Forgiving without counting the cost: what John Chrysostom understood about the debt that sets us free

Matthew 18:21–35

²¹Then Peter approached him and said, «Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?» ²²Jesus said to him, «I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. ²³«Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. ²⁴The settling of accounts having begun, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. ²⁵Since he had no way to pay, his master ordered that he, his wife, his children and everything he had be sold to settle his debt. ²⁶The servant, throwing himself at his feet, begged him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything. ²⁷Moved by compassion, the master of this servant let him go and forgave him his debt. ²⁸The servant, having barely left, encountered one of his companions who owed him a hundred denarii. Seizing him by the throat, he choked him, saying: Pay what you owe. ²⁹His companion, throwing himself at his feet, begged him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything. ³⁰But he, refusing to listen, went away and had him put in prison until he paid his debt. ³¹When the other servants saw this, they were deeply saddened, and they came and told their master what had happened. ³²Then the master called him in and said to him, “You wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you begged me to.”. ³³Shouldn't you have had pity on your companion, just as I had pity on you? ³⁴And his angry master handed him over to the executioners until he had paid all his debt. ³⁵This is how my heavenly Father will treat you unless each of you forgives his brother from your heart.»

Imagine a bank employee riddled with impossible debts—the equivalent of several lifetimes' wages—who, in an instant, receives a complete remission of everything he owes. He leaves the manager's office free, light, saved. On the sidewalk, he runs into a colleague who owes him the price of a meal. He grabs him by the collar and drags him into court for this paltry sum. This is the story that Pierre unknowingly asked, by posing an accountant's question—"How many times must I forgive?"—to the man who would answer him with infinity.

Forgiving without counting the cost: what John Chrysostom understood about the debt that sets us free

In the parable of the unmerciful servant (Mt 18:21-35), John Chrysostom discovers that the real obstacle to forgiveness is not hardness of heart, but forgetfulness — forgetfulness of what we ourselves have received.

There is a question we all ask ourselves at some point, with the same anxious calculation as Peter: how far does the obligation to forgive extend? At what point do we have the right to close the door, to settle accounts, to finally say no? John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople at the end of the fourth century, devoted an entire homily to this question—the sixty-first of his immense commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, preached to the people of Antioch after a long illness. Few patristic voices have examined this text with such attention to concrete detail: the exorbitant sum, the act of strangulation, the silence of the king upon learning of the betrayal. Chrysostom does not theorize about forgiveness; he stages it, he makes it felt in the body, like a preacher who knows that his audience, too, has debts to remit and grudges to lay aside before returning home.

Peter believes he is taking a giant leap forward by proposing seven times. Jesus responds with seventy times seven—a number that ceases to be a number, that dissolves the counter itself. John Chrysostom, in his homily on this passage, sees in the ensuing parable not a moral lesson but an X-ray of the human soul: we accept infinite forgiveness, yet we limit our own mercy to the first offense that comes along. What Chrysostom offers us is a way to understand why this contradiction dwells within us all—and what we need to change in our perspective for it to end.

There's a scene we all know, even if we've never owed anyone ten thousand talents. Someone owes us something—an apology, a favor, a word that was never spoken—and we wait. We count the days, the missed opportunities, the silences. We tell ourselves we're not resentful, that we simply have good memories. And one day, without warning, that memory becomes a prison in which we lock the other person—and ourselves along with them.

This is precisely the scene that John Chrysostom chose to illuminate, and he did so with an intelligence that still surprises sixteen centuries later. His sixty-first homily on the Gospel of Matthew belongs to a cycle of ninety sermons delivered in Antioch, where Chrysostom commented, Sunday after Sunday, on the Gospel almost verse by verse, before a mixed congregation of merchants, imperial officials, the poor, and the rich. It is not a scholarly treatise intended for desert monks: it is a living message, addressed to ordinary people grappling with ordinary anger. And Chrysostom begins his homily by explaining precisely why he chooses this subject at this point in his ministry: he has just spent an entire Lent fighting the habit of swearing at every opportunity among his listeners, and he judges the time has come to tackle another vice, even deeper — the anger and resentment that simmer beneath the surface of human relations.

What is most striking about Chrysostom is his refusal to treat Jesus' number as a mere rhetorical hyperbole. Many commentators, both before and after him, have sought to interpret "seventy times seven" as a precise number not to be exceeded—four hundred and ninety pardons, not one more. Chrysostom dismisses this accounting interpretation with a clarity that goes straight to the point: "By saying: up to seventy times seven, He is not limiting a definite number within which forgiveness must be observed; but He is signifying something without limits and without end" (Homily on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, LXI). In other words: the number is not a ceiling, it is the destruction of the ceiling itself. Jesus does not give Peter a larger number so that he can continue counting longer—He takes away from him the very purpose of counting. This is a scene we know well: the mental tally where we record the wrongs suffered, with the certainty that at a certain point, we will finally have the moral right to close the case. Chrysostom tells us: this tally has no reason to exist. It's not that we should enlarge it; we should throw it away.

And when Chrysostom reaches the end of the parable, he notices a detail that most hurried readers overlook: Jesus' last sentence, where he no longer speaks of "the Father" in general, but of "my Father." "He does not say: 'This is how your Father will treat you,' but 'my Father,' because such hard and uncharitable souls are unworthy to be called children of God" (Homily LXI). It is a terrible remark, almost surgically precise: Chrysostom hears, in this simple possessive, a distancing. The merciless servant, the one who has received an infinite discount and who strangles his companion for a handful of coins, finds himself excluded by Jesus' very language—not condemned outright, but discreetly removed from the sonship he nevertheless refuses to live out toward others. One can receive God's forgiveness and refuse to be changed by it; One can be saved from debt and remain, in one's heart, a slave to accounting.

The impossible debt and the gesture that no longer calculates

«By saying: up to seventy times seven, He is not limiting a specific number within which forgiveness must be observed; but He is signifying something without limits and without end» (Homily LXI). What this means concretely is that Peter’s question—«how many times?»—is flawed from the outset, because it presupposes a forgiveness that is measured, that is exhausted, that one day reaches its legitimate end.

Let us consider what the first servant's debt truly represents. Ten thousand talents, within the economy of the text, is an almost comical sum, so far does it exceed what an individual could ever repay—the equivalent of several hundred years' wages for a laborer. It is not a realistic figure; it is a deliberately absurd one, chosen to signify total insolvency. No gesture of goodwill, no staggered repayment plan, no promise—"I will pay you back everything"—will ever suffice. And yet the master does not negotiate a discount: he erases everything, at once, out of pure compassion. It is this total gratuity, without any possible reciprocation, that the servant forgets as soon as he crosses the threshold. He finds his colleague, who owes him one hundred pieces of silver—a paltry sum, repayable in a few months' work—and seizes him by the throat. The contrast the text creates is not merely quantitative; it is one of kind. One is a debt that no human justice could settle; the other is a trifle that ordinary patience would suffice to absorb.

We all know this inner turmoil. We know, in theory, that we have been forgiven for immense things—by God, by parents, by friends who would have had every reason to turn their backs on us. And we also know how easy it is, an hour later, to refuse someone else a trifle: an awkward word, an oversight, a lateness. It's not that we are worse than the rest of humanity. It's that the memory of the forgiveness received fades at a dizzying speed, while the memory of the offense suffered is etched with indelible clarity. Chrysostom knew this well, he who preached to merchants capable of calculating interest down to the last penny, but incapable of calculating their own debt to God.

Much later, the Council of Trent would summarize this same intuition by teaching that divine forgiveness is never a negotiated settlement of all accounts, but a free gift that precedes all merit — a learned way of saying again what Chrysostom had already preached in concrete terms in Antioch: we never pay our debt to God, we receive it forgiven.

Harshness that turns against itself

«He does not say: this is how your Father will treat you, but my Father, because such hard and uncharitable souls are unworthy to be called children of God» (Homily LXI). This quote opens a different angle from the first: it is no longer about the nature of forgiveness, but about what a refusal to forgive produces in ourselves—a kind of silent self-exclusion.

There is something striking in the way Chrysostom refuses to make God an external, arbitrary judge who would punish after the fact those who have not forgiven. His interpretation is more subtle and, in truth, more disturbing: it is the hardened heart itself that cuts itself off from lineage. It is not God who excludes; it is man who, by refusing to pass on what he has received, makes himself a stranger to the family to which he nevertheless claimed to belong. Consider the father who, after a painful reconciliation with one of his children, is intractable toward a colleague who has disrespected him even once. He has lost none of his capacity to forgive—he has simply reserved it for those he already loves and refused it to those who remain, in his eyes, strangers, mere debtors. Chrysostom would say of him that he lives under the gaze of a Father whom he no longer dares to call "mine", because something in him knows that the generosity he received is no longer circulating.

A figure from the desert illuminates this same point with a striking contrast. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we find the story of Abba Moses, invited to judge the sin of a brother, who appeared before the assembly carrying a leaky basket on his back, from which sand flowed. When questioned about this strange gesture, he replied that his own sins flowed behind him unseen, while he now came to judge the faults of another. This starkly simple tale expresses precisely what Chrysostom implicitly develops: he who remembers his own debt can no longer regard that of others with the same severity. Self-forgetfulness is the root of all harshness toward others; the memory of one's own fragility, conversely, is its surest antidote.

This mechanism is nothing exceptional; it permeates all human relationships, from the most intimate to the most institutional. A couple who have experienced infidelity and genuine forgiveness, but who subsequently remain incapable of tolerating the slightest ordinary imperfection in each other, unknowingly reenacts the scene of the ruthless servant. An employer who, in their youth, benefited from a providential second chance, but who summarily dismisses the first employee who makes a mistake, reenacts the same scene. It is never a matter of pure malice; it is a matter of forgetting. We become hardened not because we are naturally cruel, but because we have ceased to remember our own original inadequacy.

Forgiveness that comes from the heart, not just from the lips

Augustine, in his Sermon 83 delivered for that same Sunday of the liturgical year, extends this thought with a statement that goes even further than a simple observation: «I dare to say that if he sins seventy-eight times, you will forgive him» (Sermon 83). What this means in concrete terms: even beyond the symbolic number given by Jesus, the logic of forgiveness never stops on its own—it continues, precisely because it has never been a matter of counting.

This «audacity» that Augustine advocates is not naiveté. It is the recognition that a forgiveness that stops at a specific number was, from the beginning, just a number—a moral performance, not an inner transformation. The last sentence of the parable, the one Chrysostom comments on so carefully, emphasizes this point: «unless each of you forgives his brother from your heart» (Mt 18:35). The forgiveness in question is therefore not an external act, a formula uttered half-heartedly to politely end a dispute. It is a movement that must descend to the deepest layers of the soul—where tenacious grudges reside, the little phrases we silently repeat to ourselves, the scenarios of revenge we will never carry out but that we mentally replay every night.

We all know the difference between these two kinds of forgiveness. There is the superficial forgiveness, the one we utter because circumstances demand it—before the assembled family, before observing colleagues, before our own conscience, which urges a gesture of goodwill. And then there is the forgiveness that goes all the way, the one that accepts complete disarmament, no longer bringing up the offense at the first sign of disagreement, no longer holding it in reserve like a weapon ready for use. This second kind of forgiveness is rare, and it comes at a high price, because it requires us to relinquish the relative security that resentment provides—that false but persistent impression that holding a grudge protects us from being hurt a second time. Chrysostom, by emphasizing this parable precisely after having combated the superficial curses of his audience, knew full well that he was attacking something deeper than linguistic habits: he was attacking the very inner architecture of resentment itself.

A simple scene illustrates this difference. Two brothers are fighting over an inheritance. One eventually gives in, whether out of weariness or calculation, and utters the words "I forgive you" before the notary. But for years afterward, he continues to discreetly bring up this episode at every family meal, as if it were a moral debt the other should eternally repay in gratitude. That forgiveness never left their lips. Forgiveness of the heart, however, would erase the episode from the conversation itself—not through denial, but because there would be nothing left to gain from it, no currency to exchange.

What we still have to carry

What this meditation offers us is not just another rule of conduct to add to our list of New Year's resolutions. It's a shift in perspective. We tend to ask ourselves what the other person deserves—do they deserve to be forgiven, do they deserve a second chance, do they deserve to have what they did forgotten? Chrysostom invites us to turn the question back on ourselves: what have we, ourselves, been graciously acquitted of? This simple change of perspective is often enough to defuse the rigidity within us. We don't forgive because the other person finally deserves it; we forgive because we remember having been, ourselves, insolvent.

There is a very concrete action that stems from this thought, and which Christian tradition has retained in almost every generation: remembering, before judging the fault of another, the debt one bears oneself. This is not an exercise in guilt-tripping—Chrysostom never seeks to crush his audience under the weight of guilt—but an exercise in lucidity. Remembering that one has been forgiven, and forgiven without measure, immediately changes the way one looks at the person who owes us something, be it an explanation, an apology, or simply time.

This thought has endured through the centuries with remarkable consistency. It is found, almost word for word, in the prayer that Jesus himself taught his disciples—"forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us"—where forgiveness received and forgiveness given are linked by the same conjunction, like two movements of a single gesture. Augustine takes it up again in his liturgical commentaries; medieval mystics rediscovered it in their own experiences of mercy; and even in the contemporary teaching of the Church, this parable is invoked whenever it is necessary to recall that mercy received structurally calls for mercy given—not through an externally imposed moral obligation, but because it is the same reality that must continue to flow within us.

We do not emerge from this parable with a new law to observe, but with a question that discreetly accompanies us, day after day: what have we forgotten to have received? Chrysostom, in the final lines of his homily, does not conclude with a reassuring softening. He allows the severity of the text to resonate, because he knows that it is this very severity that can, paradoxically, make us gentler toward others—by reminding us how much we ourselves need to be treated with patience. «Such hard and uncharitable souls are unworthy to be called children of God» (Homily 61): this is the phrase that should accompany us, not as a threat, but as a mirror held up to our own failing memory.

Lectio divina

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