Deeper Forgiveness
By Anthony Casperson
6-28-25

When I began playing Final Fantasy VII: Remake, I learned a lot about the game’s magic system, which is referred to as “materia.” Essentially little spheres that your characters place into their weapons and armor in order to give them the ability to cast certain spells. For instance, a Fire materia will allow the character to cast fire-based spells, and the Cure materia lets them cast healing spells.

The player is able to mix and match various materia depending on the number of materia slots that the weapon or armor has. And certain sets of materia slots might be linked, thus allowing the paired materia to work in unison. As an example, an Elemental materia linked with the Fire one mentioned above will cause a weapon to deal extra fire damage, while the same pair of linked materia added to armor gives the character a certain percentage of fire resistance.

As I played around with the system, I realized that the choice of materia made a huge difference to how easily I could defeat enemies. Certain combinations gave me the ability to escape an encounter with more health than I had started it with. And I’d figured out most of it with trial and error.

Thus, when I’d played FF7: Remake’s sequel, FF7: Rebirth, I figured that I’d understood the whole system pretty well. So much so, that I willingly tried to play the hard mode of the game once it was unlocked. (If you know me very well, you know that I rarely try to play a game at its max challenge level.)

It was here that I discovered the shallow nature of my understanding of the system. Sure, I could passably succeed in certain encounters. However, a number of the bigger boss battles were impossible for me. I had to look up what I was doing wrong.

And what I saw made me realize just how deep the interconnected nature of the materia system went.

Some of the videos I watched pointed out an exact set of materia that they needed to have in order to succeed. They said that other combinations could work, but this was the best one they found. Certainly, I saw that their conceptualization of the system superceded mine by miles.

This idea of thinking that we have mastery of something, until we see a true master at work, is typical of many skills and areas of understanding. A person thinks they’re great at a fighting game, until they challenge someone online to a match. We might consider ourselves to be a good driver, until we’re sitting in the passenger seat during terrible conditions and the driver doesn’t even break out in a sweat. A follower of Jesus might think themselves an extremely faithful person, until they witness someone else face a life-threatening condition with the purest of joy and peace.

It’s when we truly witness the depths of something that we finally realize how much we’ve lived in the shallows.

This truth is something that Peter learned in the passage for this week’s parable in our “Mysteries of the Kingdom” series, found in Matthew 18:21-35. Most might look only at the parable and question how I can say this, but the context is crucial to understand the point of the parable—as we’ve seen is true for multiple parables in our series so far. So, we’ll start with that context.

Just previous to this passage, in verses 15-17, Jesus had spoken about how to interact with a person who has sinned against us. Openness and a heart for reconciliation are both important for this interaction.

Because of this teaching, Peter asks Jesus how many times a person should forgive. Since forgiveness is important for reconciliation, the question was about how many specific sins a person could commit for forgiveness to be given. Basically, Peter wanted to forgive like Jesus commanded, but he wanted to know the limits of that forgiveness.

And Peter throws out an exact number of times. Seven, to be specific. This number is more than double the extent of the standard rabbinical teaching, which says to forgive three times—because part of forgiveness includes the person learning not to do the same thing, thus repeated events would deny the process of learning to not sin anymore.

See, Peter had been following Jesus for quite some time by this point. He knew that Jesus had a heart for reconciliation. Thus, Jesus would definitely forgive more than any other rabbi. Peter thought that he understood forgiveness, grace, and mercy.

He went for a hard mode playthrough of forgiveness. And failed. Like most of us do, when we compare our extent of forgiveness, grace, and mercy with Jesus, the truest master.

Jesus looks at his disciple and laughs, saying that there were even more multiples needed for the full extent of forgiveness. No matter whether Jesus meant seventy-seven times or seventy times seven times, it’s far beyond the number that Peter tried of just over double the rabbinic standard. He’d still been in the shallow end of the pool of forgiveness.

To showcase the extent of forgiveness—and its importance for those of us who are members of the Kingdom of God—Jesus tells a parable that we often call, “The Unforgiving Servant.”

He says that the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who called his various civil leaders together in order to settle the affairs of the kingdom. This probably means the king called those in charge of gathering taxes to cough up the money.

But when this king got to one of the servant officials of his realm, the man was short on his cut of the taxes. Very short. We could take the amount of ten thousand talents in a less literal amount by saying that ten thousand was considered the biggest number in the Roman Empire, and a talent its biggest denomination. So, this would be the most amount of money a person could possibly imagine. Or, we could take the number literally and say that a single talent was approximately six thousand days’ wages. So, multiplied by ten thousand would be sixty million days’ wages. Or over one hundred sixty-four thousand years’ wages.

Saying that he was a little short doesn’t quite portray the scope of his debt.

At this vast amount owed, the king ordered that the servant and his family be sold into slavery—which wasn’t outside of the scope of a non-Israelite king’s authority—and everything that the man owned was to be sold as well. This would never come close to paying the debt that the government official owed, but would at least give the king something.

The man then fell to his face before the king and pled for his life. Literally. He promised that every cent would be paid, if only he could have time. I’d be like, “Buddy, there isn’t time in the world for you to pay that off. You shouldn’t even try.” However this guy faced a king who was much more gracious than I naturally am.

In a moment of deep pity—the same feeling in the bowels that we saw a couple of weeks ago with the Good Samaritan in Luke 10—the king declares the debt forgiven. There’s not even a demand for the debt to be repaid. It is completely forgiven. A clean slate. Debt free. (More than a few of us could only hope for that level of forgiveness in our finances.)

The man leaves the king’s presence in utter amazement at what he’d just be shown.

But then, as he went about his business, he came upon a fellow servant of the king who owed him money. Only one hundred days’ wages. Sure, that could still be considered a lot, but nothing in comparison to what the man had just been freed from. But that memory had gotten lost in the rage that filled this man. He began to choke the fellow servant out, demanding that the money be paid right now.

This fellow servant fell to the ground before him, much like the man had done before the king. Actually the words are as close to a repetition as they can be without being completely redundant. The fellow servant pleads for time to repay.

What does the one man do with his fellow servant’s pleas? Does he feel the same mercy as the king? Does he consider that he’d just been forgiven so much? Is forgiveness on the horizon for the fellow servant?

No, the man throws his fellow servant in prison until the debt can be paid. This treatment makes it all the more difficult for the man to settle the debt, because roman prisoners didn’t earn any money. They were entirely dependent upon the grace of their friends and family to survive, let alone earn an income. So, this was a huge disgrace.

News of this action came to the king who’d forgiven the one man. Because of this, fury rose in him. And he ordered that the first servant be treated exactly the same as he’d treated his fellow servant. Imprisoned for the debt, which had been un-canceled, for what would certainly be a life sentence.

This ending sounds kinda strong doesn’t it? I mean, this is supposed to be an image of the kingdom of heaven. Does God really act that nastily if we’re not as forgiving as he is? Well, no. But there is something to learn from the parable about ramifications for not being forgiving.

Notice that the king’s original order of selling the man and his family into slavery was off the table. Instead, he ordered that the man was to be thrown into prison, treated in the exact same manner that he’d enacted upon his fellow servant. It sounds a lot like Jesus’ words elsewhere in the gospels where he says that a person will find the same measure they use on others to be used against them.

We should forgive others as we have been forgiven, lest we be treated as we’ve treated others who asked our forgiveness.

That’s part of the application of the parable. But even more than that, I believe an application comes with a deeper look that the first part of that sentence above: forgive as we have been forgiven. And that relates to Peter’s question of how many times we should forgive another.

Peter wanted to know the extent of forgiveness that we should have. It’s a question we’re all too familiar with. What is the minimum amount of effort that we should put in to get out the maximum amount of grace and favor from God? We talked about how bad that perspective was in another previous parable from this series.

But Jesus explains again that looking for a limit shows a misunderstanding of the kingdom. It minimizes our own debt of sin while maximizing others’ sins against us. Our sin against God, every act of rebellion against his ways, is such a cosmic level of debt that no one could ever repay it, even if they lived multiple lifetimes. Yet the grievances we might have against another human being pales in comparison to that huge of a debt.

The infinite God shows us limitless forgiveness, mercy, and grace. Yet the finite sin performed against us is such a small thing by comparison. How many times does a hundred divide into infinity? An infinite amount of times. That’s kinda the thing about infinity. It doesn’t have a limit.

Thus, we see that only when we witness a master of forgiveness, mercy, and grace do we come to understand their depths. And how shallow our understanding of them is.

So, let’s be willing to forgive as we’ve been forgiven. Not with limits. Not with a measuring balance to see if our fellow image-bearers of God have finally tipped the scales to a level where we can throw them into relational jail. But with a depth of mercy that descends deep into the bowels of care and concern. Forgiveness, mercy, and grace worthy of a true master.

Forgive as we have been forgiven. And be thankful that God doesn’t forgive at a level that we naturally would. Because that would never turn out well for us.