Verses 24-27
This servant had great authority under an even greater king (cf. Matthew 18:1). However, he had amassed a debt of such huge proportions that he could not possibly repay it. A talent was a measure of weight equivalent to 75 pounds. The exact or even the relative buying power of 10,000 talents of silver is really secondary to the point Jesus was making, namely, that the debt was impossible to repay. Depending on the current price of silver, the slave owed the equivalent of many millions of dollars. There was no way he could begin to pay off such a debt.
"Ten thousand (myria, hence our ’myriad’) is the largest numeral for which a Greek term exists, and the talent is the largest known amount of money. When the two are combined, the effect is like our ’zillions.’" [Note: France, The Gospel . . ., p. 706.]
The king commanded that the servant sell everything he had to compensate him even though what he could pay amounted to a mere fraction of what he owed. The servant pleaded for time promising to repay everything, an obvious impossibility in view of the amount of the debt. Moved by compassion for the hopeless servant, the lord graciously cancelled the entire debt.
The Greek word for "debt" in Matthew 18:27 is daneion and really means "loan." Evidently the king decided to write off the indebtedness as a bad loan rather than view it as embezzlement, another indication of his grace.
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