Delivered Sunday, July 29, 2018, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Arlington, VA
Text: Matthew 18:21-35
Over the course of this summer we have been looking at parables. Many of them are complicated. This one is not. Matthew has been kind enough to tie a bow around this one clearly marking it off as about forgiveness.
About a month ago, I brought a book called “Do Unto Otters” to the Children’s moment. I could easily stand here and repeat that, with a reminder that it applies to forgiveness and be done.
Or I could just jump back a few chapters in Matthew to “Judge not lest ye be judged,” or point to the Lord’s prayer’s “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” say “Amen” and step down. After all, I’ve often been told that no one has ever complained about a sermon being too short. I could choose today to test that and walk away after less than 150 words.
But if you’re guessing that I won’t do that, congratulations.
It’s too easy for us to take Matthew’s tidy frame around Jesus’ story and make this a small moral story about not being like the “wicked slave” who didn’t forgive a small debt after having a larger one forgiven. It could easily turn into a story about “paying it forward.”
But doing that lets us get away with missing something larger going on here, and I think that’s a problem, because this text is, I suspect, the single most “inside-the-beltway” passage in scripture.
But it’s easy to miss that.
One of the greatest problems of translating scripture is that language is constantly changing. This gets even worse when you start talking about money, thanks in no small part to inflation. It isn’t hard for us to pick up that 10,000 talents is more than 100 denarii, both from the context of the story and the fact that 10,000 is a much larger number. Even without knowing the difference between a talent and a denarius, it’s obvious that, relative to 10,000 talents, a debt of 100 denarii is insignificant, but most of us can’t go beyond that.
I want to change that. As much as I am in this pulpit thanks in no small part to a strong aversion to math, sometimes it can’t be avoided.
We’ll start, as Jesus does, with the larger debt, 10,000 talents. First, 10,000 was, at the time, the largest easily citable number. This is not to say that no one could count higher than that, just that there was no single word for a larger amount. In fact, the Greek word for 10,000 is the same word that gave us “myriad,” which we still use to mean “countless.” Second, the talent was the largest unit of currency. With a careful reading of Matthew, it’s possible to realize that a talent is not an insignificant sum, it is, at the very least, an amount worth investing. In Matthew 25, we have a parable about slaves being given 1, 2, and 5 talents to invest on behalf of their master.
Thanks to other sources, we can also know that the tax revenue from the area ruled by Herod the Great was about 900 talents per year, less than 1/10th the debt forgiven by the king. Because this is from a time when money was still attached to precious metals, we can learn that a talent is equal to about 45 pounds of silver. 10,000 talents is 450,000 pounds of silver, which, at current prices, is more than 100 million dollars. Put this all together, and this is something like Jesus saying “a gajillion dollars…” but, you know, with appropriate gravitas.
This means that this “wicked slave” is no ordinary slave, and the king in this story is no regional ruler. This is Empire money. This is not some personal debt but one that could only have been accrued as a function of massive mismanagement. It’s an amount of debt that the king knows it can never be recovered. Any decision to sell the slave, his family, and possessions, as the king is first inclined, or to have the man tortured, is purely punitive. This debt is never going to be repaid.
Now, the other debt, the debt of 100 denarii. That is, relatively speaking, a tiny amount. It took 6,000 denarii to equal a single talent. And again, it’s easy to stop here now that we’ve established the smaller debt is 1/600,000 the larger debt, but, while it is a
This isn’t a trivial amount even if calculating by this method puts the larger debt in the vicinity of 33 billion dollars assuming we drop the gold standard and maintain the relative relationship of the two units.
Are you starting to see why I think this is such an “inside-the-beltway” story?
The allegorical frame provided by Matthew makes it easy for us to read this as a story about a wicked slave forgiven an enormous debt by a merciful king who is then cruel to someone who owes him little. The relative difference between the sums forgiven makes it easy to think that the “wicked” slave should obviously have forgiven the smaller debt. It makes it easy for us to stand at a distance and say “well yes, of course, I wouldn’t be like that guy.” This frame makes it easy to spiritualize the story into one where the massive, unrepayable debt
If this parable was found in Luke, we would likely have a different frame. Matthew puts a spiritual frame around this, making this a story of God’s limitless grace in forgiving the massive debt and the hard-heartedness of the “wicked slave.” Luke would give us the social justice lens. Luke would make this about the greed of the first servant. If this were a Lukan parable, it would lend itself to a sermon on income inequality; on the injustice of a world in which capricious rulers impose purely punitive punishments and where the rich help out each other, but not the poor.
My imagined Lukan version of this parable is still an inside-the-beltway story, but a slightly different story. For those of you who are wondering why I keep coming back to that phrase, I hope you’ll allow me to paraphrase scripture.
I’d like to tell the story a little differently.
One day, over in the GAO offices, they came across some major discrepancies in a large program’s budget. Somehow, it seemed that the program’s director had managed to lose over $100 million dollars. As a result, the GAO launched an investigation, and the director was under suspicion of having embezzled the money, leading to a second criminal investigation. The director begged for mercy, and was eventually acquitted as the investigation revealed that while this particular director had woefully mismanaged the program’s resources, he hadn’t done anything actually corrupt…just careless. He was allowed to quietly resign. He then moved into a new house in McClean which he enjoyed between stints on the lecture circuit.
After the initial coverage had died down, he reviewed his finances, and discovered that one of the contractors who worked his new house had accidently charged him for about $5,500 worth of materials they ultimately didn’t use. He sued the company, and the legal fees drove them into bankruptcy.
A few years later, he decided to try to restart his political career, but when the press found the story about his bankrupting a small, local contractor, the public outcry drove him from public life for good.
This isn’t a story about any particular administration. Please resist the urge to add that layer. This retelling isn’t about politics, but is an attempt to make the story a bit more relatable—even we may struggle to personally put ourselves in the shoes of someone who lost that much money, I think we can imagine the scenario I just described taking place.
That’s why I think this is the most “inside-the-beltway” passage: because there aren’t a lot of places where we can contemporize this story, but this area is definitely one of them.
We can imagine someone driven from office trying to hold on too tightly to the remaining scraps of money, power, and/or influence.
We can imagine someone who lost a lot holding too tightly to whatever is left.
Even if the specific sums are too large, we can probably remember a time where, facing a loss in one area, we held on too tightly in another.
We can imagine a person feeling both relieved at being forgiven a massive debt and ashamed at amassing that debt in the first place, and we can imagine that person transferring that shame onto someone else. We can probably remember a time where we felt ashamed and took that out on someone else.
A time when we found comfort in holding so tightly to a grudge that we couldn’t see anything else.
If you’ve been here when I’ve preached before, this might be where you expected me to end. I like to end my sermons on introspective, even confessional notes. And today’s Story Jesus Told ends, if we take out the Matthean frame, on the wicked servant being tortured. He spoiled his chance at grace.
But we can’t stop there, because even as we focus on this story as an allegory, with the king as God, we should also remember that no allegory is perfect. The king in this story is a tyrant. We can’t just stop with the slave’s squandering of the mercy shown him without remembering that he had to beg for it in the first place, and in that way, this king is not like God.
We need to make one final turn with this story, and even with the Lord’s Prayer line “forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.” If God’s mercy to us was contingent on our mercy toward others, we would, just like the slave in this story, end up being tortured.
So, instead, let us ask that we might be granted the grace to forgive others as God forgives us.
Amen.