By Philip Yancey
By my reckoning Judas and Peter stand out as the most mathematical of the disciples. Judas must have shown some facility with numbers or the others would not have elected him treasurer. Peter was a stickler for detail, always trying to pin down Jesus’ precise meaning. Also, the Gospels record that when Jesus engineered a miraculous catch of fish, Peter hauled in 153 big ones. Who but a mathematician would have bothered to count the squirming pile?
It was altogether in character, then, for the scrupulous apostle Peter to pursue some mathematical formula of grace. “How many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?” he asked Jesus. “Up to seven times?” Peter was erring on the side of magnanimity, for the rabbis in his day had suggested three as the maximum number of times one might be expected to forgive.
“Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” replied Jesus in a flash. Some manuscripts have “seventy times seven,” but it hardly matters whether Jesus said 77 or 490: forgiveness, he implied, is not the kind of thing you count on an abacus.
Peter’s question prompted another of Jesus’ trenchant stories, about a servant who has somehow piled up a debt of several million dollars. The fact that realistically no servant could accumulate a debt so huge underscores Jesus’ point: confiscating the man’s family, children, and all his property would not make a dent in repaying the debt. It is unforgivable. Nevertheless the king, touched with pity, abruptly cancels the debt and lets the servant off scot-free.
Suddenly, the plot twists. The servant who has just been forgiven seizes a colleague who owes him a few dollars and begins to choke him. “Pay back what you owe me!” he demands, and throws the man into jail. In a word, the greedy servant is an ingrate.
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Vanishing Grace: An Interview with Philip Yancey]
Why Jesus draws the parable with such exaggerated strokes comes clear when he reveals that the king represents God. This above all should determine our attitude toward others: a humble awareness that God has already forgiven us a debt so mountainous that beside it any person’s wrongs against us shrink to the size of anthills. How can we not forgive each other in light of all God has forgiven us?
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As C.S. Lewis put it, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” Lewis himself fathomed the depths of God’s forgiveness in a flash of revelation as he repeated the phrase in the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins,” on St. Mark’s Day. His sins were gone, forgiven! “This truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.”
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Philip Yancey: The Three Obstacles to Bible Reading]
The more I reflect on Jesus’ parables, the more I like the word “scandalous” to describe the mathematics of the gospel. I believe Jesus gave us these stories about grace in order to call us to step completely outside our tit-for-tat world of ungrace and enter into God’s realm of infinite grace. As Miroslav Volf puts it, “the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts.”
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From nursery school onward we are taught how to succeed in the world of ungrace. The early bird gets the worm. No pain, no gain. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Demand your rights. Get what you pay for. I know these rules well because I live by them. I work for what I earn; I like to win; I insist on my rights. I want people to get what they deserve—nothing more, nothing less.
Yet if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtors’ prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet spread for me.
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Taken from The Scandal of Forgiveness: Grace Put to the Test by Philip Yancey. Click here to learn more about this book.
Forgiveness offers an alternative to an endless cycle of resentment and revenge, but do you really understand forgiveness? In The Scandal of Forgiveness bestselling author Philip Yancey will answer: What is forgiveness; Why is forgiveness so difficult; Why is forgiveness scandalous; and What does God have to do with forgiveness?
We all live and love imperfectly. Therefore, only forgiveness will set us free. Yancey teaches us how to forgive by better understanding the clear connection between God and the gospel. You will learn:
- God forgives our debts as we forgive our debtors.
- only by living in the stream of God’s forgiveness will we find the strength to respond with forgiveness toward others.
- the true depth of what forgiveness is and what it demands of you.
- how to shed the illusions about forgiveness.
- the importance of grace and what it means to be a grace-full Christian.
Adapted from What’s So Amazing About Grace, The Scandal of Forgiveness is great for:
- someone who wants to learn how to authentically forgive and truly understand grace.
- men and women that want a closer relationship with God.
- readers who enjoyed Yancey’s other books—Disappointment with God, Vanishing Grace, and Where Is God When It Hurts?
We speak of forgiveness often, even believing that we are forgiving people, but do we understand the true depth of it and what it demands of us? The Scandal of Forgiveness reveals how to adopt the forgiveness the world is searching for.
Philip Yancey has written twelve award–winning books and won two ECPA Book of the Year awards for What’s So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew. Four of his books have sold over one million copies. He lives with his wife in Colorado. Learn more at philipyancey.com.
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