Pastor, Oakhurst Baptist Church

September 22, 2002

Matthew 18: 23-35

Let me tell you a parable: There once was a very powerful group of rulers who started a war on drugs. These rulers were concerned for law and order and had many thousands of drug-users rounded up and put in jail. This policy affected poor people who could not afford lawyers more than anyone else. In this powerful country, there was a powerful governor whose daughter was caught with illegal drugs. The governor had great compassion on his daughter and pleaded with the authorities not to throw her in jail, but to send her to a drug treatment facility where she could get help. The authorities had mercy on him and forgave his daughter more than once. Each time she broke the law, she was sent, not to jail, but to the best drug treatment facilities in the state.

Legislation came before the governor asking him to be compassionate to others like his daughter who had drug problems but had not committed other crimes. Mothers and fathers pleaded with him to help their children to also receive treatment instead of incarceration. But the governor refused, and instead he actually began to reduce the money available for drug treatment. He even opposed a state referendum that would require treatment, not prison, for other non-violent drug offenders like his daughter.

And the authorities were so angered by his lack of compassion and forgiveness that they took that governor and stripped him of his power and handed him over to a sheriff’s department in a rural area of the state to be tortured.

This modern parable about Florida governor Jeb Bush and his daughter Noelle parallels the parable of the unforgiving servant. The last part would come true only if we were to apply this parable literally. In this regard, Jeb Bush is an example of who Matthew had in mind—people who experience grace and forgiveness, but do not offer this same grace and forgiveness to others. It seems a great irony that this would be true of one who named his child Noelle, a name that comes from the word nativity.

One result of our government’s war on drugs is that there are now more African American men in jail or prison than in college. The latest figures available show that in 2002 there were 791,600 black men in jail or prison and 603,032 enrolled in colleges or universities. In 1980, before the war on drugs began in earnest and helped fuel the huge growth of the prison industry, the number of black men in institutions of higher learning outnumbered those behind bars by a ratio of 3-to-1. (Study by the Justice Policy Institute as reported in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 29, 2002, A3.)

One major reason for this injustice is the hard-heartedness of powerful people like Jeb Bush and of folks like me who were too silent and apathetic as it happened.

Following this parable, Matthew summarizes its meaning in the sentence: “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 warning echoes a comment from Jesus that appears at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14-15)

Stop and think about that: God only forgives us in proportion to how we forgive others. I don’t know about you, but I find that a scary thought! I often have trouble forgiving someone who hurts or angers me even one time, to say nothing of seventy-seven times! Yet according to Matthew, we are those who God has lavishly forgiven; therefore we must be ready to show that forgiveness to others again, and again, and again.

This traditional interpretation is one possible meaning of the parable, but not the only one, and maybe not even the one Jesus intended. An amazing thing about Jesus’ parables is that they can rarely, if ever, be reduced to one explanation. You can understand them on one level, but if you are willing to enter them, you can discover new and often even deeper meanings. I would invite you now to go with me into this parable to try to hear it as Jesus’ original listeners would have heard it.

This means that we look beyond what was heard by the original audience of Matthew’s gospel to see how it might have been heard in Jesus’ day. Since this may be a new concept for some of you and worth a reminder to others, let me give you a quick introduction to New Testament 101. It is the consensus of biblical scholars that the Gospel of Matthew was written around 80 AD. Because a generation had passed since Jesus’ death, the writer was almost certainly not the same Matthew who was a tax collector and one of the original disciples of Jesus. It may have been written in his honor.

The writer of Matthew used two primary sources. One was the Gospel of Mark, which was written about a decade earlier, around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Matthew used some of the material in the Gospel of Mark just as it was written, but felt free to reinterpret and even delete other parts.

Matthew’s second major source was a collection of sayings and parables of Jesus upon which the writer of the Gospel of Luke also drew. Luke and Matthew used these collected sayings in different ways and put them into different contexts in their narratives. Matthew, like Luke and later John, was not trying to write what we think of as a biography of Jesus, but more a theological interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. He was probably a Jewish Christian, living in Antioch (one of the places I will visit on my interfaith trip to Turkey next month). He wrote specifically for a church or group of churches around Antioch that contained other Jewish Christians but was already largely Gentile Christian in composition. Matthew also incorporated oral traditions found in no other gospel. The parable that we are focusing on today is an example of a story that appears only in the Gospel of Matthew.

Coming from Southern Baptist roots, I was shocked when I first realized that the gospel writers were not literalists. The gospel writers had no qualms about using Jesus’ teachings and his actions to write a story to bring the gospel alive in their context. They were evangelists, not historians.

The gospel writers may have even put some words in Jesus’ mouth that they had no record that Jesus had actually said. They were careful that any words they wrote and attributed to Jesus were consistent with his character. In other words, he might not have said these words exactly, but it would have been just like him to say something like this. Some would say that the reason the gospel writers felt free to do this was that they were inspired by the presence of the risen Christ.

I am convinced that when Jesus first told this particular parable, his major focus was quite different from the way Matthew later used it. Whether Matthew changed the focus intentionally or just missed Jesus’ original intent is hard to say.

For what follows I am indebted to my former teacher and mentor, an American Baptist professor I studied with in seminary, Bill Herzog. Herzog uses the methodologies of social scientists to help unlock the meanings of the parables by examining their original social and political context. Much of the following (including a number of direct quotes) comes from the chapter concerning this parable in his book, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, Westminster/John Know Press, 1994, pp. 131-149.

The conversation between Peter and Jesus that begins this parable does not fit at all with what follows. The parable neither illustrates nor develops the theme of forgiving either seventy-seven or seventy times seven times. The king in the story forgives once and that’s it. There is also a big problem if you identify the king with God, as Matthew does at the end of the parable: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

True, the king did forgive him magnanimously, but only once. If this is a parable about God, how do we account for the “fact that the very God who through Jesus exhorts us to forgive others seven-seven times, immediately thereafter abandons this lofty standard and nails the servant after his first failure!” Forget this seventy–seven times stuff, this king has a strict two strikes and you’re out policy.

Not only that, but the king was so angry that he went further than his original threat and handed the servant over to be tortured. I do not believe that God is a torturer nor did Jesus. The king in this parable does not sound like God, but like some tyrannical, autocratic ruler in Jesus’ time—or in ours. And I think that this is exactly who Jesus intended the king in the parable to represent.

The conversation between Peter and Jesus preceding the parable, as well as the concluding moral of the story that compares the king to God, was likely put there by Matthew. Matthew uses both the conversation and the concluding moral in this context to teach his community, which was struggling with internal conflict, an important lesson about conflict.

Matthew probably also added the connective words, “For this reason, the kingdom of heaven may be compared….” In all likelihood, the parable came down to Matthew independently, as did the bit of conversation between Peter and Jesus about forgiveness. Matthew thought they went together nicely, but upon closer examination, maybe they don’t.

In order to understand why Jesus originally told this parable, we have to understand the Middle Eastern world in which he lived. We have to do some incarnational theology. One of the reasons that Jesus’ teachings are most misunderstood is the assumption popular in American Christianity that he was interested only in personal salvation. If that were true, he would never have gotten in trouble with the political and religious leaders.

The setting of the parables is in no way incidental, as we will see with this particular parable. The common people in Jesus’ time were no doubt as enthralled as we are by tales of the rich and famous. Jesus would have immediately caught the attention of his audience with a story about the inside intrigues of court life, rather than presenting the usual way the royal court impacted villagers, by means of the toll or tax collector.

His story transported its hearers out of their daily struggle for subsistence into the nearly magical and unimaginable world of the powerful elites whose whims dominated their lives. The king in the story would have represented a client king of the Roman Empire with whom Jesus’ hearers were familiar. The king was an elite belonging to the top 1 or 2 percent of the population. He had engaged in an immense power struggle with other equally ambitious aristocrats for the most lucrative prize of all, control of the state or political apparatus. After he secured that prize, he engaged in perpetual conflict to consolidate his power and protect himself from the endless intrigues and designs of competing aristocrats, who would gladly usurp his power as he had usurped his predecessor’s. To do this effectively required immense resources—what today would be called direct and indirect taxation. Once he had achieved the kingship, the resources of the state were his possession to plunder for his gain. The ruler stood at the apex of an authoritarian system, above the law and beyond most restraints.

No ruler could exercise power alone. Each required an apparatus to put his policies into place. Consequently, a retainer class arose to provide bureaucratic services. Service meant service to that ruler in exchange for benefits and access to power and privilege.

The closer to the ruler one could rise, the more power and wealth one could amass as reward. The unmerciful servant of the parable is just such a highly placed bureaucrat. Of course, an immense distance separates even highly placed bureaucrats from the ruler, so he is called a “servant” (in the parable). Apparently, the servant has grown too confident in his power and has overstepped the thin line between calculated risk and recklessness. The king recognizes and reacts immediately, reasserting his control over the life of the servant who has forgotten that the king can, at a moment’s notice, crush him and reduce him to slavery. The king cannot betray the slightest sign of weakness. The king may be dependent on the bureaucracy but the king is not dependent on any single bureaucrat. The harsher his judgment, the less likely that others will try to swindle him in the future. The amount of money the servant owes is enormous; it is beyond the comprehension of those listening to Jesus tell it. Ten thousand talents in today’s terms would be roughly the equivalent of the billions that has been stolen by corporate executives.

According to Fortune magazine, the total amount of money raked in by corporate executives selling company stock, even while their companies crashed and burned, was roughly $66 billion. With $66 billion, you could:

· Fund the annual budget of the FBI, corporate crime-fighting included, for 16 years.

Give 74 times what America currently gives in foreign aid to all of sub-Saharan Africa.
Cover the entire $25 billion America has spent fighting the war against terrorism in Afghanistan—and still have enough left over to give all Afghans more than two times their average yearly incomes.

I am guessing that most of these guys will serve less time than your average non-violent drug user.

The king not only decides to sell the servant into bondage, but his wife and children as well, reminding us of just how vulnerable they were and still are today in many parts of the world.

The servant fell on his knees before the king and promised that he would pay him everything back and he may well have had the capability to do it. Amazingly, the ruler decides to show mercy.

How would we feel if George Bush pardoned every one of the executives who stole from their corporations? Probably outraged! The hearers in the story would have been too. They would know that the stolen money had come from their hard-earned meager wages just as the billions that these corporate executives have stolen came from a lot of working folks’ retirement plans.

The ruler in the parable may have a vested interest in showing mercy. The servant has proven his loyalty and worth until this maneuver, and he responded with proper desperation when judged. He will be less likely to try so brazen a move again. He has been a good client and may be so again. Perhaps what is needed is an unexpected show of patronly generosity. So the king reverses himself, even forgiving the debt. After all, the ruler has probably had to do the same thing himself once in a while as he worked his way up. It’s like President Bush who has trouble coming down too hard on Enron or other executives while he is hiding his own S. E. C. file.

The servant has barely survived a crisis of his own making. His effort to increase his power and wealth nearly resulted in his ruin. Still, “it’s a dog-eat-dog world.” The servant must find ways to reassert his control. He acts like a kid who has been beaten and goes out and kicks the dog. He finds the first person that owes him and seizes him by the throat, demanding he cough up the money owed him right then and there. Though the amount is small compared to what he had owed the ruler, this loan is still enough that the man does not have the money on hand. This fellow falls down and pleads exactly as the servant had done, but the servant shows no mercy and throws him into prison.

Word of this gets back to the king. This time, the king has had enough. By his actions, the bureaucrat has shamed the king, violated his honor in some important way. Therefore, he is abandoned to the torturers.

So what might all this mean when Jesus told it? The parable begins with an extraordinary act, quite uncharacteristic of any ruler. The king in this parable forgives a debt of unimaginable proportions. During Jesus’ time, there was a hope among the common people that a king would arise to save them, a ruler like King David. For the vast majority of peasants and rural poor who were mired in endless and inescapable debt, the coming of a new king meant the forgiveness of or cancellation of debt.

The king in the parable represents that hope. It is a messianic act of forgiveness of debt. The peasants who followed Jesus were looking for the kind of king who would break the cycle of endless exploitation. If the largest amount of debt imaginable has been canceled, then the messianic king has arrived and the messianic age has arrived. It is the fulfillment of sabbatical and jubilee hopes condensed into a moment. But the moment is short lived.

The servant’s cutthroat response brings about a violent response from the king and the cycle of violence continues. The parable ends with nothing changed. It reminds me of the times the World Bank has forgiven some poor country’s loan, giving the peasants hope until the rulers of the poor country find a way to take care of themselves and nothing changes for the ones who need it most.

For Jesus’ audience, the parable was about the hopelessness of looking for a messianic ruler that would save them. Like most rulers of our day, the maintenance of power required vast resources, and the accumulation of that wealth demanded the systematic and unrelenting exploitation of the population. The parable proposes that neither the messianic hope nor the tradition of popular kingship can resolve the people’s dilemma. Jesus had come to help them look in a direction they had never looked before.

I have to admit that this parable challenges my own false hopes. I still find myself looking to the powerful rulers of this world for my hope, and they always fail me. In 1992, I traveled to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of Bill Clinton. On the eve of the inauguration, I sat just a few rows behind him at a prayer service in the church where I served for seven years. (The First Baptist Church of Washington, D.C. I listened to Maya Angelou’s poem and hoped that day would be a new morning for America.

The Clinton administration let me down and the letdown had nothing to do with Monica Lewinsky. I think history will show that one of the truly evil people in all that mess was Kenneth Starr, who dragged us through the shenanigans of two consenting adults with very poor judgment. Still, they showed more restraint than Newt Gingrich and who knows how many others in Congress who sat in judgment while hiding the same kinds of behaviors. What disappointed me about Clinton is that in getting and keeping the power he needed, he lost sight of what he wanted it for. Bill Clinton was not the messiah I had hoped for. George H. Bush was not the messiah some had hoped for. Ronald Reagan was not the messiah he thought he was. Jimmy Carter may have been the only recent president to actually let some of his Christian principles shape public policy, at least in the area of human rights. But Jimmy Carter was not the messiah. Richard Nixon was a Quaker, but I have yet to figure out how that affected his presidency in any way. George W. Bush is not the messiah. Folks like him and Saddam Hussein who see themselves as being above international law outright scare me. Despite their enormous power, neither our capitalism nor our military strength will bring in the kingdom of God. We must not place our hope there, but in something much mightier than that.

This is what Jesus was saying to the people with this parable. To reshape their world, they would have to look elsewhere rather than to their political leaders. This was subversive stuff in a culture where the king thought he was God. It might be just as radical today.

In this particular parable, Jesus does not say just where we are to look for salvation. You have to let go of your preconceptions about who the messiah is before you can look for another. The common people were intrigued and they kept their eyes on Jesus. So too, must we, for there lies the real Messiah, the hope of the world, the Prince of Peace.

And by the way, Matthew is also right. We need to keep working on that forgiveness thing.