The Unforgiving Servant

I was afraid the meaning of the parable got a bit lost in the shuffle last week. So this week we helped drive it home a little by “bookending” it with Jesus’ conversation with Peter. Peter, who knows that love is an important commandment, and has probably heard some people think three times is already going the second (third!) mile of forgiveness, asks Jesus if they should forgive others as many as seven times. Jesus answers, not just 7 but 70x7. We had someone do the math for that on the blackboard. Then Jesus and Peter sat down while we reported the parable he told to illustrate what he’d just told Peter.

Our king, in his crown, sat on his throne reading his accounts ledger and noticed that this one servant owed him an enormous amount of money. He writes $10,000,000 on the blackboard. He calls the servant before him and tells him it’s high time he pays back the money. He says he can’t yet. The king tells him to go get his wife & children & come back, so the servant has to go choose someone to be his wife and children. They come before the king & he says, since you can’t pay, I am going to sell all of you as slaves so at least I’ll get a little money out of you. The servant kneels and begs the king to give him time and he will pay it all back. The king knows this is impossible, but he takes pity on the man and decides to forgive his whole debt. The family goes home very happy.

And yet the very next day, this fellow meets another servant who owes him $100 (writes that on the board). He demands repayment, and the fellow servant says he hasn’t got the money. Servant #1 says, pay it or I’ll have you thrown into prison. Servant #2 kneels and begs for more time. Servant #1 says, forget it! And two “soldiers” armed with swords come to drag him (her) off. At this point servant #2 bursts into tears at being so roughly handled. I was a bit callous, perhaps; this girl has been very volatile lately and it’s hard to take her tears real seriously. So I went right on with the story, saying, obviously, servant #2 is very unhappy about this, so some other servants go and tell the kind what happened. Immediately the older sister of the crying girl appoints herself one of them; she marches up to the king and starts shaking her fist at him and yelling at him in her non-verbal but vociferous style. (Hey, this isn’t the king’s fault! He’s on your side! smile) The king calls servant #1 back before him and says, I had mercy on you, shouldn’t you have had mercy on others? For that, you are going to jail for the rest of your life! And the soldiers haul him off.

Jesus and Peter stand up again & Jesus says to Peter, this is why we must keep forgiving others; otherwise your sins will not be forgiven either.

For our game, we offered a shining example of forgiveness: a bop-bag, whatever you call those things, the ones that keep “forgiving you” (popping right back up for more) no matter how many times you punch them in the nose. Each child got to punch it while counting out seven times. Our crying servant was still a bit sulky and not wanting to do it; her sister worked very hard to persuade her. Finally she was willing to try it when someone turned it around so she wasn’t hitting something that had a face on it. She can be sweet!

For craft time, we talked about how a life with a heart full of forgiveness is very beautiful, like a flower is beautiful. But—and we showed a sample picture—a flower with only one petal isn’t very pretty, is it? Even forgiving seven times—a flower with only seven petals isn’t that pretty either. So we encouraged them to stick on as many petals as they could.

I got to lead the Bible study time this week. We started by discussing the parable and at first no one was managing to apply it to anything but money & they were all saying, eventually you just give it up and it’s not that a big deal. How about other things that are not money? They couldn’t think of anything bad enough to be hard to forgive. What? Am I the only one who ever struggles with this? Too hard to believe! So I brought up the example of a husband walking out and taking up with another woman. Whoa, now that got the discussion going! Hard to harness it and get back to the Bible and the application! Which was NOT “so go out and forgive whoever you’re mad at” which is how I’ve always tended to read this. But it had struck me while I was preparing, that (duh), the real point of Jesus parable was to compare the huge debt we owe the “king” to the relatively limited ways others sin against us. Application being, when it’s hard to forgive, remember how much you need God’s forgiveness. We closed with I John 1:8-10.