<p>18:32&nbsp;<i>Then his Lord summoned him and said to him: You wicked servant; because you pleaded with me</i>- What is the function of the detail about the fellow servants informing their Lord, and His response being to call the wicked servant and punish him? The calling to account and &lsquo;eternal punishment&rsquo; is surely allegorical of the second coming of Christ and the final judgment. The impression is surely that He is encouraged in doing this by His servants coming to Him and sharing with Him their hurt at the way His servants are being treated- both within the household as well as outside of it.</p>
<p><i>I forgave you-&nbsp;</i>The Lord was absolutely sure that He would be victorious on the cross; His parables speak of our responsibilities and blessings on account of what He knew He would achieve for us. Thus the Master in the parable is able to remonstrate with the unforgiving servant: &quot;I forgave you all that debt&quot;. The Lord's assumption was that He would attain our forgiveness on account of successfully enduring the cross. Yet He triumphed through His faith; although He was all too aware of the human possibility of failure, He believed He wouldn't fail, He made use of the constant encouragement of the word to this end. He described Himself as the Lord of the servants, and also as the King (e.g. Mt. 18:23 cp. 31- there are other similar parables)- even before His cross. He had such confidence that He would be crowned as a result of His future cross. The tenses in Greek can be used very exactly (unlike Hebrew); it was quite within the ability of the Lord to build into His parables the concept of future Kingship. He could have implied 'When I'm King, I'll judge like this'. But instead He saw Himself as already having overcome. &quot;Be of good cheer, I have (already) overcome the world... now I go my way to him that sent me (bypassing the cross in His words) ... I have glorified thee... I have finished the work thou gavest me to do&quot; (Jn. 16:33,5; 17:4); these are only a few samples of the Lord's remarkable confidence that He would overcome. This confidence is reflected in the parables. He was practising His own preaching concerning believing that we have already received what we ask for. No doubt His words recorded in Jn. 15-17 and the parables which reflected this confidence came back to Him as He struggled to quell His crisis of doubt in Gethsemane.</p>
<p><i>All that debt</i>- The hint could be that the exact amount was still clearly in the King&rsquo;s mind. God forgives sin but He doesn&rsquo;t literally forget it in the sense of as it were deleting it all from memory cells. It is &lsquo;forgotten&rsquo; in the metaphorical sense of not being held against us. Peter was the one initially addressed here, and he uses the ideas in his later letter, when he criticizes some of his converts for having forgotten that they were purged from their old sins, and notes that therefore they were without motivation in living the Christian life (2 Pet. 1:9).</p>
<p><i>Because you desired me</i>- AV. Actually, as noted at :26, the wicked servant didn&rsquo;t actually desire forgiveness of the debt. He asked instead for time, &ldquo;patience&rdquo;, so that he could repay everything he owed. The pity of the Master was more because of the man&rsquo;s lostness and how little he appreciated his own position. However, the Master kindly and sensitively read through the man&rsquo;s request for &lsquo;time to repay&rsquo; to the desire of the man&rsquo;s heart- that the debt be written off in total. And he did so. The Father and Son likewise perceive the spirit behind our prayers, and see through the surface level word choice which we make. This of itself is a great comfort to those who fear that they &lsquo;are not good at praying&rsquo;. Because it is our inner spirit rather than our word choice which is the essence of prayer.</p>