DO YOU REMEMBER when you first learned to drive? I’m a good driver now (I think?), but I definitely wasn’t at first. The car I drove belonged to my parents, and it was a beast of a thing compared to the subcompacts I drive now. I once plowed it into the garage wall while my father watched in horror.

In my defense, it was tricky getting the car into the garage, because our driveway sloped upward and made a sharp turn at the end. But Dad had been sitting in the passenger seat as I drove home, and when we reached the top of the driveway, he specifically told me to let him park the car. But as you might have guessed, as soon as he got out and slammed the door, I put the car in gear and hit the gas. Come on, how hard could it be?

It took about two seconds to find out.

That, of course, wasn’t my only mishap. In a parking garage, I once creased a door on the passenger side of the same car while backing out of a space. I misjudged the distance between me and the car parked next to me and turned too soon. I am ashamed to say that I drove away without taking responsibility for the damage I caused to the other car. Nor did I tell my parents what happened when I got home. They had to discover the damage for themselves later.

Let’s just say that wasn’t a pleasant conversation.

You may have your own stories to tell about situations in which you were given some responsibility and botched it in a costly way. Your parents leave you in charge of your little brother, and he breaks something valuable while you play video games in another room. Your boss assigns you an important project, but you mishandle things in a way that will cost the company thousands of dollars in lost revenue. You can try to hide the failure for a while. But sooner or later, you hear the sound of your parents’ car in the driveway, or get an email from your boss asking for an update. You’re going to have to confess. What then?

Wouldn’t it be nice if your parents said, “That’s all right. We forgive you”? Wouldn’t you want your boss to have mercy and not fire you? You’re not expecting that kind of compassionate lenience. Indeed, you have no right to it. But when your parents or your boss bless you with their forgiveness, and you know that you don’t deserve it, it should make you want to do better next time.

PETER ONCE CAME to Jesus with a question about forgiveness: how many times did he have to forgive someone who kept offending him? Seven times, perhaps? Seven was an important number for Jews, symbolizing fullness or completeness — so surely seven was enough?

Jesus responded in a way that suggested the question itself was wrongheaded. True forgiveness, godly forgiveness, can’t be a matter of keeping score. To drive home the point, Jesus told what’s sometimes known as the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew 18:21-35. Here’s a modernized retelling of the story.

A senior executive who handles multimillion-dollar accounts has made some questionable and risky business deals and has lost more money than he himself will ever see in his lifetime. To help offset the loss, the president initiates a lawsuit against the man, even though the executive’s personal assets can’t come close to the amount he lost. Feeling hopeless and knowing himself to be ruined, the man fell to his knees before the president and begged for mercy.

What happened next caught him completely by surprise. The president looked at him with compassion and took pity on him. Not only did the man not lose his job, the lawsuit was canceled as if nothing had happened. By rights, the executive owed an impossibly huge debt, but the president forgave every penny.

So what did the man do? He could have leapt for joy. He could have thrown a party to celebrate the unexpected mercy he’d received. He could have — should have — gladly forgiven every penny someone else owed him.

But no. Not trusting the president, he believed it was still up to him to figure out a way to repay the debt or win back his reputation. He found a fellow employee who owed him money — a paltry amount compared to what he had been so generously forgiven — and threatened him. When his colleague asked for mercy just as he had, the executive refused and sued him.

When the president heard this, he was livid. He called the executive back into his office. “I had mercy on you,” he thundered. “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your colleague?” The president therefore sued the executive as originally planned and the man lost everything.

MY VERSION OF the story is much tamer than the parable Jesus told of a king and his unmerciful, unforgiving servant, because in Jesus’ day a king held the power of life and death in his hands. Listen to the severe way the parable ends:

Then the master called the servant in. “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 handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. (Matt 18:32-34, NIV)

And if that’s not intimidating enough, Jesus adds this final coda:

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

Jesus told this parable, remember, in response to Peter’s question about forgiveness. I imagine that after that, Peter didn’t ask any more questions.

“BLESSED ARE THE merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Again, Jesus isn’t saying that we need to be merciful to earn mercy. In the parable, the servant has already received mercy, and is expected to conduct himself accordingly. But his unforgiving behavior showed that he hadn’t taken the king’s mercy to heart. Instead of being transformed by it, he took the king’s clemency as a temporary reprieve and arrogantly went back to trying to fix a situation that no longer needed fixing.

Those who follow Jesus have already received a mercy they don’t deserve. They look forward to the day when that mercy will be complete. But how do they live between now and then? Will they be merciful people themselves?

Mercy isn’t some abstract ideal. Remember Peter’s question to Jesus: it was asked in the context of being angry at someone else for some repeated offense. Peter knew that he should be forgiving, but was looking for Jesus to give him an out, to tell him, “Wow, Peter, you’re willing to forgive that jerk seven times? That’s amazing.” But instead, Jesus teaches that it’s wrongheaded to keep track. The only calculus needed is a very straightforward one: “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had mercy on you?”

That doesn’t mean that we should simply ignore injustice or sin or take any and all abuse that someone wants to dish out. That would be to turn the beatitude into some kind of simplistic religious rule instead of a vision of kingdom character. The question, rather, is whether we live as those who know in our bones how much we have already been forgiven.

Let’s make sure we know that, and then live accordingly.