“A kindom parable?” based on Romans 15:1-12 and Matthew…

There
are some simple takes on today’s parable.  If you read it the way
Matthew wrote it, is an allegory about the importance of forgiveness.
As a reminder, the STORY itself says,

“A king called one of his
servants to settle accounts, the servant owed an extraordinary amount
of money.  When the servant couldn’t immediately produce the money,
the king ordered that the servant, his family,
and all their possessions be sold to cover the debt
(worth noting, it wouldn’t have covered the debt.)  The servant
grovels, the king not only relents, but FORGIVES the whole debt.

However, upon leaving, the
servant encounters someone who owes him money, requests that it be
repaid, and when that is impossible,
the servant threw the man into prison.

This got reported to the king,
who then had the servant tortured until he could pay back the debt.”

(It
is worth noting that the amounts of money in this parable are
OBSCENE.  I’ve seen scholars guess that the first figure is as low as
$10 million or as high as $6 billion.  The second figure is lower,
but not trivial.  It is still more money than most peasants would
ever see, perhaps in the $10,000 range.  The Jesus seminar actually
thinks this parable goes back to Jesus, in part, because the numbers
are so huge and they believe Jesus’s parables tended to exaggerate.
Other scholars point out that the first figure essentially equated to
“the largest figure one could ever name.”  Our version of a
gazillion dollars, so,  A LOT of money.)

So,
when the parable is taken as allegory, it is simple:  God is like the
King, God forgives us our debts, we are then supposed to forgive
others their far smaller debts, if we don’t, we will go to hell.  

HOWEVER,
despite what I learned in Sunday School as a child, parables aren’t
fables.  They don’t tend to be easy to understand.  Instead, they
tend to be things that make us think.

So,
when we come to a parable that seems easy to understand, it usually
indicates it has been cleaned up a little bit from what Jesus said
into what the Gospel writer thought it should mean.

If
we take the story just as Matthew wrote it, then God is vindictive
and while we’re instructed to forgive 70*7 times, God forgives once
and then gets unforgiving immediately.  That should also give us
pause, since it simply doesn’t fit how we understand the Divine.

Now,
if we take out Matthew’s final scolding at the end, we un-fable the
story and get back to a parable.  To take the parable as a parable
first requires that we do NOT assume that the earthly king is a stand
in for God?  

If
we read it as parable, the whole thing gets uncomfortable.  How could
anyone ever owe a king that much money?  How does even the king have
enough money that he can forgive a figure like that on a whim?  Where
does the money come from (hint: the laborers who are dying young of
starvation so the money can flow to the top)? Why doesn’t the servant
respond with generosity?  Why did the other servants tell the king?
Why did the king respond with such venom?  Who or what is good in
this story?  What are we supposed to do?  Does the second man get
released from prison when the first one gets sent to be tortured?
Does anyone win?

That’s
a solid parable.  

However,
if we take out the BEGINNING line about this story being about the
kin(g)dom of God, things get even more interesting.  

William
Herzog II in “Parables as Subversive Speech” suggests that we
first look at the story on its own merits – in the context of the
day.  What follows is my adaptations of Herzog’s work.  The king in
this story is most likely a client king of the Roman Empire.  Someone
placed by Rome, and replaceable by Rome.  He is in charge of
extracting wealth from the area he is king of, keeping some, and
sending the rest on.  The system by which he does this is pretty
complicated, including many levels of bureaucracy that does his dirty
work for him – and is paid well enough to be grateful not to be the
peasants.  The bureaucracy is kept on its toes with fear, and as such
the “work environment” is deeply suspicious, prone to untruths,
and manipulative.  Everyone is “playing politics” with everyone
else because that’s how you survive.

When
leaders exist to extract wealth, they have to use their power to
terrify, and when power is inherently violent, the systems that
support it won’t be healthy.  One could simply say that bad leaders
create bad systems, and that’s true, but under it all is a question
of what is the POINT of leadership.  

The
Hebrew Bible suggests that the point of a leader is to care for the
people and pay attention to the needs of the whole, by
creating a system of justice that is fair, a society that enables
even impoverished people to survive, and an economic system that
distributes livable wages and sustainability as broadly as possible
(and prevents both generational wealth and its counter generational
poverty).  Because the Jewish people knew this, the way the Roman
Empire worked was seen as inherently immoral.  The Roman Empire, like
any empire understood the king to “own” the whole land and the
people, and to be responsible for using them to  to extract wealth
from  and to send to the top, and to do so by creating an unjust
system and threatening everyone with death and destruction.  You can
see their point on this being a bad system.

OK,
so we have a Roman client king, and the first Jewish hearers would
have STARTED with distrust of this guy.  Helpful to know, right?

And,
while the king was inherently immoral, SO WAS HIS COURT, as they were
the ones doing his dirty work.   In fact, that first servant, was a
top level bureaucrat, and that large “loan” he was supposed to
replay was actually the “taxes and tributes” he and his
department were responsible for extracting from the people and the
land.  Calling in the “loan” was demanding his money, perhaps as
a test of the servant, in order to threaten violence and keep the
fear up in the system.  Being arbitrary and making unreasonable
demands helps create a culture of fear.  The man doesn’t have the
full amount yet, possibly because it wasn’t “due” yet.  

Now,
the first hearers likely would not have had a lot of identification
with this servant, because he was … basically a cabinet level
official whose own actions had done incredible damage to their
country and their lives.  The king’s anger and threats are par for
the course, but, in fact, so is his forgiveness.  Because the king
has now RE-ESTABLISHED his dominance, which was always the point. I
suspect the “Forgiveness” of the loan in this case is inherently
untrue, this was just a show of power, forcing the otherwise powerful
servant to be submissive and reminded of what can happen to him.

This
servant goes out after the “forgiveness” and then demands a
smaller BUT STILL LARGE sum be paid back to him.  Again, it is worth
noting that the people Jesus spoke to would not have identified with
the man owing the smaller sum because it was still more money than
they ever had.  And in this case the top level bureaucrat does not
forgive the debt, probably because most of the time debts are not
simply forgiven.  Then other people in the court, who gained power
and prestige by lowering someone else’s, used this to take down the
top level official.  And the king’s whims take him down this time.

That
is, perhaps this is not
parable of “what the kindom of God is like” and more a
description of “what the kingdom of Rome is like.”
By making plain how the systems of power work in the world,
Jesus was able to invite people to consider how they are complicit in
the system as well as if they want to continue to be.

Because
I, for one, don’t want to be part of systems like that.

Recently,
I’ve seen how beautifully another option can work.  The practice that
I went to for care during my pregnancy and birth is one that prides
itself on putting patients first.  And they did!  My medical care was
profoundly humane, I was taken seriously all along, and my caregivers
took the time to talk with me – and not just about medical issues!
This seemed to penetrate the whole system.  From the person who
greeted us at the desk, to the one weighing me, to the ones
scheduling next appointments, there was grace abundance, as well as
patience and kindness.  

I
also noticed that the practice was humane to its workers.  People at
various “levels” in the practice could be seen talking and
laughing with each other.  It felt much more like people were doing
various tasks that all mattered than like there was a hierarchy in
the office.  I also heard, at the hospital (as we were there for a
while) how incredibly well respected the group is!

Truthfully,
I found it mesmerizing.  I wanted to know all their secrets.  I asked
a bit, and what I heard was that the whole group was deeply committed
to putting patients first
and people came to work there to do that.   The nature of the
organization was created by its primary value being lived out.

On
a smaller scale, I love the story of a very VERY mild mannered man
becoming the roads supervisor in a small town.  As you’d expect,
people tended to call that office in a fury when something was wrong
with their roads, and lots can go wrong with roads.  Those that loved
the man worried about him being eaten alive by other people’s fury,
but instead, his mild manners, calm assurances, tendency to listen
and commitment to doing his job well transformed those who called.
Even one person can make a huge difference.

Many
of Jesus’s stories teach us how to subvert broken systems.  I think
this story teaches us how those systems work so we can make decisions
about engage with them.  Funny enough, the reading from Romans goes
through this as well.  Either we can take people down for making
different choices than we do, or we can participate with God in
building the kindom.  Judgement, like manipulation, fear, and
suspicion keep us participating in systems of oppression.
Compassion, equity, listening build the kindom of God.  In every word
that we say, and every action we take, we get to choose where we put
our lives.  We can choose fear and violence or we can choose to build
the kindom of God for all people.  May God help us choose well.  Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

September 13, 2020