Whoa! What an astronomical sum. Jesus employs hyperbole, right? He's exag­gerating to make a point. Or is He? One person would never owe such an amount to another. But might Jesus be referring to the debt we owe to God?

Let's calculate our indebtedness to him. How often do you sin, hmm, in an hour? To sin is to "fall short" (Rom. 3:23 NIV).

Worry is falling short on faith. Impatience is falling short on kindness. The critical spirit falls short on love. How often do you come up short with God? For the sake of discussion, let's say 10 times an hour and tally the results. Ten sins an hour, times 16 waking hours (assuming we don't sin in our sleep), times 365 days a year, times the average male life span of 74 years. I'm rounding the total off at 4,300,000 sins per person.

Tell me, how do you plan to pay God for your 4.3 million sin increments? Your payout is unachievable. Unreachable. You're swimming in a Pacific Ocean of debt. Jesus' point precisely. The debtor in the story? You and me. The king? God. Look at what God does.

He [the servant] couldn't pay, so his master ordered that he be sold — along with his wife, his children, and every­thing he owned — to pay the debt. But the man fell down before his master and begged him, "Please be patient with me, and I will pay it all." Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt (Matt. 18:25-27 NLT). God pardons the zillion sins of selfish humanity. Forgives 60 million sin-filled days. "Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we're in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ" (Rom. 3:24).

God forgives the unforgivable. Were this the only point of the story, we'd have ample points to ponder. But this is only Act 1 of the two-act play. The punch line is yet to come.

Act 2: We do the unthinkable.

The forgiven refuse to forgive. But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant pay­ment. His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. "Be patient with me, and I will pay it," he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn't wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full (Matt. 18:28-30 NLT). Incomprehensible behavior. Multimil­lion-dollar forgiveness should produce a multimillion-dollar forgiver, shouldn't it? The forgiven servant can forgive a petty debt, can't he? This one doesn't. Note, he won't wait (18:30). He refuses to forgive. He could have. He should have. The forgiv­en should forgive. Which makes us won­der, did this servant truly accept the king's forgiveness?

Something is missing from this story. Gratitude. Notably absent from the parable is the joy of the forgiven servant. Like the nine ungrateful lepers we read about in the last chapter, this man never tells the king "thank you." He offers no words of appre­ciation, sings no song of celebration. His life has been spared, family liberated, sen­tence lifted, Titanic debt forgiven — and he says nothing. He should be hosting a Thanksgiving Day parade. He begs for mercy like a student on the brink of flunk­ing out of college. But once he receives it, he acts as if he never scored less than a B.

Could his silence make the loudest point of the parable? "He who is forgiven little, loves little" (Luke 7:47 RSV). This man loves little apparently because he had received little grace.