“Dad, exactly how much did he owe?” My six-year-old son has been obsessed with this question ever since he heard the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, where Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a king who, deciding “to settle accounts with his servants,” first turns to a debtor who “owed him a huge amount” (Mt 18:24).
Jesus, of course, does tell us the precise amount, even though the translation doesn’t reflect it. Deeming us incapable of grasping the exact value of “ten thousand talents” and “a hundred denarii,” the translators/interpreters render it “a huge amount.”
What a shame, since the numbers are significant for several reasons.
First, it would have taken fifty million days for the average laborer to pay off a debt of ten thousand talents. In other words, no matter how long the servant would have worked, he never would have repaid the debt.
Second, Saint John Chrysostom teaches us that Jesus chose such a ridiculously huge sum to illustrate the difference between sins against man and sins against God. The difference “is as great as that between ten thousand talents and a hundred denarii, or rather much more.” Chrysostom explains that the human mind is geared toward thinking in discrete units so that we most readily grasp comparisons through number, even if the values are astronomical. This is precisely why my son is also obsessed with size-comparison videos. It’s not the relative expanding size of the passing objects that fascinates him, but the numbers written above the objects. He just has to know the precise measurement of each and every celestial object.
By translating “ten thousand talents” as “a huge amount,” the translators have robbed my son of an opportunity to engage his imagination and marvel at the vastness of God’s mercy. No matter how ridiculously high the number, it’s not enough. God’s mercy is always more. It is one thing to say that God’s mercy is infinite, but quite another to say that we need to forgive “seventy times seven times” (Mt 18:22). By pondering that symbolically rich number (seven represents perfection), we understand that God’s forgiveness surpasses even such a large figure. Referring to this parable, Pope Benedict XVI taught that “the debt for which the Lord has pardoned us is always infinitely greater than all the debts that others can owe us” (Holy Thursday, 20 March 2008). And, as Pope Francis makes clear, the beauty of God’s mercy is found precisely in the numbers: “God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy. Christ, who told us to forgive one another ‘seventy times seven’ (Mt 18:22) has given us his example: he has forgiven us seventy times seven” (Evangelii Gaudium, 3).
The relative amounts of 10,000 talents and 100 denarii also illustrate why Jesus chose to teach us in parables in the first place (cf. Mt 13:13). Simply put, parables help us understand supernatural realities in natural terms. They “throw” (bolē) one thing “alongside” (para) another so that we can examine the similarities and differences within the story, and then compare the story to our own lives and the kingdom of God.
Hence, the parable in Matthew 18 presents similarities between God and the king, but also differences. More specifically, it presents radical differences between the king and the unforgiving servant that help us understand the difference between God and man. The king’s debtor has no way of paying him back, even if he were willing to work every day—nay, every hour—for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the king forgives the debt not partially, but fully. In contrast, the first servant is so furious with his fellow servant that he doesn’t even give him a chance to pay off his debt, the size of which is a mere fraction of the debt he has just been forgiven. By throwing the second servant into jail, the first servant deprives the second of the opportunity to earn enough money to pay back the loan. In fact, the first servant would have more to gain by allowing the second to earn the money and pay him back rather than locking him up and thus forfeiting any possibility of getting his money back. The similarity, in turn, is found in the formula the servants use to beg pardon from their respective creditors: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.” As Origen reminds us, the unforgiving servant refuses to honor the very words he himself has just used to gain mercy from the king.
There is yet another reason for which the specific denominations are important. Saint Augustine tells us that, since the Law is set forth in ten precepts, the 10,000 talents owed by the unforgiving servant represent all the sins possible under the Law. In other words, the first servant represents a sinner who has committed every sin in the book, all of which are remitted because no sin is beyond God’s power of forgiveness.
The Catechism teaches that parables act as “mirrors” in which we can see ourselves and examine our moral choices and actions (cf. CCC 546). Translating “ten thousand talents” as “a huge amount” and “one hundred denarii” as “a much smaller amount” introduces a subjective element into the parable. It suggests that it is we who determine what is large and what is small. But the force of the parable is precisely the opposite. Jesus uses objective monetary values to make us uncomfortable with the irrationality of both situations: that of the first servant and that of the second. The king acts irrationally because he could at least get some of his money back. He has the authority to demand at least a portion of that money from the first servant, and the first servant has the ability to earn some of that money by putting in extra hours at work. The first servant also acts irrationally, but in his case, it is by refusing to allow the second servant to work extra hours so that he can get all of his money back. The numbers are absolutely essential to this point!
Lives can be changed through parables because at their root they are riddles (mashal in Hebrew). Why would a king ever choose to forgive such an incredibly large debt? Why would a servant ever treat another servant so cruelly over such a small debt? The “answer” to the riddle can only be found if we look into our hearts and recognize that we act just as foolishly as the unforgiving servant, and God acts just as generously as the king.
Most importantly, the riddle is designed to draw us ever more closely to the “riddler,” Jesus Christ:
Not only does [Jesus] speak of [mercy] and explain it by the use of comparisons and parables, but above all He Himself makes it incarnate and personifies it. He Himself, in a certain sense, is mercy. To the person who sees it in Him—and finds it in Him—God becomes “visible” in a particular way as the Father who is rich in mercy.
Saint John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia, 2
A good parabolist employs stories, characters, images, and numbers in an extraordinarily memorable way, and no one did this better than Jesus of Nazareth. Translating “ten thousand talents” as “a huge sum of money” and “one hundred denarii” as “a much smaller amount” destroys the literary value of these masterpieces. It saps the creative imagination of both the parabolist and the audience. No one knows this better than my six-year-old son. The translators may have had good intentions in removing the finite denominations from this parable, but in doing so, they’ve sapped 10,000 talents of their infinite worth.
Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash
