a few blocks away. After coming inside and sitting down at her kitchen table, she asked, “Sweetie, your dad mentioned some debt you’d like to pay off. How much was that again?” “Um, thirteen thousand,” I sheepishly responded.

And then she proceeded to write out a check for thirteen thousand bones before sliding it across the table to me. All I could do was sit there stunned. Eventually I went over to give her a big hug. In an instant a weight was lifted.

Just a few months later, my feisty Aunt Vera was gone. It seems that her instincts told her she wasn’t going to be here much longer, which put her in a giving mood. To this day, her lavish gift remains one of the most vivid pictures that I have of grace and forgiveness. Simply put, I received something good that I didn’t deserve.

In today’s encounter with the Teacher, Jesus is giving Peter a lesson on forgiveness. He compares the kingdom of heaven to a man who was indebted up to his eyeballs to his king, owing him “millions of dollars,” or ten thousand talents as it says in the Greek (v. 24).

It turns out that one talent was worth about twenty years of wages for a laborer. So ten thousand talents equaled two hundred thousand years of wages! Put another way, ten thousand talents equated to about 375 tons of silver. In case you forgot, one ton equals two thousand pounds. As of this writing, an ounce of silver is selling for $17.55. There are sixteen ounces in a pound. After crunching some numbers, we come up with $210,600,000 in today’s value.

And would you believe that this king completely forgave the man’s debt? Unfortunately, this guy had a case of forgiveness amnesia when it came time to collect “a few thousand dollars” that a fellow servant owed him (v. 28).

I’m afraid you and I have experienced that same amnesia in our own lives, if we’re honest. Someone wrongs us and we want to grab them by the throat, all too quickly forgetting how much we’ve wronged a perfect and holy God.

Earthly debts pale in comparison to heavenly debts. It took a divine Being to pay a divine debt in full.

That’s the ultimate weight lifted.

Reflection: Describe the feeling of being on the receiving end of lavish grace or forgiveness. Whose burden could you help lift today by sharing these three powerful words: “I forgive you”?