NOTES for Mat 18:23-35
More than once and in many different words, Jesus explained to His disciples and to everyone willing to listen that the foundation of the Kingdom, forming its very structure, is the relationships that bind its inhabitants both to Him and to one another. Everything capable of destroying these relationships separates from the Kingdom the one who threatens their destruction. But what proves most destructive to the relationships of the Kingdom? Ingratitude? Yes, certainly that too. But ingratitude is only a consequence; the root cause is evidently something else.
A man whose enormous debt has been forgiven attacks his neighbor, who owes him far less, and refuses to forgive him anything. What is this: a short memory? An inadequate understanding of the situation? Or perhaps simply an inability to see? This man was treated according to the laws of the Kingdom: he was forgiven everything. Had it been otherwise, he would no longer have been able to demand anything from anyone. He was forgiven because he begged for forgiveness, and begged sincerely: for him it was a matter of life and death, his own life and death.
His neighbor's debt to him was a matter of life and death for that neighbor, even though it was incomparably smaller. But the issue is not the amount; it is the relationship, the relationship that decides everything. The creditor's life and death were in his master's hands, and the master made his choice. The debtor's life and death then came into the hands of the forgiven creditor. But to the creditor this was not his own life but someone else's, for which he felt no pity, and someone else's death, which he had no intention of regretting.
What is this: madness? From the Kingdom's point of view, yes. From the point of view of the untransformed world, where everyone is on their own, no. Whatever anyone may say, in the fallen world everyone is on their own. If it is otherwise, then a reflection of the Kingdom, its light and its breath, which sometimes reached our world even before Christ's coming, has passed over the untransformed world. But in the Kingdom such an attitude is impossible. This is so not only because it destroys and deforms the Kingdom itself, but also because it spiritually deforms the person, to such an extent that the Kingdom's light turns into fire for that person and its breath becomes deadly. Then truly nothing remains but the outer darkness.