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PENTECOST 17 (September 11, 2005) |
`Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven. Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison, until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said. ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger, his master turned him over to the jailers until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” (NIV)
LETTING THE ENDING SURPRISE YOU A recent movie, The Upside of Anger, starring Joan Allen and Kevin Kostner is significant not only because of it’s surprise ending, but also because it relates so well to the parable in today’s Gospel lesson. Joan Allen plays the role of Terry, an angry housewife, with four daughters who is incensed that her husband has run off with his secretary to live in Sweden. As the plot unfolds, the viewer becomes involved in her relationships with her four daughters, all complicated and dysfunctional because of the rage that she holds against her former husband. She takes some satisfaction in finally hearing at least some of her daughters say about her husband and their father, “we hate him too.” The story gets more complicated as she becomes involved with Denny, a neighbor, who finally moves in with her and the girls, and who also experiences the brunt of her anger at being jilted by her husband. Most of the reviews I have read of this film waste a good bit of analysis on the complex relationship with the mother and daughter, or Terry and Denny, showing how this makes the story real because it can happen in suburban family lives today—or because the sexual affair may happen to spouses or separated partners in their early fifties. However, such analyses miss the point of this story, a point that is typical of many a good parable in which the end stress says it all. At the end of the movie, Denny is exploring acreage in back of the house for a new subdivision that is to be built. The workers uncover an old well, and what do they find when they look inside?! Of course, Terry’s husband, the one who was supposed to have run off to Sweden with the secretary, but who apparently fell in a well and drowned while walking the dog. (Apologies to you who haven’t seen the film yet.) So the infidelity never happened, did it? What really happened was that Terry made a choice: she decided to accuse her husband of infidelity, of leaving her and the girls, and to justify her own feelings of abandonment, she entered a lifestyle of alcoholism and jealous rage, of vituperative anger. She almost also ruined the lives of those closest to her in the process. So the story comes to its gradual end with Terry weeping over her folly, over her real loss, and over her own stupidity. She had made a choice, a lifestyle choice, and it was the wrong one. In parables, this is all that’s important: the bottom line, not all the details along the way. Terry had made an error, and the ending asks the viewer to consider how such errors are like their own. Life style choices with dead ends In the parable in today’s Gospel lesson, the lead character also makes a poor choice, which brings him to a dead end. He finds himself in debt to his master with no means to pay off the debt. He knew this world of indebtedness very well, as do we. Sometimes people spend too much, lose their perspective on what’s really important in life and squander what resources they have on unimportant things. It also happens that accidents occur, and people have not set aside what they need to help them survive in situations of emergency. Whatever the situation with this particular servant, he knew how things worked in a world of debt. When you can’t pay, you have to renegotiate or you end up in debtor’s prison. So he asked for some kind of deal, any kind of deal, so that he could finally do the only thing he expected in the world he knew—pay what he owed. The master, however, surprised him by opening the door to a world about which he knew nothing. He introduced him to a debt-free world, a world in which debts could be forgiven. He told the servant he would have to pay nothing. Of course, Jesus is here introducing his hearers to the world of God’s mercy. It is a world in which people don’t have to do anything to earn or deserve God’s affirming love. God gives because his heart is extravagantly kind. Understanding what this means and choosing to live within such a world is a large order for each of us. Whether we can respond in kind is an open question, a bottom line question for each of us for whom Jesus tells this parable. As you know, the servant goes out and finds someone who is indebted to him. He tells him to pay up, and when he can’t, he has him thrown in jail. The other servants report this and the tables are turned for the servant who accepted so freely the master’s forgiveness, but who himself couldn’t forgive others. He himself gets to experience the same lifestyle with which he is stuck, the one of which he can’t seem to let go. In effect Jesus is saying to his hearers, there is a lifestyle which deals with debts and indebtedness, and there is another in which debts are not an issue because forgiveness in that lifestyle sets you free. Surprising as it is, you have a choice-- to live in one or the other. In the parable that Jesus tells, the unforgiving servant chooses to go back to the only world he knows best, the one ruled by debts and indebtedness. This is a hard parable to some because it seems to talk about a God who vacillates between being kind and being mercenary or, at least, between being kind and expecting you to merit his kindness. But these are just details along the way. The bottom line of the parable is that a man made his choice, to live in a world where indebtedness was the common currency, and that way was a dead end street. And that, the parable wants to say, is a question now placed before each of you: What kind of lifestyle will you choose for yourself? Do you know how to live the life that sets you free? Life style choices with openendedness On our living room wall hangs a piece of art by Eloise Krabbenhoft that is computer generated. From a moderate distance you can see a cross imposed on a gray field, the details of which are not clear. When you get an inch away from the picture, you can interpret the details, many hundreds of tiny 70x7s, the cryptic message from today’s Gospel lesson. There is a surprise in this picture, just as there was in the words of Jesus. Wherever there is debt, bondage and a dead end street, consider a new dimension. Over and over again. Consider a world in which people can live freely because Jesus offers us the means to live freely. We are tied in so many ways to bondage of our own choosing, to debts that we impose upon ourselves. In the current tragedy along the southern coast of the United States, people are anguishing over their losses, human, physical and psychological. Who is to blame for this? God? The President? The government of Louisiana? The Commisison that wouldn’t strengthen the levees? The doctor who didn’t get to you on time? One can hardly blame people for lashing out when everything they worked for is suddenly washed away. These are terrible times and people throughout the world want to show their support and care for those who have lost so much. But people have choices, as do you and I. A white woman on the news last night, a caretaker for fifteen other people in her extended family said, “we have lost everything, but we are blessed. We have each other.” And a white-haired black man, sitting with his family of five in a shelter of some kind, said, “I’ve surrendered everything, but I haven’t surrendered God.” We live in a very litigious society in which we like to hold others responsible for things. “Who is to blame”? we want to know, when an accident occurs. “Someone has to pay,” we have been taught, not only by lawyers who are often dependent for their livelihood on such thinking, but by friends and colleagues who all too often interpret life from the point of view of debt. In a world of debt, nobody gets away with anything. In that dimension of life, which Jesus introduces, however, freedom is at the heart of everything—a freedom that permeates his life and death. At the cross, we who know all about indebtedness might expect him to cry, “Who is responsible for this? The Romans? The Jews? The Pharisees? The people who said and did nothing? My Father in heaven?” Instead, we hear him cry, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It is this emancipating perspective, the ability not to have to hold on to others with some chain of indebtedness which not only sets us free from bondage to hatred, jealousy, frustration and greed, but opens the future to us. And this perspective is at the heart of the Christian faith. Endless forgiveness makes no sense to our human way of thinking, but without it we can never live open-ended lives. Who are the people chained to us by virtue of what they have said and done? With whom do we get even in our fantasy world and dreams? Whom would we make pay if we could only figure out how to do it? Being a Christian involves us daily in a consideration of choices between an older, dead-end way of doing things and an eternally new, open-ended possibility. The story of Jesus’ death and resurrection reminds us that these issues were so critical for the one whom we call “Lord and Master” that he allowed those who insisted on blaming someone for trouble and danger and blasphemy in their world to take out their revenge upon him. And then, surprise of surprises, he forgave them for it—because he wanted to be free of hatred, and he wanted to set them free from guilt. In his example, we are given new life and new possibility. In his parable told to us today, we too are asked the questions: How do you want your life to turn out? Would you prefer to live in freedom or bondage? And, as with all good parables, there is a stress connected to the ending? The story is waiting for the kinds of choices you and I will make. Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus |
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