How often should I forgive?

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How often should I forgive? As many as seven times? No, Jesus replies. Seventy-seven times.

Did you ever want the Bible to be clear about what you should and shouldn’t do? Well, this passage is pretty clear. Forgive. Pretty much always.

Straightforward, right?

Well, maybe not. Because forgiveness is hard. And because even today’s Gospel is more complicated than it might first appear.

Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to identifying Nazi war criminals and seeking justice. He was also a writer. In a book called The Sunflower, he tells a story from his time as a prisoner. And he asks us a question: what would you do?

He was being held in a concentration camp near the city of Lviv. Lviv is in modern-day Ukraine, but at that time it was part of German-occupied Poland. He lived surrounded by death. Friends and family had been thrown into mass graves, and he expected to join them soon.

One day, Wiesenthal was sent out as part of a work detail to clean a hospital that was set up in an old school – a school that Wiesenthal had once attended as a student.

A Red Cross nurse called to him and brought him to the bedside of a young SS soldier named Karl. Karl was dying, and he had asked to speak to a Jew. Any Jew. Karl told Wiesenthal a horrifying story of his part in the murder of hundreds of Jews, mostly women, children, and old men, and of how he shot a family as they tried to jump from a burning building.

The memory of his crime haunted him. And he asked Wiesenthal to forgive him.

Wiesenthal believed the man’s repentance was real. But he couldn’t give him what he wanted. He stood and left the room, without speaking the words of forgiveness the dying man yearned for.

That day stayed with Wiesenthal after the war. Should he have forgiven Karl? Did he have a right to forgive crimes committed against others simply because he too was Jewish?

He told his story and he asked his readers what they would have done in his place.

A dying SS soldier, and a Jewish concentration camp prisoner. It’s a powerful story, a powerful question.

But there are other people in Wiesenthal’s story I also can’t forget.

There’s the Red Cross nurse, who came looking for a Jew, any Jew. She didn’t seem to care that he was a prisoner, starved, tortured, and facing death. She didn’t seem to care that she might be putting him at further risk. The only suffering she seems to have noticed was that of the dying SS soldier.

And then there were the people in the street who watched Wiesenthal and his fellow prisoners walk by under guard. The people who saw them and turned away. People who had once known some of these men as neighbors and colleagues. The SS soldier at least expressed repentance and sought forgiveness. The others never did.

How many times should I forgive? Seven times? Seventy-seven times?

Wiesenthal asks his readers, asks us: What would you have done? What would you do?

Jesus says forgive one another from your heart. We pray to live out this command every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Because we know that the one doesn’t come without the other.

I hope we never have such horrors to experience, or to confess, as Wiesenthal and Karl did. But if we ever do, Jesus’s command remains. Forgive. Seven times. And seventy-seven times. Forgive from your heart.

I do notice one thing, though, one thing that might make this hard lesson just a little bit easier.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story about a king settling accounts. A servant owes him an amount so enormous that repayment is impossible. And the king forgives the debt. But then that servant turns around and throws his own debtor into prison for a much smaller debt.

Notice who has the power in each encounter. The king has power over his servant. The servant has power over the man who owes him money. The forgiveness shown by the king, and the forgiveness withheld by his servant, both come from a place of power.

Jesus’s command to forgive has sometimes been used against people who are being mistreated, used to urge them to stay quiet, to put up with abuse. That’s not what’s happening here.

In fact, today’s parable includes people who refuse to look away, and who call for justice. Others notice what has happened, they see how wrong it is, and they go to the king to tell him about his servant’s ingratitude. The shape of what follows makes me uncomfortable. But the call for justice remains.

I also can’t help but compare the actions of the fellow servants in today’s parable with the inaction of the bystanders and the nurse in Wiesenthal’s story.

As I read today’s parable, I’m not actually sure it would require Wiesenthal to forgive. He wasn’t a king or even a creditor. He was the prisoner of an evil regime. And he was being asked to forgive sins committed against others who were no longer alive to make their own decision.

But still Jesus says, forgive. Seven times, and seventy-seven times.

Forgiveness is hard. Peter knew it. Jesus knew it. But still Jesus tells us to forgive. Not because the injury isn’t real. And not because the person who hurt us can suddenly be trusted. But still, he says, forgive.

How many times should we forgive?

Cover image: JESUS MAFA. The Unforgiving Servant, via Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/48396 [retrieved September 18, 2026]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact).