What mercy, what can we do but the same...

In Matthew 18:21-35 the question that comes to Jesus and of which Jesus' teaching is responding to, is this:

"Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?" v21.

Jesus' story is about "a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants". Note this is not saying the king wanted to forgive all his servants but that if their is any imbalance in the accounts he has with his servants, the king wants them sorted. God is a God of justice, he will by no means clear the guilty.

In the story the servant who is brought to the king owes him "ten thousand talents" (v24). The ESV helps us by pointing out in the footnote that a talent was "worth about twenty years wages for a labourer". So this man owed the king ten thousand x twenty years wages which equals... 200,000 years wages!

This is contrasted with the mercy of the king:
1. he had pity (v27a)
2. he released the servant (v27b)
3. he forgave the servant (v27c)

Later in the story, after the servant has been accused (rightly) of not forgiving a FELLOW SERVANT (for the reapeated use of this name in the story see vs. 28, 31, 33), the moral of the stroy shines through...

v33 - "should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?"

The punishment seems worse now than it would've been before he was forgiven...

before - sold with family until payment had been made (v25)
after - the master is acting "in anger" (v34a) and the servant was delivered to the 'torturers' (v34b - see ESV footnote).

Jesus is of course teaching on the Father's response to covenant members who do not forgive their brothers from their hearts (v35), it seems it would've been better for them not to be forgiven if they were going to be such wicked (v32) servants.

Let us not be wicked, strangling our brothers and demanding recompense (v28) by not forgiving our brothers from our hearts. Let us be like the Father in heaven who has had mercy on us, let us forgive our brothers seventy times seven times (v22).