It's About the Money
Matthew 18:21-35
1st Sunday in Lent
February 22, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
There are a lot of things we can talk about in church. We can talk about the weather. We can talk about our families. We can talk about our health. We can even talk about how the weather has affected our family's health. We can even talk about politics and sex. The one thing we can't talk about is money.
Which is too bad, really, because a lot of life is about money. That's why Jesus talked so much about it, maybe more about it than about anything else. So by not talking about it we leave out a lot of life and a lot of what Jesus has to say.
Based on past experience, I can virtually guarantee that all I have to do is to mention money a couple of times over the course of two or three months and there will be murmurs of complaint—“All he ever talks about is money.”
We preachers have become so afraid of offending folks on the subject of money that we leave off speaking about it even when it's staring us right in the face. Take the parable in today's reading from Matthew for example.
It seems to be about forgiveness, certainly. And in part it is about forgiveness. The parable is introduced by a conversation about forgiveness. Peter wants to know if he should forgive his fellow Christian as many as seven times. Then Jesus tells this parable. So we know that Matthew suggests we read it as a parable about forgiveness. Okay.
But I must say first, we have an odd way of reading parables. We've done it for so long that we no longer regard it as strange, but consider this. Here's a parable that begins with the words, “Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle accounts, they brought to him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold.” We read that parable and we never even consider the possibility that it might be about money. The accountant is there. The lender and debtor are there. The amount of money involved is stated. But we never consider that it might be about money. We go straight to the frame story and assume that it's about forgiveness and only forgiveness, which, of course, we imagine has nothing to do with money.
Doesn't that seem odd to you? I sure does to me. So I would like for us to hesitate, to linger for just a few minutes over this parable to see if it has anything to say about money, before going on to what we're already convinced—by 1800 years' habit—it's really about.
So there is a king and it is a day for settling accounts, or as it was called in Anglo-Saxon England, Doomsday. And well it might be called that for the first slave that the parable mentions. This slave owes ten thousand talents (or "bags of gold" as our version has it), and the king wants his money back. Understandably so. What has the slave done with it? We aren't told. But he doesn't have it.
So the king acts according to the usual procedure in such cases and orders the slave and his family and possessions sold. The slave begs for more time and the king replies in a way that no one would expect: he forgives, that is releases him from, the debt. The slave walks away free of any obligation.
The slave, whose bottom line has just improved immensely and who should be feeling pretty good about the universe, meets another slave who owes him money and the same scene is played out again, for much lower stakes. But the debt-free slave does not share his good fortune, nor does he hear the cries of his fellow slave and has him and his family and possessions sold and he has him confined to debtors' prison until the debt should be discharged.
Slaves had little power of their own. They were unable to deal directly with this stingy fellow, so they complained to the king who had the slave turned over to the torturers.
To understand what is happening here, it's important to remember how parables work. They are drawn from social or natural scenes that would be familiar to the hearer. And certainly debt was a familiar part of the social landscape of Jesus' day. Because money was scarce and because taxes were paid in money, most people had to go into debt to pay their taxes, securing their loans with their land. This would work in good years, but bad years would come and, unable to pay off their loans, these folks would be forced off their land. There is some evidence that many of Jesus' followers were drawn from these displaced peasants. They understood debt. The terrible collection techniques, too, would have been all too familiar. Having to sell one's own children to stay afloat financially was common.
Parables are drawn from familiar scenes, but then there is a twist that causes us to question our assumptions, to see things in a new way. Often that takes the form of some absurd element introduced into the parable alongside the familiar. Shepherds, for example, do not leave their sheep and go looking for strays—that's what makes the parable of the lost sheep so powerful.
Here the strange element is the first debt: ten thousand talents. If you're like me, you have no idea of what kind of money we're talking about here unless you look it up. So that's what I did. A talent is a thousand denarii. Well, that's nice, but not too helpful, since I don't know right off the top of my head what a denarius is either. So I looked that up, too. A denarius was a coin that was worth the wages that a laborer would earn in a day, say, in modern equivalents, about fifty dollars. So a talent was worth about $50,000. And ten thousand talents? $500,000,000.
That's a pretty good sized chunk of change, by our standards at least. But that isn't the half of it. The Roman Empire was what economists describe as vastly under-capitalized. Money was scarce. Ten thousand talents was starting to approach the entire annual tax revenues of a small province, say Judea. So we have a king who has loaned his slave money amounting to the equivalent of, say, the annual tax revenues of the state of Iowa.
It's too big to be believable. Kings didn't have that kind of money and, if they did they certainly didn't loan it to a slave. If that weren't strange enough, the king forgives the debt, simply writes it off because of what? because the slave begs? Can you imagine the bank doing that because you couldn't pay a mortgage or car payment?
The parable challenges our thinking. It invites us to imagine something nearly unimaginable: life without debt. It's almost unthinkable. At the end of 2014, Americans owed over 800 billion dollars in credit card debt. That's actually up three percent in the last year. Even more staggering is that Americans owe 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt.1 This is money borrowed against future earnings that may or may not ever happen, since nearly 44% of college graduates are underemployed, many because they have massive student loan debt to pay.2
The parable asks us to imagine life without any of that. Imagine a life without being indebted. A life free from the obligation to pay, or else. Imagine a life in which we didn't work for the bank, to discharge a debt, but because there is meaningful work to do that puts our best talents to work. Imagine a life in which our behavior toward each other was not driven by debt but by love. Imagine a life without debt.
Imagine a world without debt. We might be able to dream it, but it's hard to imagine.
The first slave had an invitation to do just that. The king erased his debt, gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card so that he could leave, not just his own debts, but the entire debt system behind. And instead of taking the king up on that offer, the slave figured that he had advanced within the system and he could now make it work to his advantage. So when he ran into the fellow who owed him money, he pressed his advantage within the system. And so, naturally enough, the king concluded that he didn't really want to be debt free, that is free of the debt system, so he put him back into the system and packed him off to the torturers.
The slave can either live in the debt system or not. It's true for us as well. We can either live in the debt system or not. What we we can't do is have it both ways, claiming freedom for ourselves and laying an obligation on others.
There is evidence that this was real for the early church. It wasn't at all uncommon for a church to buy a slave's freedom. Slaves often became slaves because of debt. The church operated a debtor's safety net to rescue those whose lives were being destroyed by the debt system.
Now we know this is a parable about forgiveness. The context tells us that. And that's what we've always thought, anyway. What reading the parable on its own terms has let us do is to see that the parable sets forgiveness within a framework of freedom from the debt system.
Have you noticed how much of the language around forgiveness is financial language? Someone has done me wrong, so they owe me. And I can settle accounts. I can pay them back, maybe even with interest.
We even think that God plays that game. How many of us, I wonder, have pictured the book of life at the last judgment as a ledger?
It's clear from what Jesus tells Peter that we are to forgive each other, if for no other reason than because we have been forgiven ourselves. But if we put it like this, "Because God has forgiven us, we owe it to God to forgive each other," we're still in the debt system. Jesus invites us to step out of it altogether. We forgive because, having been freed from the debt system, we are no longer able not to forgive each other—we're living under an entirely different system.
Jesus certainly preached forgiveness, but forgiveness was part of a much broader theme of debt relief of all kinds. Over the course of centuries we have diminished Jesus' teaching. Maybe it's because we wanted rich donors in the church and rich donors don't like the idea of debt relief and we were afraid we'd scare them off. Maybe it's because the church is run by us middle class folk, and we like the idea of social relations based on contracts and obligations. Maybe we just can't believe that Jesus meant what he said and God dreams of our freedom from debt, not only as an obligation but also way of living in the universe.
That's a shame, really, because what Jesus is offering is freedom. That freedom is about a lot of things. It's about peace within our relationships. It's about reconciliation. It's about freedom from our own past and its pains and failures. But it's also about our lives in the material world. It's about why we do what we do, and, yes, it is about the money.
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Chen, Tim. “American Household Credit Card Debt Statistics: 2014 - NerdWallet.” Cited 19 February 2015. Online: http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-credit-card-debt-household/.↩
Bowyer, Chris. “Overqualified and Underemployed: The Job Market Waiting for Graduates.” Cited 19 February 2015. Online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thecollegebubble/2014/08/15/overqualified-and-underemployed-the-job-market-waiting-for-graduates/.↩
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