It’s easy to confuse Jesus with a guru, philosopher or self-help speaker. Even Christians can often read His teachings the way you would read a self-help book. They look for principles to follow or rules to obey. But when you reduce Jesus’ teachings to principles and rules, you empty them of their power. The heart of Jesus’ message was a message of good news – God’s gift to transform us. Someone once came to Jesus for help in dealing with a hard relationship. Examining Jesus’ response helps us to see how distinctive Jesus’ message is and how we can apply the good news to our own relationships.

One day Peter approached Jesus and asked him how many times he needed to forgive someone who had sinned against him (Matthew 18:21-35). Obviously, he had someone in mind who was wearing down his patience. Peter probably thought he was being generous when he suggested, “As many as seven times?” Seven sounded like a complete number, maybe even a biblical number. And he was probably at five or six and figured that was about enough. To his great disappointment, Jesus told him that he had to forgive not seven times but seventy-seven times. If he was just a religious teacher, Peter would write down seventy-seven and he would have his rule. If Jesus was giving a TED talk, he might have followed this up with an inspirational story of the incredible breakthrough that took place in His relationship the seventy-sixth time He forgave someone. What He does instead shows us how the gospel can redefine not only how we see our relationships but how we see all of life.

Jesus proceeds to tell the story of a king who erased his servant’s debt. The servant owed the king 10,000 talents, which was almost a ridiculously large sum of money. For an average labourer in the first century, it would take twenty years to earn just one talent. So, the servant had somehow racked up a debt that would take 200,000 years to repay! It was a debt of billions of dollars in today’s currency. And Jesus simply says, “out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27). Imagine the relief! Imagine the gratitude he would feel. But it’s here that Jesus’ story takes a surprising turn.

The servant, who had been forgiven such an impossibly large debt by the king, comes across a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii. A denarii was the daily wage for a temporary labourer and so the debt was the equivalent of about four months’ wages or a little over $10,000 in today’s terms. It’s a lot of money, but having received such mercy, you expect him to graciously forgive the debt. But far from forgiving him, he begins to choke him and has him thrown in prison until he pays back every last penny. When the king learns of his harsh, unforgiving attitude, he puts his servant in prison – the debt he had forgiven is forgiven no longer. Then Jesus ends the story with the punchline: “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35).

If you examine what Jesus is doing in this story, it becomes clear how His approach to relationships is so different. The point isn’t just that we should forgive others – we could have learned that from a self-help book. The message is rather of a lavishly forgiving God, represented in the story by the king. It is only as we grasp the enormity of the debt of sin that we have before Him and the impossibility of us ever being able to pay Him back, that we can see our relationships with others from a right perspective. Having been forgiven so much, we find the strength to forgive the comparably little offences and sins that people have against us. As we find our patience with people wearing thin, we reflect anew on all that God has forgiven us of, and the injustices and annoyances don’t seem so unendurable anymore.

What Jesus is doing here is viewing the problem of people’s sins against us through the lens of the gospel and it’s what makes the Christian life so profoundly different than merely ethical or religious systems based on rules and principles. He invites us to view what we should do in light of what God has done. And what God has done is far more than most of us can imagine. The warning, of course, is that if the good news of what God has done for us isn’t gratefully reflected in our own lives, then we probably aren’t recipients of His gift of forgiveness and grace either. If you want to see what Jesus could do to change your relationships, think more on the grace that God has shown in His relationship with you and let that grace overflow in your response to others.

In awe of Him,

Paul