Romans 14.1-12, Matthew 18.21-35
Sept 14, 2014,Trinity 13, Queen Camel, West Camel, Corton Denham
Jesus tells a parable about debt and debt release:
A king […] wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; 25 and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” 27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow-slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, “Pay what you owe.” 29 Then his fellow-slave fell down and pleaded with him, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you.” 30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he should pay the debt. 31 When his fellow-slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?” 34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt. [1]
We’ve been accustomed to calling it The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. But when we strip away the commentary which Matthew adds to the story and concentrate on Jesus’ words alone, we can see Jesus’ tale as something quite different altogether. Jesus might rather we think of it as The Parable of the Messianic King.
For the king in the story behaves like the Messianic king who the people of Israel had been hoping for, for centuries. It gets lost in the translation, but in releasing his servant and forgiving him the debt the king in the story wrote off the entire debts of the nation. Unlike any other king they had known, his was a generous act of ‘unimaginable proportions’, which enabled the people to start over again. [2]
The clue for this interpretation is in the amount of money which the king’s servant owed. Ten thousand talents. Now in the era being described here, ten thousand talents was the ‘largest debt imaginable’ [3]; entire provinces such as Galilee or Perea usually yielded an annual tribute to King Herod Antipas of just two thousand talents; Jesus chose to use ten thousand in his story - surely to illustrate that the king’s waiving of this debt was on the level of releasing an entire nation from financial obligation.
This king was acting totally out of character of all the kings before him: all the kings the people had ever known had confiscated the ordinary people’s land and exacted tribute from them in various forms of what we would now call ‘direct and indirect taxation’. But this king lifted the tax burden from the people so that they were free to return to their land. [4] This king of Jesus’ parable acted like the longed-for Messianic king, the king of Jubilee.
The scriptures had fuelled the people’s hope for such a king to come. The Book of Leviticus records God instituting the practice of the Jubilee year, to be held every fiftieth year, in which slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven and those who had been displaced from their homes would return to their property, in a tremendous outpouring of social justice under the wonderful grace of the God who commanded it. [5]
In Jesus’ day, centuries had passed since the Lord gave this order to Moses, and Jubilee had never yet been kept. But the people still lived in hope that a king would come who would inaugurate Jubilee and restore their fortunes. The problem had been that all their kings, even the great king David, had succumbed to the ways of every other aristocratic empire and turned their back on the God-given laws of Moses. These empires were no constitutional monarchies.
Their kings were an elite belonging to the top 1 to 2 percent of the population. They engaged in an intense power struggle with other equally ambitious aristocrats for the most lucrative prize of all, control of the state or political apparatus. After they secured that prize, they engaged in perpetual conflict to consolidate their power and protect themselves from the endless intrigues and designs of competing aristocrats, who would gladly usurp the new king’s power, just as they had usurped their predecessors. Their confiscation of land and various forms of tribute provided them with the immense resources they needed to hold onto power. Being a typical agrarian ruler, the king of the parable operated [in this way]. The resources of the state were his possession to plunder for his gain. He stood at the apex of an authoritarian system, … constantly moving outside the law and standing above it, his unrestrained autocracy keeping everyone always at risk, whether in the village or in the king’s court. [6]
This changes our perspective on the story Jesus told. It helps us to see the king and his servant as two leading players in a ruthless bureaucracy. The so-called ‘slave’ of the parable could not have been a menial outsider - to have responsibility for gathering such a massive amount of public debt this man must have been one of the king’s closest aides, a political associate, a key bureaucratic figure. We see the story now in the same light as a Prime Minister calling the Chancellor of the Exchequer to account - the only difference being that the meeting between these two would bear little resemblance to a polite exchange between two chummy Old Etonians, for the ruthless ruler of Israel would feel no compulsion to stay loyal to any errant retainer who had failed him. The king’s initial response in the story says it all: he ‘ordered [his retainer] to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made’.
But this is where the story turns into something unexpected: this is where the king turns into a messiah-figure as he hears the pleas of his retainer, and forgives the biggest debt he or the retainer or anyone else could ever imagine, the debt of an entire country, and in releasing the servant from his obligation to deliver it, he sets his whole people free.
This would be wonderful if it was where the story ended. It would be a model for the economics of our day; those campaigning for debt release in the UK and worldwide would use it as an example of what can be done. [7] But Jesus wanted his hearers to understand something else about this popular desire for a king who enacts Jubilee. Initially phrased as The Parable of the Messianic King, Jesus now recasts the story again. As it unfolds it becomes The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving.
It’s a sad story, for it reminds us of a terrible truth about human nature - that even those who have been treated mercifully can easily treat others mercilessly, that even those who have been relieved of terrible debts, terrible burdens, can load debt and burdens onto others without compunction. And so the high official, the top bureaucrat who was pardoned by the king in his grand gesture of Jubilee release, immediately reverts to the usual form of behaviour expected in the dog-eat-dog domain of the royal courts, and when a lower-level functionary comes to him asking for his patience over the repayment of a lower-level debt, he punishes him brutally. As you might expect - for the top dog would have lost face, having to grovel before the king over his financial failings, and he would now be looking for an opportune moment to restore his dignity and his status in the court. The occasion to put a lesser grade functionary in his place - and thus to elevate his own position - was an opportunity he grasped emphatically. Just as any canny politician would.
But as Jesus told this tale his focus was still on the king - and how he would respond to this act in the light of his previous graciousness. This is where the story sadly becomes The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving. For when the king heard about the unforgiving behaviour of the one he had forgiven, the king reverted to his usual form.
Not as messianic as we first imagined, we see the king still caught up in that perpetual conflict to consolidate his power and protect himself from the intrigues and designs of his political enemies. Standing to lose face over the errant behaviour of one of his inner circle, facing the possibility of losing power as his opponents sense weakness at the heart of his government, the king strikes hard, ruthlessly reprimanding the man and in anger handing him over to be tortured. Everything was back to normal in the court of the unrestrained autocrat.
And so The Parable of the Messianic King becomes The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving. And to Jesus’ listeners as to us, today, it raises the terrifying question: What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed?
What if the one in whom we place our hopes for peace and security, economic well-being, equality and social justice, fails us? What if the one we thought would save us, cannot even save him- or herself from the old ways we thought they’d vanquished?
I deliberately stripped away Matthew’s commentary on this parable because Matthew’s perspective leads us down a different avenue altogether - into a discussion about forgiveness. An important discussion for his followers to have, but maybe not the one Jesus wanted to generate when he first told the story. For this is a story about debt and debt release: this is a tale about the rulers we put our trust in, and how they and their peers behave.
It has been said that ‘The parables were not just earthly stories with heavenly meanings, but earthy stories with heavy meanings’. [8] The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving is an earthy story with a heavy meaning. And no particular answer either. Matthew always wants to tidy up the parables for us, but Jesus left it to his listeners to decide what to do with this story.
And so I leave it with you. As we pray for the people of Scotland this week making decisions about their political future; as we remember the complex life and leadership of the Reverend Ian Paisley; as we give thought to all those in our country who are saddled by debt, and the political arrangements which keep them there; as we consider those nations we know who are ruled or threatened by unrestrained autocrats today. …
And as we consider the nature of the God or gods in whom we have put our trust…
Jesus wants us to assess this question: what if our Messiah came and nothing changed?
Notes
[1] The lectionary reading is Matthew 18.21-35. I have stripped from the parable Matthew’s three additions to the story (emphases mine): vv.21-22a (‘Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. For this reason’), v.23a (‘the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves’), and v.35 (‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’) This approach and the entire sermon owes everything (including the title) to the discussion in William R. Herzog, Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, Chapter 8, ‘What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed?’, pp.131-149. Herzog’s book is always my first point of reference for any of the parables: as he says in the Introduction, his Freirian analysis of the social setting of the parables demonstrates that ‘the parables were not just earthly stories with heavenly meanings, but earthy stories with heavy meanings’.
[2] Herzog, p.148
[3] Herzog, p.147
[4] Herzog, p.136
[5] Leviticus 25:8-13
[6] Herzog, p.136, 139 (my rewrite)
[7] Jubilee Debt Campaign UK; Justin Welby, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop calls for ‘culture’ change at financial institutions, 3rd October 2013
[8] Herzog, p.3
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