Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Peter walks up with a number in his hand. Seven times. By the standards of his day that is already generous, since the common teaching set the limit at three. He has more than doubled it and he is probably expecting to be told so. Jesus says seventy-seven, and that is not him raising the limit. He is telling Peter that the whole idea of a limit was the wrong idea.

Then he tells a story that is almost funny in how exaggerated it is. A guy owes his king ten thousand talents. To give you a sense of that, the entire yearly tax revenue of the region was around two hundred talents. This is a made-up-sounding number on purpose. It is a debt no human being could pay. The king wipes it out. Then the guy walks outside, runs into someone who owes him about three months of pay, and grabs him by the throat over it.

The uncomfortable part is that the second debt was real. The guy actually owed the money. Jesus does not pretend otherwise, and he never suggests the first guy was wrong to be upset. The problem is that he had just been handed something enormous and it did not change how he treated anyone. He took the mercy and went right back to running his accounts.

The real question underneath "how many times do I have to forgive this person" was never about the number. It is whether you still think of yourself as someone who is owed. Change that and the counting stops on its own.