QUICK: CAN YOU name three people who have offended you in the past? You’re fortunate if you can’t, whether it’s because no one has ever hurt you, or you just don’t remember such things. But I suspect that for many of you, at least one person came immediately to mind. It may have been a boss or a co-worker, a neighbor or a friend. It may have been someone in your family. It may have been someone you counted on to be a brother or sister in Christ, even someone in church leadership.

Some of the memories may be long-standing and traumatic. The trauma may have been from a single horrific incident, or the cumulative effect of continuing mistreatment. You may know in your bones that what happened to you was wrong, unfair, undeserved.

And then someone tells you that if you’re really a Christian, you have to forgive. Can you do it? Do you want to?

Let’s start with this: anyone guilty of an offense toward you can ask for forgiveness, but they have no right to demand it, let alone to play on your conscience to manipulate you into doing it. I say this because it happens too often in congregations: what Jesus teaches about forgiveness is twisted in a way that demands more righteousness from the abused than from the abuser.

But how should we understand what Jesus teaches? Doesn’t he say in Matthew 6 that God won’t forgive us if we don’t forgive others? Yes. And it’s not just in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s in Matthew 18, in the parable of the unmerciful servant, which we looked at earlier when pondering the beatitude about mercy.

The parable, you’ll recall, was Jesus’ response to Peter’s question about how many times he was obligated to forgive someone who had offended him. The story is about a high-ranking servant who somehow lost a huge sum of the king’s money: 10,000 talents, or what the New International Version translates as “10,000 bags of gold” (Matt 18:24). Jesus is using exaggerated language to say that the servant lost an unimaginably huge fortune which could never be paid back.

But though the servant desperately promised to do the impossible and pay off the debt, the king compassionately forgave the entire sum and let the servant go. The clueless servant, probably not believing he was truly forgiven, tried to collect on a comparatively tiny debt that was owed to him by another servant. When the second man couldn’t repay, the first servant had him thrown in jail.

When the king heard about it, he was furious. “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” he thundered at the servant (Matt 18:33). And with that, the man got what he had deserved in the first place: he was thrown into prison, where he would rot until the entire debt was paid back — which is to say, forever.

And then Jesus added this disturbing moral to the story:

This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart. (Matt 18:35)

That’s pretty much what he said at the end of the Lord’s Prayer:

 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (Matt 6:14-15)

If he said it twice, he must have meant it. But what did he mean?

IT’S INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT to remember that at no point in the parable does the servant do anything to earn the king’s mercy. Nor does the king expect the debt to be repaid, even if it could be. Forgiveness was given solely on the king’s initiative, and though it was enormously costly to the king, it was utterly free to the servant.

That’s not to say, however, that it came without expectations. The king rightly expected that the man would be transformed by his mercy. The servant should have been shocked to the depth of his being at just how great and gracious a gift he had just been given. It was the kind of full and unexpected forgiveness that should have made him dance with joy and gratitude.

And in that gratitude, he should have wanted to give the same blessing to others. His unforgiving behavior toward his fellow servant, unfortunately, shows that he never truly understood the king’s mercy as mercy. I imagine him taking it instead as something like a temporary reprieve, a little extra time for him to come up with a plan to pay back the debt and impress the king with his cleverness. Thus, even though mercy was given, the servant never received it as such, and reaped the consequences.

WHEN WE HEAR Jesus say in Matthew 6 that the Father won’t forgive us unless we forgive others, we should remember the parable. There, the story starts with our sin and the king’s forgiveness. Gracious, costly mercy has already been given. But that mercy has to be received for the gift it is, in humble recognition of just how large of a debt we owe.

And what’s the sign that the king’s mercy has been properly understood and received?

A desire to be merciful toward others.

Jesus isn’t saying that we have to earn the Father’s forgiveness by forgiving others. Nor is he saying that the forgiveness we already have will be withdrawn if we fail to forgive even one person one time. What I believe he is saying, however, is that our unwillingness to show mercy to others is the surest sign that we never received God’s mercy for what it is in the first place. We still haven’t acknowledged our debt, still haven’t truly repented.

That’s why he teaches us to pray, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” It’s a continual acknowledgment of our sin and a commitment to being transformed by God’s mercy. It’s an eschatological prayer that looks forward to the day in which we will receive the full fruit of the forgiveness we already have, in response to the forgiveness we’ve demonstrated toward others.

But please note: if we’ve learned anything from Matthew 6, it’s that we can’t turn forgiveness into another rule of pious behavior. That would be to fall into the same trap that Peter did, when he asked Jesus how many times he had to forgive.

Note, too, that forgiving is not the same as excusing or condoning bad behavior. Honest repentance and change are still expected. Anyone who demands forgiveness but continues to behave badly doesn’t really want mercy per se; what they want, selfishly, is a return to the status quo. We don’t have to let people use religious language to bully us into submission — and God will hold them accountable for doing so.

Meanwhile, though, our responsibility is to prayerfully let God search our hearts, to let the Spirit reveal to us where we struggle to acknowledge our own sin or let go of old resentments. God’s mercy empowers our mercy, and that truth can be brought home to us again each time we pray as Jesus taught.