A Case Study in Forgiveness and Generosity

Please visualize a story with me.

Put yourself into the narrative as you read this story. Perhaps you are able to envision a time in your life when you have encountered something similar.

A Story

It is a Friday night and you are going to celebrate a friend’s birthday. You and several other friends are going to a high end restaurant, followed by a short walk to a new dessert store just down the street in a hopping area of town.

Everyone enjoys themselves at dinner taking their time to move through appetizers, dinner, drinks and dessert - racking up the bill. One of your friends forgot to bring a gift and asked if they could sign their name to your gift as well, mentioning they will pay you back for a portion of it later. You send them a Venmo request for their share and trust your friend enough to pay it.

As dinner is wrapping up, a friend discreetly pays for the whole table. As you all move down the road to dessert the generosity continues and a friend pays for your dessert as well. All-in, someone has covered well over a hundred dollars of your extravagant evening.

As the fun wraps up your mind begins to shift to real life again - the normalcy of work, babysitters, budgets, and bills seep back into your mind. You’re walking back to your car as you pass a homeless person asking for a small amount of cash to stay the night somewhere. You pass by, shrugging them off without much concern.

On your way home, you are thinking about how much you will need to pay the babysitter that has been helping you out for the evening. You haven’t used this babysitter before and you did not agree on a price before heading out for the evening. You try to think through what is a reasonable amount to pay them - on the lower end of a fair price, making sure you get an accurate count of hours (and minutes) to pay their hourly rate.

With money on the mind, you also think about your friend who signed their name to your gift. Will they actually pay you for their share in the gift? Should you send your friend a venmo request or will that seem cheap? 

A Parable

Have you ever found yourself in a situation like this? I certainly have. In-fact, some of this story happened to me recently, and I was hit with a striking parallel.

“Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt.”

Matthew 18:21-30

Now, to be clear, this parable is not specifically about finances. As is the case with all of the parables, they try to illustrate a much larger concept through a similar (more familiar) picture. This parable is about forgiveness and our sin. With us (the servant) rebelling against God (the King) in a way that is much more grievous than the sins of others (the second servant) towards us.

One of the things that strikes me about the parable is that ideally we should be overwhelmed by the forgiveness of our own debts so that everything else seems insignificant.

Merit

Did the forgiven servant in the parable deserve any of the forgiveness in the story?

His 10,000 talent debt was the equivalent to 200,000 years of wages - by another estimate it would be similar to $3,480,000,000. Even if the servant worked a few good weeks or even years, it would be nothing to deserve that much debt to be forgiven.

I think about the small amount of cash being requested by the homeless person, I see how it is not only a small amount of cash in general, but it is also small in comparison to the “forgiven” expenses from the evening’s festivities.

Everyone at the party did not deserve their dinner to be paid for; The homeless person did not deserve any generosity; The forgiven servant (we) didn’t deserve his debts (sins) to be forgiven - but praise be to God for his generosity.

Fairness

In a similar vein, what is fair to someone who is working for their wages, i.e. the babysitter?

There could be a whole article covering this in relation to the Parable of the Vineyard Workers (Matthew 20:1-20), but from our text, we can see that fairness isn’t in the equation all that much. Even if the king forgave the servant 1% of what he was owed, 2,000 years of wages ($34,800,000), that would have been plenty generous.

But the King goes beyond fairness and forgives ALL, which not only affects the servant’s life but future generations of the servant’s family. In our story, perhaps that looks like not counting the precise amount of minutes we were going to pay the babysitter, but to round up to the next hour instead.

Expectations

How did the King allow for the servant to take out such a debt?

If someone asks to borrow $50 you may not think a lot about it. If they ask to borrow $100,000, then you may start to hesitate and think of the probability of you seeing your money again. Exponentially so for $3.48 billion or 10,000 talents. Many people would say it is unwise. A bank will likely lend you money to purchase a house at 3x your annual salary. At 200,000x your annual salary your mortgage wouldn’t stand a chance.

It would be unwise unless there was no expectation of receiving your money back. The king, from the onset of the debt, never expected to receive the loan back. And so, we can think back to the “loan” we extended our friend where we set our expectations (and provided practical steps) for them to pay us back. We may not say something explicitly to our friend, but how long do we set our hopes that they will pay us back? From the onset of the outrageous debt against the king he did not set those expectations towards his servant.

Considerations

As I consider the parable and the story, I consider the following:

• Look at the amount of forgiveness we have been given as we consider our generosity towards others. Also, we can look at the riches that have been extended to us. Second Corinthians 8:9 says that “though our Lord was rich He became poor for our sake, so that by his poverty we might become rich.” And these riches aren’t referring to financial prosperity, but to the fullness (abundance) of life that we find elsewhere in the scriptures. This abundance mindset opposed to the scarcity mindset is how we are to consider all acts of generosity in our life.

• There are times when proper stewardship is not the most efficient use of our money. At CFAN we have authored other articles on what it means to be a steward. Put simply it is managing resources on behalf of another (The King). While there is a call to manage effectively & fairly, there is also a case to manage generously (as we’ve seen the King deal generously with us).

Finally, we should manage our expectations. There may be times that a debt we extended to a friend turns into an act of generosity. And, by managing our expectations, we also change our perspective to see what we have been forgiven of (mercy) or generously given (grace).