In considering the servant in the parable, we are to look upon ourselves. This servant had received a great many things from his master; we have received even more from God. The blessings that God has given us are truly incalculable. God has thought of us from all eternity; He has called us into being from nothing; He has given His life to redeem us; and He gives us countless blessings every day. The enormity of our debt to God is truly incalculable. After standing in awe and bewilderment at the consideration of all that God has done for us, we then must call ourselves to give an account. What have we done with all the benefits and graces that God has so generously poured out upon us?
How many material things has God placed in our hands that we have squandered or wasted? How many spiritual gifts have we likewise misspent? These graces were entrusted to us by God and we have carelessly allowed them to slip through our hands and disappeared without doing any good. How many of these blessings both material and spiritual have been spent in doing evil? They were not just wasted but even used against God. What a crime of injustice! God’s gifts that were supposed to be blessings for us have been turned into weapons against Him. Every sin is truly an abuse of some gift that we received from Him.
We too, must likewise appear before our Master prostrate and begging for mercy. Our debt is much greater than ten thousand talents. God brings us to this understanding of our debt and our inability to pay it so that we might beg Him for mercy and receive the tremendous blessing of having the entire debt forgiven. But, He would have us understand the enormity of the debt first. In just a moment the very word of God wipes clean the entire debt, no matter how huge it had grown.
The saints would have us frequently reflect back upon this debt and our past sins, even when they have already been forgiven so that we may increase our repentance, but more importantly, so that we might increase our gratitude. St. Paul even after his conversion often recalled that he persecuted the Church and therefore is the least of the Apostles and unworthy to be an Apostle.
In this state of repentance and gratitude, let us now consider the debt that our fellow men perhaps may owe us. All that they are indebted to us for, we are likewise indebted to God for. It was God who placed the goods of this earth in our hands and it was through God that we were able to sell, or lend to others. In this light, we must consider that no one is really our debtor, but rather they are debtors to God through us. Since God is ever ready to forgive us our debts when we plead for mercy and more time, so we should be ready to do for our fellow men. That which they owe us is truly owed to God and since we no longer owe this to God because He has released us from our debt, it seems that we have no right to demand payment. It was loaned to us and we loaned to others; and the loan was forgiven us. Since our debt was forgiven so must we now forgive others debts to us.
Our debt was immense and just as we were forgiven much so must we forgive much. In fact, in the Lord’s Prayer, we ask that God may forgive us in the same way and the same measure that we forgive one another.
If having failed in the virtue of compassion and mercy towards our fellow men, we then can expect that God will, just as the master did in the parable, recall us to account. We will then find that we are once again overwhelmed with an incalculable debt. In this state, we will be handed over to the devils until payment be made. But, since the debt is an infinite debt because of the infinite good that God has bestowed upon us, we will never be able to repay, and thus will spend the rest of eternity in Hell.
May we seek to avoid this sentence of justice by showing charity and mercy towards one another, just as we have received it from God.