Forgiveness from the Top Down

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matthew 18:21)

I was reading an excellent resource for worship planners put out by our national church body, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, when I came across this:

Forgiveness must be learned, and Peter thought he had figured it out. From the elders of the Jews Peter had heard: “If a man transgresses one time, forgive him. If a man transgresses two times, forgive him. If a man transgresses three times, forgive him. If a man transgresses four times, do not forgive him.” Three times, the elders said, was the limit of forgiveness for a good Jew. Peter, however, was willing to go much further; not three times, but seven times, Peter thought with a smile. Until Jesus said…

Sounded pretty insightful to me! But of course, the only resource we can trust implicitly is the Bible, so I was eager to check this out and verify it.

As it turns out, this is not actually what the elders of the Jews taught, though I don’t blame the author who made this claim. Such popular and trustworthy Bible commentators as John Lightfoot and Carl Friedrich Keil support this claim. If you want to find more commentators who support it, just Google “forgiving three times.”

However, what the elders of the Jews actually did teach perhaps gives us even more insight into what Jesus teaches us about forgiveness in the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Mt 18:21-35).

Commentators usually incorrectly cite two quotes from the Talmud when making the claim that the Jews were only expected to forgive their fellowman three times. The first was spoken by Rabbi Jose ben Hanina, who taught around 270 AD. He said, “One who seeks pardon from his neighbor need do so no more than three times, as it is said [in Genesis 50:17], ‘I ask you, forgive…and now please forgive’” (Yoma 87a,b). In other words, “I ask,” “forgive,” “and now please forgive” show that one only needs to request forgiveness three times.

But as you can see from the quote itself, Rabbi Jose is not talking about how often one should forgive his neighbor, but about how often one must ask his neighbor for forgiveness for himself. The rabbi’s point is that if you sin against your neighbor and then go to him and say, “I’m sorry I wronged you, and I ask your forgiveness,” and he refuses, and you repeat the request again and eventually a third time, and he still refuses to forgive you, you don’t need to keep asking him for forgiveness. If he still refuses to forgive you after the third time, the fault is his, not yours.

The second quote cited more often was spoken by Rabbi Jose ben Judah, who taught around 180 AD. He said:

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If a man commits a transgression one time, he is forgiven;¹ if for the second time, he is forgiven; if for the third time, he is forgiven; if for the fourth time, he is not forgiven, as it is said [in Amos 2:4]: “Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, yea for four, I will not avert it.” And furthermore it says [in Job 33:29]: “See, all these things does God work two times, yea three times, with a man.” Why is the second passage necessary? Because one might have assumed that those words [in Amos 2] apply only to a group, but not to an individual, so come and hear [the additional verse in Job]: “See, all these things does God work two times, yea three times, with a man” [thus with an individual]. From that point on he no longer forgives him, as it says: “For three transgressions of Israel,” and so on [Am 2:4]. (Yoma 86b Baraitha)

A careful reading here shows that the undefined agent who either forgives or does not forgive is God, not a fellow human being. The rabbis commonly refer to God in this indefinite way, to avoid using his name as much as possible (and thus to avoid potentially using his name in vain). In other words, the rabbis taught that God only forgives us two to three times if we commit the same sin.

At best, then, a person could conclude, “If this is how God deals with us, then I certainly don’t have to go beyond that in my dealings with my neighbor.” However, the rabbis never actually express that thought.

Peter therefore was probably not thinking he had forgiveness figured out because he was going above and beyond the Jewish teachers. He was thinking he had forgiveness figured out because he was using words that had been spoken by the Teacher. It was Jesus who said, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him” (Lk 17:3-4).

Jesus may have already spoken those words by the time we get to Matthew 18. Now that Jesus was again talking about forgiveness (Mt 18:15-20), Peter asked a practical question, and perhaps he thought he could look like the attentive pupil in asking it: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Perhaps he was expecting Jesus to say, “Good, Peter, you were listening to me. Yes, you should forgive your brother up to seven times.”

But that is not what Jesus said. “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Then, to promote this kind of generous, non-tallying forgiveness among us, he did not address any misconception about our forgiveness, but he addressed a misconception about God’s forgiveness. In the parable that followed, Jesus compared God to a king to whom one of his servants owed 10,000 talents. One talent was about 6000 days’ worth of wages. Using the current national minimum wage in our country as a gauge, one talent would equal somewhere in the neighborhood of $348,000 (8-hour day) to $435,000 (10-hour day) in modern day terms. That would make 10,000 talents equal to $3.48 billion to $4.35 billion today. And this debt was owed by a servant!

Yet what did this king do? “The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go” (Mt 18:27). And he did this in spite of the fact that the last words his servant spoke to him were a blatant lie: “Be patient with me…and I will pay back everything” (Mt 18:26). The king’s forgiveness was a pure act of grace.

God, then, is clearly not someone who stops forgiving us after we commit the same sin two or three times. Rather, as the prophet Jeremiah says, “Because of the LORD’S great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam 3:22-23). “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1Jn 1:8-9).

It is only when we come to grips with this right conception of our sinfulness and God’s forgiveness that any false conceptions about our forgiveness will disappear. Just as a Jew, judging from what the rabbis taught about God’s forgiveness, could have concluded that he only needed to forgive his neighbor up to three times, so also we should conclude how to forgive our neighbor from what Jesus teaches us about God’s forgiveness. For when we understand our enormous debt to God, which we are just as incapable of paying by ourselves today as we were yesterday and will be tomorrow, and when we understand how God has erased all our debts through the blood of Jesus, no matter how often we have incurred and re-incurred those debts…

Then how can we fail to glorify him by forgiving each other?

For further reading: Ephesians 4:31-5:2; Psalm 103:1-22

Endnote

¹ For you linguists, the Aramaic literally reads: “there are ones remitting [his sin] to him” (masculine plural participle). This is a classic Aramaic paraphrase for the passive voice. It is parallel to German “man” constructions. (The German translation of this phrase in the Talmud is “so vergibt man ihm.”) Rf. Alger F. Johns, A Short Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, p. 26. For another example of the exact same masculine plural participle construction used in a passive sense to refer to God’s forgiveness, see Berakoth 12b.