How many of you have ever tattled on anybody? I used to be the queen of all
tattletales when I was little, so I know that it feels really good to tattle. You can just feel an inner glow of goodness spread through your body, as you give voice to the wayward actions of your neighbor. Right? By putting the other guy on the wrong side of the rules, you can bask in the sunshine of rightness and feel in control of the scales of justice, and you can make sure that ordered fairness reigns around you. I have a feeling that in the classroom of life, we human beings all tend to be tattletales, and our merciful God is the exasperated teacher. Today’s parable is Jesus’ attempt to put a crack in the complacency of all of our tattling hearts. Instead of calling it the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, I think that it should be called the parable for the Tattletales.
Today’s parable is a tricky one. It is so tricky that it appears only here in the Gospel of Matthew—and even Matthew tries to make an allegory out of it, placing it next to Peter’s question about forgiveness. Matthew identifies God with the King in the parable and takes the moral of the story to be: “Don’t be like the unforgiving servant or God is really going to zap you!” We and the Gospel writers often get in trouble, though, when we start to make one on one correspondences in Jesus’ parables. In today’s parable, an allegory leads us to a fickle, untrustworthy God, to a God who can take away the mercy that he has promised, like the king in our story. It leads us to a God who throws out grace and hands sinners over to “the torturers” for eternity. And most of all, it allows us to convince ourselves that Jesus is addressing people like that bad, unforgiving servant, instead of us.
Instead, let’s say that the king in this parable does not represent God at all. Actually, in Greek, this is a human king, probably a Gentile King, the kind of all-powerful ruler who was known to farm out the collecting of taxes on his land holdings to a lesser noble, who would bid for the chance to collect the king’s taxes, and who would make money by adding his own percentage to the amount to be collected for the king. In our story, on the day of accounting, this conniving tax collector cannot come up with the amount of his bid. This Gentile king and his big deal tax collector are already “bad guys” in the minds of Jesus’ Jewish listeners, peasant farmers who lived at the constant mercy of Rome’s thirst for tax revenue. The amount owed to the king is also shocking in this story. Ten thousand talents is an absurdly large sum of money, equivalent to something like a billion dollars in our modern world, a crazy, unthinkable debt for one tax collector to owe. Like most of Jesus’ stories, this is a tall tale, a strange and disturbing story, meant to shake us up.
Just for fun, and to keep us out of the realm of allegory, let’s put the parable into a similarly shocking setting on this 11th of September 2011.[1] Let’s make it a story about a Taliban-linked drug lord in Pakistan and the lesser tribal chief who owes him a billion dollars in drug money. “Ahhh,” we all shake our heads as we hear the story begin, “this bad tribal chief is in trouble. We’ve seen enough movies to know that he is going to get in trouble with the Taliban leader, but you know, he deserves what he gets. He shouldn’t be dealing with that evil group, anyway. He’s not a good, law-abiding Christian, like I am.”
Then, of course, when the Taliban leader grants the tribal chief mercy, when he has pity on the chief’s groveling …. For goodness’ sake, we are really shocked, then. We start to wonder what kind of crazy story this is going to be. According to the lawless world of the Pakistani border that we know about from movies and news reports, merciless Taliban drug lords are supposed to punish the people who fail them; they’re not supposed to forgive them enormous debts out of pity.
Then, to top it all off, having been given mercy, the tribal chief goes out and demands money from one of his own associates, practically strangling him and confiscating his property as punishment for not paying a little $50 debt. We find it even easier to pass judgment on the tribal chief now. “What awful, immoral, violent people,” we proclaim, “that kind of insane behavior is just what you can expect from the Taliban. He is granted mercy and then he turns around and refuses mercy to someone else. I would never be caught in a situation like that!”
When the other tribal chiefs from the region come in, having witnessed the blatant but expected hard-heartedness committed by the drug-running chief, we are all ready to identify with them. As our parable says, “when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place.” See, here they come: the tattle-tales! Our reactions to the story have placed us side by side with them all along. And how does the drug lord respond to the tattlers? He is of course forced to act, just like a teacher in a classroom when misbehavior is brought to her attention through tattling. In his anger, the Taliban drug lord now revokes his mercy, acting not in the unexpected, merciful role, but in the role assigned to him by his culture. He hands the tribal chief over to be tortured until he repays the billion dollars, which of course is too large ever to repay.
Despite our satisfaction over justice that is now served on these enemies of ours, in the usual, expected ways, we can’t help but be uneasy and shaken up, can we, by the violent reaction of the drug lord this time. Does the unmerciful tribal chief really need to be given to “the torturers,” we wonder? Couldn’t he just sit in a nice prison for awhile? We don’t really want to be responsible for brutal torture, do we? And his punishment IS kind of our fault. We tattled on him, after all, bringing what he did to the drug lord’s attention.
We tattletales believe that failure is logically supposed to lead to a just punishment. But in the world of our parable, our tattling implicates us in chaos. Here we are, trying to bring about justice, or to bring about what we judge to be justice, and we find that the reality is indeed more complex than we thought, and we ourselves are trapped by our tattling in a pervasive, sticky web of evil. As we pray in our confession today, “Lord, forgive us the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.”
Our parable today shows that God’s justice and God’s mercy are somehow inexplicably intertwined. When we try to separate judgment and mercy with our unforgiving, tattling tongues, in order to make them fit our corrupt molds here in this world, we deform the very Kingdom of God. God needs all of us as partners in putting back together a creation shattered by evil and sin. For our own sakes, and for the sake of God’s Kingdom, we can’t afford to let our self-righteous tattling send anyone off to the torturers.
[1] This take on the parable is indebted to Bernard Scott's interpretation in Hear Then the Parable.
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