Held Together
Matthew 18:21–35
Phrases that spoke to me today:
• “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive?”
• “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”
• “Moved with compassion the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan.”
• “Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?”
Applying the Word to My Life:
Growing up, I could never understand why Jesus had to be crucified. I know I will never fully understand that mystery, but as I have gotten older I have started to understand it a little more. No one has ever suffered more or given up more in love than Christ did on the Cross. And that means everything else, when compared to the Cross, is put into perspective.
There have been times when I have been wronged, betrayed, or hurt and held on to those feelings. But when I look at the Cross, things change. It is hard to look at a crucified Christ and say, “Yes, but you don’t know what they did to me,” and not feel small and petty.
The truth is that He does know. We have a God who has suffered the worst humanity could possibly throw at Him. He was betrayed by His closest friends, wrongfully convicted, beaten until He was unrecognizable, and then killed on a cross. And after all of that, He still forgave them for what they had done.
That matters because forgiveness is not just about what I do with my private feelings after someone hurts me. It is about whether mercy is going to keep moving through the body, or whether it is going to stop with me. We have just spent the last few readings talking about one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. A community cannot stay one-hearted if everyone is quietly keeping debts alive against one another. Unity does not just get torn apart by pride, impatience, or harshness. It also gets torn apart when mercy stops circulating.
That is why Jesus answers Peter the way He does. Peter wants to know where forgiveness can stop. Jesus answers with a parable about a servant who is forgiven a debt so large he could never have repaid it, and then walks out and starts demanding payment from someone else. That is not just a story about personal cruelty. It is a story about what happens when someone receives mercy but refuses to let that mercy shape the way he lives with others. The moment forgiveness stops with him, he starts tearing at the very kind of community mercy was meant to create.
And that is where the Cross comes back in for me. Christ did not just forgive the men standing in front of Him that day. He also knew every time I would choose myself over Him, every way I would fall short, every sin I would repeat, every grace I would receive and still fail to live well. And He still gave His life for me. My life itself stands on mercy I could never repay. If that is true, then when I insist on holding someone else to their debt, I am not just being harsh. I am forgetting the Cross, and I am damaging the body that mercy was meant to hold together.
Every time I insist on holding someone to their debt, I am forgetting how much of my life stands on forgiveness.
My Response for Today:
Today, I will bring one person to prayer and ask Christ to loosen my grip on their debt.