The Word He Used Only Once

A man named Simon threw a dinner party, and a woman came in who had not been invited.

The first room

Luke does not soften who she was. He calls her a sinner, and he says the whole city knew it. She came in behind Jesus, at His feet, and she started to cry. Not politely. She cried hard enough to wet His feet, and then she had nothing to dry them with, so she used her own hair. Then she kissed His feet, and kept kissing them, and poured out a jar of ointment that had probably cost her more than she could explain.

Nobody at that table said a word to her. But the host was thinking, and Luke tells us what he was thinking.

Luke 7:39 · KJV

This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner.

Simon is not shouting. He is keeping count. He is weighing her, and he is weighing Jesus, and he has decided about them both before the meal has begun.

Gregory the Great noticed what she did with the very things she had used before:

And Chrysostom, who was not sentimental about anyone, says the thing plainly: “Thus the harlot became then more honorable than the virgins. For no sooner was she inflamed with penitence, than she burst forth in love for Christ.”

So Jesus tells him a story, and it is about money. Two men owe a creditor. One owes five hundred pence, the other owes fifty. Neither of them can pay. The creditor forgives them both. Then Jesus asks the question, and He asks it of Simon, not of her.

Luke 7:42-43 · KJV

Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? Simon answered and said, I suppose that he, to whom he forgave most. And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged.

He has just answered his own question. The order in that story is not negotiable. The debt is cancelled first. The love comes after. Love is what a forgiven man does, not what he pays.

The sentence people argue about

Luke 7:47 · KJV

Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.

It sounds, in English, as though her weeping bought something. It did not, and the Greek will not allow it. The word behind are forgiven is apheōntai, and it is in the perfect tense, which in Greek means a thing already done and still standing. Her sins were not being forgiven while she wept. They already stood forgiven when she walked through that door. The for that follows is evidence, not payment. The tears were the receipt.

Jesus closes the same way four verses later, and the tense is perfect again: “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace” (Luke 7:50). Already. Standing. She is not told to go and earn it.

Which leaves Simon exactly where Jesus put him. To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. That line is not about her. It is spoken to the man who is not weeping at his own table, and it is the most frightening thing in the passage, because Simon does not think he owes very much.

The second room

Peter asks a reasonable question, and he thinks he is being generous.

Matthew 18:21-22 · KJV

Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

Then comes the story. A king settles accounts, and a servant is brought in owing ten thousand talents. The Greek is myriōn talantōn, and it is not a realistic figure. Myrias is the largest number the language has a word for, and the talent is the largest unit of money. Jesus has stacked the biggest number on the biggest coin, which is a way of saying: a sum nobody could ever count, let alone pay.

The servant asks for time, which is absurd, and he gets something else entirely.

Matthew 18:27 · KJV

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt.

Before the cancelling there is a threat: the king orders the man sold, with his wife and children. Chrysostom will not let that be read as temper:

The severity was aimed at getting the man to ask. He asked, and the debt went.

He walks out of that room and finds a man who owes him a hundred pence, about a day's wages, and takes him by the throat. And when the king hears of it:

Matthew 18:32-34 · KJV

O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him.

The word used once

That word, tormentors, is basanistais, and it occurs exactly once in the entire New Testament. Right there, and nowhere else.

Its root is not rare, and that is what makes the choice deliberate. The same word is what demons use when they beg Christ not to torment them (Mark 5:7, Matthew 8:29). It is the rich man in torment across the gulf (Luke 16:23, 28). It is a woman in labour (Revelation 12:2). It is Lot's righteous soul vexed from day to day (2 Peter 2:8). And it is five times in Revelation for the final judgment.

Jesus reached into the harshest vocabulary available to Him and spent the noun form once, on a man who had been forgiven everything and would not pass it on. Then He says the line that has troubled readers for two thousand years:

Matthew 18:35 · KJV

So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.

Same currency, two rooms, opposite directions. The woman was forgiven much and poured it out, and was told to go in peace. The servant was forgiven everything and closed his hand, and was handed to the basanistais.

Who this is aimed at

Here is where this letter has to be careful, because these verses have been used to beat people, and they were never pointed that way.

Look at who is standing in front of Jesus both times. In Matthew it is a man who was forgiven an uncountable debt and then took a man by the throat over a day’s wages. In Luke it is a host who is quietly congratulating himself while a woman weeps on the floor. In both rooms the severity falls on the one keeping count. Never once on the one who is bleeding.

So these are not verses to read at a woman whose father did something to her when she was nine and who cannot yet form the words. That is not what they are for, and using them that way turns a person into one of Job's friends, who spent thirty chapters explaining a man's suffering to him and were told at the end, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right (Job 42:7).

God did not tell Elijah to have more faith. He fed him and let him sleep, and came back and did it again, because the journey is too great for thee (1 Kings 19:7). We have written about that elsewhere. The first word to someone who cannot forgive yet is not you must. It is that the weight is real and God knows what it is.

But the question does have to be asked, eventually, and it is better asked as a question than shouted as a rule.

What it actually costs

Set aside, for a moment, whether you must. Ask instead what holding it does, because Scripture is unusually specific about that and almost none of it is about your own pardon.

It does not stay in you.

Hebrews 12:15 · KJV

Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled;

Not you be defiled. Many. A root does not stay where it was planted. Children take it in, without ever being told what happened. That is the part people do not expect.

It opens a door.

2 Corinthians 2:10-11 · KJV

To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also… Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices.

Paul is writing about a church that would not restore a man who had repented, and he names withheld forgiveness as the thing that gives the enemy a place to stand. It is his word, not ours: a device.

It gets between you and God when you pray.

Mark 11:25 · KJV

And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.

Jesus says it again in the sermon, and there He interrupts an act of worship to say it: leave your gift at the altar, go and be reconciled, then come back (Matthew 5:23-24). The Psalmist puts it plainly, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me” (Psalm 66:18), and Peter tells husbands to live with their wives honourably so that “your prayers be not hindered” (1 Peter 3:7).

Three writers, one point. Something held against a person does not sit quietly in a corner of your life. It sits between you and God.

Job prayed for the men who wounded him

Job's three friends had spent the whole book explaining to a man who had buried ten children that this sort of thing does not happen to the innocent. At the end God turns on them, and the remedy He prescribes is strange.

Job 42:8 · KJV

Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept

They have to go back to the man they wounded and ask him to pray. And then comes the sentence that is the whole reason this passage belongs here.

Job 42:10 · KJV

And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.

When he prayed for his friends. Not after he had worked through it. Not once he felt differently about them. The turning happened inside the act. Job was still the man who had lost everything and been lectured about it for thirty chapters, and the restoring began while his mouth was open on their behalf.

That is worth knowing if you are waiting to feel forgiving before you try. In the one place Scripture shows us the mechanism, the feeling was not the door. The praying was.

What forgiveness is not

Two things, because this is where people are told to carry what was never theirs.

It is not pretending. Jesus, in the same breath as seventy times seven, says If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him (Luke 17:3). The rebuke comes first. A thing is named as wrong before it is released. Forgiveness that requires you to say it did not happen, or was not that bad, is not what any of these passages describe.

It is not the same as trust. Nothing here obliges you to hand your keys back to a man who took them. Release of a debt and restoration of a relationship are two different acts, and Scripture keeps them apart even while commanding the first. We have said more about that elsewhere.

And the pattern we are given is not a technique. It is two men dying badly and saying the same thing. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), and then Stephen on his knees under the stones, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60). Neither of them had recovered. Neither of them had been apologised to.

Where this lands

The Lord's Prayer contains one clause we say out loud about ourselves, and most of us say it without hearing it: forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12). We are asking to be measured by our own ruler. Jesus then stops and comments on that one line and no other in the prayer, which tells you what He thought we would find hardest.

Augustine, preaching on Peter's question, would not let the number be a limit at all:

He ends where Paul ends, and where this letter ends: even as God in Christ forgave you.

But the order never changes, in any of it. The debt is cancelled first. Ten thousand talents, gone, before the servant does anything. Her sins stood forgiven before she came through the door. Love is what a forgiven person does; it is never the price of being forgiven.

Which means the question is not really must I. The question is what a person believes he was forgiven. The servant who could not release a day's wages was telling the truth about what he thought his own debt had been worth. So was Simon, sitting unmoved while a woman emptied a jar on the floor.

To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. And he knows it, and so does everyone near him.