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 makes God out to be the King in the parable. For Matthew, the moral of the story is: “Don’t be like the unforgiving servant or God is really going to zap you!” We and Matthew get in trouble, though, when we start to make these one-on-one correspondences in Jesus’ parables. In today’s parable, reading it this way leads us to a fickle, untrustworthy God, to a God who can take away the mercy that God 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 doesn’t represent God at all. Actually, in Greek, the word refers to 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. This nobleman would bid for the chance to collect the king’s taxes, and he would make money on the side 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 can’t come up with the amount of his bid. That’s not good news for him!
This Gentile king and his big-deal tax collector are already “bad guys” in the minds of Jesus’ Jewish listeners--listeners who are peasant farmers living 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! It’s a crazy, unthinkable debt for one person to owe. Like most of Jesus’ stories, this is a tall tale, a strange, exaggerated story, meant to shake us up. [1]
Just for fun, let’s put the parable into a similarly shocking setting for us during this Season of Creation. Let’s make it a story about Big Oil making huge profits by despoiling creation. Let’s say there’s a rich, callous oil company executive down in Houston who’s trying to buy up a huge expanse of pristine Colorado farmland for fracking. He has taken bids from a host of land speculators, and a big wheeler-dealer has promised to deliver half of the state’s prime, pristine farmland to the oil company for fracking.
“Oooh” we all shake our heads as we hear this story begin, “this greedy land speculator is crazy.” We’ve seen enough episodes of Suits on Netflix to know that this deal is going to go south. But, we reason, if it does, this wheeler-dealer will be getting what he deserves. He shouldn’t be making money by despoiling farmland. He’s not a good, environmentally-conscious Christian, like I am.
So let’s say that the EPA steps in and stops the enormous land deal from going through. The speculator, who received a million dollars upfront on the deal, now can’t deliver to the Oil Company. Instead of demanding their money back, though, the Big Oil company grants the land speculator mercy! They actually take pity on the greedy guy and let him keep the million ….! For goodness’ sake! Where’s this story going to end up? It’s not making sense!
Next, we hear that the land speculator, after having his own crazy debt forgiven, goes out and forecloses on a generations-old family farm, all because the struggling farmers owe the bank fifty dollars on last year’s bad harvest. We find it even easier to pass judgment on the land speculator now.
“What an awful, immoral, greedy creep!” we proclaim, “I’d never do anything like that!”
When word gets out about what happened, the Colorado land developers, who had lost out on the original bid, are furious! They go and report to the national media all that has taken place. See, here they come: the tattle-tales! Our reactions to the story have placed us side by side with the tattletales all along. And how does the Oil Company bigwig respond to the tattlers? Now that the story is front-page news, he’s forced to take action, just like a teacher in a classroom when misbehavior is brought to her attention through tattling. Forced to act, the Oil Company Executive now revokes his mercy, acting just like we cynics expect Big Oil to act. All of a sudden, the disgraced land developer “disappears,” and we hear that Saudi Arabia might have been involved ....
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 shaken up by this story, can we? Does the land speculator really need to be murdered, we wonder? Couldn’t he just get some jail time? We tattlers don’t really want to be responsible for his disappearance and death, do we? And his punishment IS kind of our fault. We cheered on the tattlers, after all.
We tattletales believe that sin 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. We ourselves are trapped by our tattling in a pervasive, sticky web of evil. 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.
Today’s parable applies to our understanding of natural disasters, as well. Climate change has brought, and will continue to bring, ever-worsening climate chaos. Floods, fires, earthquakes, drought .... we look around at the death tolls, the economic tolls, the unfair human anguish that these disasters cause around the world, and we’re afraid. We want to find someone to blame. On the one hand, we have religious types want to tattle about all the people whom God is sending off to the torturers of wind, water, and flame: they said Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for “immoral lifestyles” in New Orleans; they say droughts and floods in the Global South are divine retribution on non-Christians. This logic is like the logic of the ancient Israelites, who attributed the Egyptian deaths in the Red Sea to Pharoah’s hardened heart toward Israel’s God.
On the other hand, there are others want to point fingers and tattle on God for natural disasters: they claim the whole idea of a loving God is absurd, when innocent people die in devastating earthquakes and floods. “There’s no loving, compassionate God,” they cry, “because such a God would stop all this suffering.”
Again, what we tattlers need to remember is that we Christians believe in a strange and mysterious Easter God. We believe in a God of “light and life and infinite love,” who does not use death to punish anyone. We believe in a God who has condemned evil and suffering by the paradoxical power of the cross, in a God who has even defeated death by leaving an empty tomb. As David Bentley Hart writes, “to see the goodness indwelling in all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain. [Ours is a world in which] life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of our days.”[2] Our Easter God invites us all as God’s partners in hope, in healing a creation shattered by greed and Empire. For our own sakes, and for the sake of our planet, 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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