“If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”

He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.

“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

Luke 17:3b–10

A lot of our relationships are transactional. They take the form of an exchange. “You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.” Transactional relationships are easy to understand and fairly easy to regulate. You give me something I want, and in return I give you something that you want. If the exchange goes awry, it is usually because the parties do not place the same value on what is being exchanged. When the discrepancy is small, it can be made up by another exchange. Sometimes, though, the discrepancy is large. What you want from me is out of all proportion to what I have to give. In such cases, the relationship itself may end.

Because transactional relationships are so easy to understand, they are also the first ones we learn. Of course, if you were born into a healthy family, you also experienced unconditional love from your parents, but I would say that forms the context of your learning about relationships rather than the content. Children, even in the least dysfunctional families, try bargaining with their parents and treat them as trading partners to get what they want. Indeed, a world without transactional relationships is impossible to imagine (at least for me).

If we live very long in the world, however, we soon realize that some relationships—those that are typically the deepest and most important in our lives—are much richer than merely transactional relationships can ever be. Transactional relationships posit each of us as unconnected individuals with bundles of wants and needs that we can fulfill through transactions, but our most important relationships find us deeply connected and even transformed by our relationships. We can’t just walk away from them if they cease to be as fulfilling as they once were. We become embedded in one another in ways that cannot be easily untangled.

In the passage quoted above, Jesus starts off telling his disciples about how important forgiveness is. No matter how many times¹ your brother or sister offends you and asks for forgiveness, you need to forgive them. Forgiveness is extremely counterintuitive. It requires overlooking an offense instead of paying it back. If you hurt me, of course, I will hurt you back. That’s how I keep from getting hurt again. This kind of tit-for-tat justice is the flip side of transactional relationships. Instead of mutual benefit, it goes for mutual harm. The harm is mutual, but it is also moderated by the values of the parties involved. This is where “and eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” comes in. You poke out my eye, I get to poke out yours; you knock out my tooth, I’ll knock out yours. Clearly, this kind of justice leads to a world of the blind and toothless.²

The disciples are taken aback by what Jesus says. They think if they are going to have to forgive so often and keep track of how many offenses have been committed, they are going to need more faith. They try to turn what is about to become a painful reflection on their own behavior into a spiritual discussion about how to have more faith. But Jesus quickly deflects their attempt at changing the subject. “You don’t need more faith,” he tells them. “The smallest amount of faith is sufficient for whatever you need to do.” Then he completely re-frames the issue of forgiveness.

The disciples, like most people even today, were thinking of their service to God as transactional. Every act of forgiveness, every obedience to Christ, makes God a little bit indebted to us. Transactional relationships, however, are presumed to be between equals so far as the transaction is concerned. So a millionaire can buy coffee at a coffee shop and get the same service as a day laborer. As far as the barista knows, they are the same, and they get the same treatment—a polite smile and greeting, a cup of hot coffee, and a mangled name. The barista is not a servant³ to the customers even though she serves them.

Jesus makes it clear, however, that our relationship with God is not transactional. We don’t earn brownie points with God for our service. He intends his kingdom to be transformational, meaning that we become like extensions of God himself, reflecting his glory and administering his love and reconciliation to everyone we meet. He forgives again and again and again because it is in his nature to do so. He intends that it become our nature to do so as well. So we won’t expect a pat on the back or any praise⁴ for becoming like him. We are only doing our duty.

1. Jesus uses the number seven, but that was a conventional number for indicating several or many. ↩︎
2. This observation is often credited to Mohandas Gandhi, but there is good reason to believe it predates him. See this article at Quote Investigator. ↩︎
3. In Greek the word δοῦλος is translated as both “servant” and “slave” depending on context. Modern translators are skittish about calling believers “slaves of God,” but Jesus was not. Paul in his letter to the Romans acknowledges the peculiarity of referring to those set free from sin as slaves to God, but he puts it down to human limitation. ↩︎
4. We can expect praise from God, but not for merely doing our duty. In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus tells of a master who entrusts sums of money to three servants with instructions to put the money to work. The two servants who do so are rewarded with sharing in their master’s happiness and with the master’s accolade, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” The third servant was punished for doing nothing with his master’s money. If, as the master said, he had put the money into a certificate of deposit, he would have done the bare minimum and received no praise, but he would have escaped punishment. ↩︎