So there's this great big movement in thought after the Protestant Reformation, right? And you got a whole bunch of people in Europe, especially thinking a whole bunch of thoughts about government and morality and how we relate to each other, and almost trying to reimagine the world with a social order that wouldn't necessarily require the whole monarchy thing that we'd become accustomed to. This all happened against the backdrop of the age of absolute monarchs, and there was crazy abuse. This also, coincidentally, extends over into the period that we associate with like the liberal Western revolutions, right? Like the American Revolution and the French Revolution, with all those ideas about all people are created equal, and we've got these inalienable rights that are endowed upon us to us by our creator, like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, pursuit of stuff. All of that business is a product of the thinking, especially the thinking a little bit before the time of this one guy, Immanuel Kant. He's a German philosopher. And like a lot of his contemporaries, he was really interested in thinking through a sustainable, workable moral philosophy that went beyond just the high church dictates to everybody what right and wrong is, or just the high state dictates to everyone what right and wrong is. What would it look like for morality to exist apart from external forces acting upon us? And well, external human forces acting upon us. And he comes up with this thing that is a very, very famous philosophical maxim. And look, if at this point you're like, oh no, we're doing philosophy nightmare, I don't like these words. This was boring in college, just hang with me because it's going to make sense in just a minute. So he's got this thing called the categorical imperative. Sometimes you'll hear people call it the moral imperative, but I don't know, I don't know, whichever, whatever. So here's a crude summary of what he thought. If you want to figure out what is a moral thing to do, think to yourself, would this thing I'm about to do work if it was a universal law? In other words, would what I do morally work if everybody did it? So I could take the next 10 minutes and I could try to remember what all these different philosophers thought, and I could pretend to be them, and I could argue with myself about how exactly legitimate this moral imperative, this categorical imperative idea is of Kant's. But I think what I'd rather do is just acknowledge that it has at least some merit. That is a decent starting point for how morality works. If it's wrong if everybody did it, but just cool if I did it, not only is that destructive in the end, because ultimately then everyone will pick the immoral thing to do, hoping everyone else does the moral thing, but also it's hypocritical, right? Well, the interesting thing is that uh while I'm not saying that Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah for whom the religion of Christianity is named, is an endorser of all of the thoughts of Emmanuel Kant, you can see a little bit of something that might have influenced Kant's moral thought in the teachings of Jesus in Matthew chapter six that, hey, we were talking about yesterday. Remember this one? For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you don't forgive men their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. This theme of you gotta give away to other people that which you want God to give to you smacks a little bit of that categorical imperative. I guess it's the other way around because Jesus came first. And this isn't the only place in the teachings of Jesus where this happens. In fact, we could easily do a Bible avalanche here where we just fill the whole thing with a whole bunch more times where the height of hypocrisy is wanting something from God, but not wanting to give that exact same thing away to others, which then indicates that really you weren't actually interested in being close to God or doing what's right. You were interested in getting a divine favor from on high, but shafting everybody else, because that's just fine. Well, one of the passages that hits on this really closely is just a few chapters down the road. We're gonna go in depth on this one eventually, but this is Matthew chapter 18. So we're picking it up in verse 21 with Peter coming to Jesus and asking a question. He says, 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. And that is a very generous offer by the religious standards of the time. But then Jesus responds in a way that is off the charts of anything I've found in terms of how much forgiving was expected. And instead of more of my lame voice, I'm gonna let Felix from the Dwell app read it. Check this guy out, it's way better.
SPEAKER_00Then Peter came up and said to him, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him as many as seven times. Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times. 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 10,000 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.
SPEAKER_01I thought you might like it too. So 10,000 talents is what this guy owes. And my understanding is that a talent is 75 pounds worth of some kind of precious metal. I don't know which kind of metal. I don't think it specifies in the text. I don't see it, but let's assume that it wasn't gold and it was silver. 10,000 talents at 75 pounds apiece. You can do the math on how much silver that would be. I mean, you couldn't fit that in the back of a pickup truck. It would completely wreck it. I mean, this is an insane, incalculable amount of money. This would be like me saying to you, there's this guy who showed up and he owed this other guy like $110 trillion. It's unfathomable. Nobody could even wrap their brains around such a number. And since he wasn't able to pay, well, of course he wasn't able to pay, the master did what was common in that time, which is, well, you got one thing that is always leveraged against borrowing, and that is your household. Now, this is unbelievably cruel as a practice, but when this practice occurred, it was occurring in a little different context than we think of slavery in our more recent history. The idea was that uh a dude was the head of a household. He was the master of a house, and everything in the house was potential property. Gross, I know. And so seizing not just the guy's property, but his social security, that is, his kids and you know, their future ability to provide for him, would completely wreck the guy. It would be the end of his ancestral home. It would be the blotting of his name from the names of the great houses of the Middle East. This is utter ruin, the kind of utter ruin from which you cannot come back. So the servant, understanding that this would be the end of everything about his name, the servant fell on his knees before him. Be patient with me, he begged, and I will pay back everything. The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt, and let him go. That is unbelievable. He didn't just be like, all right, fine, I'm gonna cut off one pinky, and then you get two more weeks, but you better deliver. And then we get an elaborate, hilarious hijinx action plot that unfolds after that. No, the servant's master was like, well, that was a pretty good speech. Remember when you said, be patient with me and I will pay back everything? I think it was that turn of the phrase that really got through the armor. It was so eloquent and well-crafted. Okay, I'll cancel the debt. So we got this major twist in the story. The first twist is that what that worked? Are you kidding me? Why don't I just call Chase and be like, uh, be patient with me and I'll pay back everything? And then maybe that guy from India who's on the other line with me will be like, oh, it's cool. We'll just cancel it then if you say those words. I mean, it's insane. It's as nuts now as it was then. And I'm sure the original audience was like, Are you kidding me? Okay, where is this fairy tale going? Because nobody forgives debt like that. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, which is like, I don't know, it's just not much. It's it's a tiny, tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things. And he grabbed him and began to choke him. Pay back what you owe me, he demanded. So again, as we've discussed before, he goes the full spree well on the guy and is like, I want that 100 bucks or whatever the equivalent would be, and I want it now. And as a listener in the original audience, and as a listener now, you're like, What? Just how out of touch are you? How much are you not tracking with what just happened? That is the most tone-deaf thing ever. And look, tone-deaf is an affliction that can get us all religious people, not religious people. We can all be in a place where we just don't see the reality of our situation, but we see everybody else's very, very clearly. And then we say and do stupid stuff that exposes that we just frankly don't get it at all. That's what this is. Except it's not some little disparity between the two. It's the biggest disparity that you could describe with words that this audience would even have a chance of comprehending. I would imagine there might have even been some gasps in this moment. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, be patient with me and I will pay you back. Oh, that's the magic phrase. If you say that, everybody automatically lets your debt go and they just cancel the whole thing. But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay back the debt, which, look, I'm a history guy. I've done the history thing for a long time. I've always thought the concept of a debtor prison was just an awful idea because of how very, very difficult it is to pay off large debts while making license plates or sharpening and selling custom shivs for your fellow inmates. It's just, you're not, you don't have a ton of earning potential when you're in prison. I guess the idea here was that you were leveraging this hostage effectively. You make the head of a household a hostage. And the idea is that all the supporting members of the household are either going to abandon him or more likely leverage the wealth of the household they stand to inherit in order to get this guy's debt paid off and get him out of prison. Well, when the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed. They were greatly distressed, understatement of the day, and went and told the master everything that had happened. The master called the servant in and unsurprisingly was like, You wicked servant, he used the phrase, when you used it on me, I did the thing and you didn't do the thing for him. That is not even a paraphrase. I'm butchering. He said, You wicked servant, he said, I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? In anger, his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed. I know, this is kind of freaky. This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. I'm just letting everybody reflect on what was just said in regard to how God will behave toward those who are not forgiving. Is this literal? I don't know. I mean, it's at the end of a parable, so maybe not, but the formula of parables is Jesus says stuff that's metaphorical and then he spells out the explanation or just lets it sit without any explanation. It looks like what he's saying is if there's just one thing you can't do in this whole kingdom arrangement, it is want the mercy of God for you and withhold that from everybody else. That means you didn't get it. You never internalized this stuff. And the point of this parable, I believe, is to illustrate further what he talked about all the way back here in Matthew chapter five, when he's like, hey, you got to forgive men when they sin against you, and your heavenly father will also forgive you. Because remember, if you pray the Lord's prayer and Jesus said to, that means you are acknowledging in prayer, as part of your oath of loyalty and fealty to your king of this kingdom, that you have forgiven your debtors. It is assumed by issuing that prayer that you've already done it. Remember, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Yikes! The implications of this are huge. And again, we see Jesus doubling down, tripling down on this concept that the currency of the kingdom is the values of the kingdom. We trade in forgiveness and grace and patience and love and truth and all of this other stuff. And when you're trading in all of these things, you can't just want it from God and then withhold it from other people. The idea is you're transformed by the values of the kingdom. The idea is you swear abject loyalty to the king, the kingdom, and the values that he holds, that you're gonna duplicate that and replicate that and give that stuff away, that you're gonna be a light on a hill, that you are gonna be flavoring and seasoning in a world that doesn't value these things by bringing these values out into the world and putting it in front of people and making people scratch their head and be baffled by what these kingdom values might be because they're beautiful and they're attractive. And then he says at the end of this parable where he doubles down and reiterates the point that you got to give away forgiveness if you want forgiveness for yourself, that if you don't do it, plain and simple, you are not in the good graces of the king. You are not on Team Kingdom, you are not advocating for the kingdom of God. You are not a son, a daughter, an heir, or an agent of the kingdom. Now I understand that right now you are running this passage and all that we're talking about through a lot of theological filters. And there are gonna be some of you who are like, well, uh, again, no wait, it's you say by grace, and that forgiveness sounds like a work. Uh, look, we can break that down a little bit more tomorrow. But the reality is this is what the text holds out. More on the forgiveness thing, manana. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour. Let's do it again soon.