Of course, the point is not to make notches after each “forgiveness” and count them again every day, anticipating the long-awaited revenge after the 490th mark. To forgive means to forgive, leaving no notches, not counting the sins of one’s neighbor, not keeping an evil memory in the heart. Hard, is it not? But there is another option: my brother sinned, I forgave him, and in order not to give him the opportunity to sin against me again, I simply break off all relations with him. It would seem reasonable and quite feasible.

Everything would be fine, but one phrase from the Lord’s Prayer gets in the way. Yes, yes, “and forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” Moreover, Jesus considers it necessary to emphasize the significance of these words separately (Matt. 6:14-15). That is, the heavenly Father forgives us exactly as we forgive. It remains only to imagine that after our very first sin He would forgive us and then break off all relations with us...

This means that in His answer to Peter Jesus does, after all, have in mind something unreasonable and not very possible for us. In this way He again directs His disciples, and you and me, to let into our heart the One Person who can forgive in this way, because His love for people is perfect. But without our effort, our consent, our desire to forgive, nothing will come of it: God does not compel, but gives strength.

Today's reading is devoted to one of the most important Gospel themes: the forgiveness of sins. Both the meaning of the parable and the meaning of the teaching come down to one thing: God forgives us our sins only if we ourselves are ready to forgive the sins of those who sin against us.

Sometimes this demand is taken as a call to forgive everything without distinction. But on closer reading of the text, it turns out that this is far from the case. After all, forgiving everything without distinction often means that the offended person simply does not notice the sin committed against him or pays no attention to it. Sometimes in Christian circles there are even calls to learn to ignore the sins of one's neighbor, including those directed against us. In practice, however, such ignoring usually sooner or later leads to an emotional explosion, in which all the accumulated grievances spill out so completely that no trace remains of the appearance of peace.

Jesus does not call us to ignore sin at all; on the contrary, He considers it necessary to call things by their names, openly and, if needed, in the presence of witnesses, and sometimes publicly, in the church assembly (vv. 15-17). Of course, such an explanation can lead not only to reconciliation but also to a break; yet in any case the relationship between people will be clarified, and only then will forgiveness and restoration of relationships become possible.

It is no accident that the teaching also mentions the assembly of the faithful (vv. 19-20), because it is impossible as long as relationships have not been restored. But they cannot be restored by failing to notice or by ignoring sin; this is possible only through repentance on one side and forgiveness of the sin on the other.

And this is not surprising, because what is at stake here is spiritual life, where relationships come to the fore, both between people and between individual people and God. To fail to notice sin, to pretend that nothing has happened between brothers, would mean building these relationships on a lie from the very start, and that would be a serious spiritual error.

But no less an error would be to absolutize sin, to treat it as something that from now on has made normal relationships between brothers forever impossible. Of course, in our still untransformed world the consequences of sin committed consciously and deliberately were indeed considered irreversible; but we no longer live in former times, we live in the age of the approaching and unfolding Kingdom, and now sin, even when committed consciously, cannot have irreversible consequences if the one who committed it sincerely repents of what he has done. And if we live in the Kingdom, we will be able to see the person behind his sin, and therefore we will be able to forgive him; if not, then a sin committed against us once will destroy our relationship with him forever.

But we can count on the forgiveness of our own sins only in the Kingdom. God does not require us to forgive our neighbors' sins because without this we will not be good enough for Him and for the Kingdom; rather, by failing to show readiness to forgive our neighbor everything and begin the relationship with him anew, we refuse the Kingdom, where everything begins with a clean slate, including for us ourselves.

The parable emphasizes the immeasurability of our mutual debts and God's forgiveness: ten thousand talents is a million times more than a hundred denarii, and there is simply no such numeral in the Greek language. It is as if, having received an apartment as a gift, we were to take a ruble away from some beggar, though even more grand comparisons could be invented. On the other hand, a debt of a hundred denarii is also a sum: the offense inflicted by those close to us can be very bitter.

We all owe one another something; all of us, in one way or another, hurt others and are hurt. But when God enters the tangled, complicated ball of our mutual grievances and old debts, He disrupts the whole moral and material balance of our human relationships. This happens when, in the face of misfortune, our disagreements and quarrels grow pale, or when on a deathbed life acquires such seriousness that grievances and the wounds we have inflicted on one another come to seem absurd.