NOTES for Mat 18:15-35

The parable emphasizes the immeasurability of our mutual debts and God’s forgiveness: ten thousand talents are a million times greater than a hundred denarii, for the Greek language simply has no numeral for such an amount. It is as though, after receiving an apartment as a gift, we were to take a ruble away from some beggar, though one could devise still more grandiose comparisons. On the other hand, a debt of a hundred denarii is also a substantial sum: an offense inflicted by our neighbors can be very bitter. We all owe one another something; all of us, in one way or another, hurt others and take offense. But when God enters the complicated, tangled knot of our mutual resentments and old debts, He disrupts the entire moral and material balance of our human relations. This happens when our differences and quarrels pale in the face of misfortune, or when life on one’s deathbed acquires such gravity that grievances and wounds inflicted upon one another seem absurd.