Month: September 2014

Delighted to see that Greenbelt have today released the mp3s of the 2014 talks. My collaboration with Harry Bird and the Rubber Wellies, Get Carter, is downloadable here. You even get to listen to a one minute extract free!

The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving, or ‘What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed?’ - my talk today, in consideration of the people of Scotland this week making decisions about their political future; in rememberance of the complex life and leadership of the Reverend Ian Paisley; with thought for all those in our country who are saddled by debt, and the political arrangements which keep them there; in considering those nations we know who are ruled or threatened by unrestrained autocrats today … Matthew 18.21-35 (without Matthew's commentary) has it all.

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

 

… the most notable criminal in scripture is Jesus himself. That's always worth remembering in a religion which at times, tries to look so respectable that it obscures the truth at its heart. 

We might think that Jesus had done nothing wrong – but the authorities of his day did, and they criminalised him by holding a show trial – a trial held in public which wasn't intended to ensure that justice was done, but was intended to influence public opinion, to persuade the people that Jesus was a heretical troublemaker who threatened national security and who should be killed.

[This] brings us back to the heart of Jesus, who went to the cross as an act of love for us, to show the world that we are unconditionally loved and forgiven – whatever we do to God or to each other, to put an end to the power of sin in the world and in our lives. As a very old prayer goes, 

We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you; Because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

Notice the major difference between sin and judgement, repentance and forgiveness, before and after Jesus. The old law says repent, so that you may then be forgiven; Jesus says you are unconditionally loved and forgiven – and knowing this may cause you to repent. …

– from today's talk, On crime, punishment, and the cross.

Romans 13.8-14, Matthew 18.15-20

Sept 7, 2014,Trinity 12, Sutton Montis

  

Today our readings suggest that we spend a while thinking together about crime and punishment. 

When we mention ‘crime’, we might think of the latest piece of news we’ve heard on the radio this morning or read in the Western Gazette, or heard about in the village. There always seems to be some crime, from a mugging to a garage theft, to talk about. 

I suspect that many of us here have been affected directly by crime: perhaps as victims: for instance in the past I’ve had my car stolen, and a bike; and currently the people of Sutton Montis are alert to lead thieves after receiving reports of the recent attempt on North Cadbury church roof. 

We may have been perpetrators of crime ourselves – and more of us do that than we might admit: eg, schoolboy thefts of penny sweets from newsagents, adult thefts of items from work, etc… 

And maybe you have been wrongly accused of a crime. That happens too, whether at home, someone missing some money out of a purse which might turn up somewhere else later, or on the streets, illegal parking maybe, without intention on your part. 

Scripture is full of crimes and criminals. We think of Cain killing his brother Abel; Joseph’s brothers leaving him for dead; David who on the one hand was a great hero of Israel but on the other hand was guilty of adultery and murder: having Uriah killed so he could have Bathsheba as his wife… 

The message for criminals in the old scriptures seems to be: what you sow, you reap: the mark of Cain was that he became a guilt-haunted wanderer, Joseph’s brothers suffered during the lean years of famine, and the people of David (Israel) were exiled…. 

What you sow, you reap. We see that repeated time and again in the New Testament: Judas’s suicide after his betrayal of Jesus, Ananias and Sapphira who immediately died when Peter challenged their dishonesty in keeping back some of their property from the church, the rich man who was punished in the afterlife for the way he treated the pauper Lazarus. 

Crime and punishment – it’s a major theme. And it is very closely connected with themes of sin and judgement, repentance and forgiveness. All very relevant themes in our world today. 

As Christians seeking truth we must fix our minds on an uncomfortable revelation – that the most notable criminal in scripture is Jesus himself. That’s always worth remembering in a religion which at times, tries to look so respectable that it obscures the truth at its heart. 

We might think that Jesus had done nothing wrong – but the authorities of his day did, and they criminalised him by holding a show trial – a trial held in public which wasn’t intended to ensure that justice was done, but was intended to influence public opinion, to persuade the people that Jesus was a heretical troublemaker who threatened national security and who should be killed. 

This gives us another angle on the subject of crime and punishment – that sometimes people are unjustly imprisoned or in some countries executed. [1] 

It also gives us another angle on sin and judgement – repentance and forgiveness. Because it brings us back to the heart of Jesus, who went to the cross as an act of love for us, to show the world that we are unconditionally loved and forgiven – whatever we do to God or to each other, to put an end to the power of sin in the world and in our lives. As a very old prayer goes, 

We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you; 

Because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

Notice the major difference between sin and judgement – repentance and forgiveness, before and after Jesus. The old law says repent, so that you may then be forgiven; Jesus says you are unconditionally loved and forgiven – and knowing this may cause you to repent. 

In Numbers 21 the people of Israel angered God by complaining against God and against Moses about being in the wilderness and about the food God was giving them to eat. God punished them with poisonous snakes. So they repented, telling Moses, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people, and the Lord forgave them and took the snakes away. 

In the old law, a criminal must first repent so that then they can be forgiven. 

Contrast this old law with the new law of God’s kingdom which Jesus brings in, where there is still punishment for crimes but where, crucially, criminals are cared about, in an open and forgiving spirit. 

Now, please don’t think that I’m going to say that Jesus is soft on crime and criminals. The truth is that Jesus is very realistic about the need to punish and discipline wrongdoers. In Matthew 18 he tells his disciples how to treat wrongdoers in the church – by trying to make them listen to what they have done wrong, and if they do not listen then to turn them out of the church.

If [they] refuse to listen to [those who speak to them], tell it to the church, Jesus says; and if [they] refuse to listen even to the church, treat [them] as you would a pagan or a tax collector – in other words, let [them] know that [they] don’t belong to the church any more. 

And following on from that Jesus tells the parable which likens God to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves – and who insisted that they paid what they owed him, and who punished them if they didn’t or couldn’t. 

The way that Jesus dealt with so many people he met, and the story of the cross particularly, demonstrate this very important truth about his attitude towards criminals and wrongdoers: first of all you are unconditionally forgiven, so that then, you may be moved to repent. 

The story of Jesus and Zacchaeus in Luke 19 is a great example of this. Jesus comes to Zacchaeus’s town Jericho and was passing through it. Zacchaeus is drawn to find out more about Jesus so he climbs a tree. Before Zacchaeus does or says anything to him Jesus goes up to him, befriends him, calls him to himself, invites himself to stay at Zacchaeus’ house. 

Notice the order things happened in: first of all Jesus shows that he unconditionally loves and forgives Zacchaeus by calling him, and Zacchaeus is so moved by Jesus’ love for him that he can’t help but repent. 

Crimes should be punished but criminals should be cared for in a forgiving spirit . And when Zacchaeus meets Jesus he can’t help repenting. He tells Jesus how he wants to change his life. Zacchaeus offered to give half of his possessions to the poor; and to pay back people four times of what he had defrauded them of.Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’

If we had been in that crowd, would we have rejoiced with Zacchaeus or would we have grumbled about it like most of them did? A prison chaplain once talked about the Zacchaeus story in chapel, pointing out that Jesus forgives even those who are most reviled by society. A prisoner who had been listening attentively commented, ‘That’s all very well; Jesus may have forgiven him but would the crowd give him a chance to change his life?’ Would they? Would we? 

Prisoners are part of our society just as much as we are and are created and loved by God just as we are. As tax payers we own prisons, but do we ‘own’ them in a deeper sense, by accepting responsibility for them and those who live and work in them? [2] 

St Paul wrote, ‘Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.’ [Hebrews 13:3]

And Jesus requires us to continue his work in the task of forgiveness and support. He once told a parable where God is like a king settling accounts with his slaves, who punished them if they didn’t pay what they owed him.

And in anger [the king] handed [the debtor] over to be tortured until he paid his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart. [Matthew 18:34,35]

The debt which we owe to God is that we are forgiving and loving towards other people. 

Because, on the Cross, Jesus showed complete love and forgiveness to everybody, regardless of who they are and what they’ve done, we owe him an attitude of forgiveness towards other people. The consequence of the Cross in our lives is that we must strive to be loving and forgiving to everyone else. 

Now if we embrace the Cross in the same spirit as Zacchaeus embraced Jesus then this should come easily to us. 

So let us listen to how God wants us to respond to this today. By continuing to pray for the victims of crime and to support them, certainly. To continue to pray that justice will be done in all cases of wrongdoing locally and in the wider world. But is God also asking us to cultivate in our hearts that spirit of open generous forgiveness? Is he prompting us to pray for the criminals, the perpetrators, that they may know that they are unconditionally loved by Jesus, and that in discovering this they might have a change of heart?

Maybe God is asking us to pray for those – like prison chaplains and prison visitors and letter-writers – who try to help criminals, the perpetrators, to discover that they are unconditionally loved by Jesus. Maybe God is asking us to think if there’s anything else we might do to help share the message of Jesus’s unconditional love for all.

We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you; 

Because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

 

Notes 

Sermon based on my earlier Crime and punishment on Holy Cross Day, preached at St Christopher Norris Green,14/9/2008, which took as its texts Philippians 2.6-11and John 3.13-17.

[1] This sermon was preached at a moment in the 2014 Iraq crisis where summary executions were being regularly reported. My 2008 sermon cited Michael Shields, a Liverpool man wrongly convicted for murder in 2005 and granted a full Royal Pardon in 2009.

[2] Prisoners material adapted from resources in the Prisons Week 2008 website (adapted because they read the order of forgiveness-repentence in the Zacchaeus story the opposite way around to the way I do).