“Then came Peter and said to him, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times?”

When I was ten years old, I decided to start a stamp collection. At the local hobby shop, the wizened old proprietor spread an assortment of stamps across the counter and said, in a thick Polish accent, that they would be very valuable one day. When I asked why, he explained they were stamps from countries that no longer existed. How can a country no longer exist, I wanted to know? The old man reached an arm across the counter, exposing a tattoo from a Nazi death camp, and in halting English, told me about genocide. For him, those stamps and the countries they represented were more than an abstraction; they were indelible reminders of unforgivable crimes against humanity.

In the teaching of the Jews, forgiveness can only granted to those who admit their wrongdoing, apologize and make restitution. They believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But there is no way to repay the loss of six million lives. Jews also believe there is an upper limit to mercy but there is no upper limit when seeking revenge. In Genesis, when Lamech delivers the Song of the Sword, he says he will avenge himself seventy times seven times.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus turns that math on its head when He tells Peter that we must forgive seventy times seven times. Peter must have been amazed to hear this. He thought he was being magnanimous in suggesting that a sinner be forgiven seven times. Then imagine his surprise when Jesus told the story of the merciful King and the two tenant farmers.

One tenant had run up an enormous debt, equivalent to millions of dollars in today’s currency. There was no way he could ever pay it back. By rights, he and his family should have been sold into slavery for the rest of their lives. Yet, the king forgave him without demanding restitution. In telling the story, Jesus illustrated the fact that our sins can have grave consequences, sometimes beyond our ability to redeem; yet, God is still prepared to forgive us . . . provided we are just as unstinting in our mercy.

When the man who had just been forgiven met another tenant, who owed him a mere day’s wages, he showed no such mercy. He had the other man thrown into jail.  Once the king learned of his lack of mercy, he applied the same standard of justice to the tenant farmer and had him thrown into jail.

On the one hand, this parable illustrates God’s limitless mercy; but on the other hand, it also contains a warning, one that echoes the words of the Our Father in which we pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others.”

In Matthew’s version of the Our Father, he is more explicit; he goes on to say, “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.”

When I left the hobby shop that day, I was haunted by the thought of that old Jewish man forever bearing that hideous tattoo like a manacle around his arm, chaining him to the past and to thoughts of unforgivable crimes against humanity. I wonder if he ever found peace of mind.

Lewis Smedes, the Christian author, once said: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.”