Commentary on Matthew 18:21-35

At the outset of Matthew 18:21–35, Peter asks Jesus about the parameters of forgiveness: “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” (verse 21). Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times” (verse 22).

Jesus’s rationale for this response may originate in his reading of Genesis 4:23–24, in which Lamech declares, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” In Genesis, Lamech recalls the fratricide of Cain and his concern that he would be killed for murdering his brother Abel. Lamech emphasizes the gravity of his actions by multiplying the sevenfold vengeance against Cain to 77 times that amount. Jesus recalls the same numerical framework to emphasize forgiveness rather than vengeance.

Jesus continues with a parable—commonly known as the Parable of Unforgiving Servant—in which the kingdom of heaven is compared to a king who “wished to settle accounts with his slaves” (Matthew 18:23). When the first slave—who owes the enormous sum of 10,000 talents (worth around 20 years of his wages)—is unable to pay his debts to the monarch and pleads for grace, the king releases the slave and forgives the debt (verses 24–26). Yet the same debtor refuses to forgive a fellow slave for the comparatively insignificant amount of 100 denarii (roughly 100 days of payment for slave labor), and throws the man in prison despite his similar plea for patience with repayment.

When the king’s slaves notify him of this episode, he confronts the original debtor and says, “I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:32-33). In anger, the king hands the man over to “torturers” (Greek: basanistēs) until he can pay down all of his debt (verse 34). Jesus explains the parable by telling his disciples, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (verse 35).

This parable expands upon a saying that Jesus provides in the Our Father prayer, in which he petitions God to “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Jesus’s rhetoric reflects a financial metaphor that became common in Second Temple Judaism: Sins were understood as debts that the sinner accumulated before God.¹

An awareness of this metaphorical presupposition helps Gospel readers understand the imagery of the above parable. When the king forgives the first slave’s immense debts, the illustration alludes to God forgiving human beings of their colossal sin-debt. By contrast, the forgiven slave refuses to pardon the lesser sins committed against him.

This scenario exemplifies a foundational Jewish hermeneutical rule known as kal vahomer, or a logical deduction from “the lesser to the greater” (also known as an a fortiori argument). Jesus’s parable asks us: If God is willing to forgive the countless sin-debts of humanity, how much more should we humans forgive the lesser amount of sin that we encounter in our personal experience? Thus, Jesus concludes that his disciples should be willing to forgive their neighbors if they expect God to forgive them.

This expectation exists in Jewish literature that predates Matthew’s Gospel. For instance, the Second Temple sage Jesus ben Sira states:

The vengeful will face the Lord’s vengeance, for he keeps a strict account of their sins. Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbor anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? If people have no mercy toward those like themselves, can they then seek pardon for their own sins? (Sirach 28:1–4).

Ben Sira’s words summarize the logic of Jesus’s parable: Since God keeps an “account” of human sins—notice the financial language—humans should be open to offering forgiveness if they hope for God to overlook their own debts.

At the same time, Matthew clarifies that divine forgiveness is not wholly dependent on humanity’s proclivity for interpersonal pardon. The first chapter of the Gospel declares that Jesus himself “will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). At the Last Supper, Christ says that his own “blood” will be “poured out” for the “forgiveness of sins” (26:28). According to Matthew, Jesus will “give his life as a ransom for many” on the cross (20:28), namely a ransom payment to God for his people’s sin-debt.²

In the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Jesus makes the first slave’s debt the immense amount of 20 talents, which would be nearly impossible for a single person to pay down. Yet Matthew portrays Jesus’s life as a super-abundant offering for the collective debt of his people Israel (see Matthew 2:6).³ On the basis of Jesus’s payment on his people’s behalf, Matthew expects grateful Christ-followers to offer vast amounts of forgiveness to those who would transgress against them.

Notes

1. See Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (Yale University Press, 2009), 27–42.
2. See Nathan Eubank, Wages of Cross-Bearing and Debt of Sin: The Economy of Heaven in Matthew’s Gospel (De Gruyter, 2013).
3. See Nicholas J. Schaser, A Ransom for Israel: Jesus and Jewish Salvation in Matthew (SBL Press, 2025).