Do unto others as you wish to be treated, in all ways.
This is an easy rule when framed by our expectations of what is owed to us. However, it becomes demanding when the perspective reverses, when the mirror turns around. In that moment, we often fall into the trap Jesus describes to Peter in Matthew’s Gospel. We become the unforgiving servant who, having walked out from the presence of a king who wiped away an unpayable debt, immediately seizes a fellow servant by the throat over pennies.
Human instinct runs on a ledger. We want to get even, to be repaid in equal measure. But as Christians, citizens, spouses, and fathers, the math changes entirely. A child cannot repay a parent for being fed for eighteen years, nor can a community survive if goodwill is measured and metered out for exchange. Grace, by definition, breaks the arithmetic. We are not called to be ledger-keepers; we are called to be stewards of a gift we did not earn, that of unmeasurable grace.
Read the parable again and place yourself honestly in the sequence: God as the King, yourself as the debtor spared ruin, and the person who wronged you as the one asking for patience. When we hoard mercy, we do not protect ourselves. Instead, we isolate ourselves, imprisoning our own hearts in that deficit that we refuse to let go.
Forgiveness is rarely natural, and it is never cheap. Yet when we measure the scale between what we have been spared and those grievances that we continue to hold, the demand becomes clear. We cannot foster that exacting natural instinct. We must do as God does, and graciously forgive. In doing so, we can only hope that our level of forgiveness can begin to approach the level God has shown to us. For if all of the unmerited mercy at the highest level has been shown to us, what right do we have to govern our daily lives any differently?