A Parable Proposes an Unlimited Economy of
Grace.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Common
Lectionary—Year A
(reprinted from 2011) By
Dennis Ormseth
Thirteenth
Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 103:[1-7] 8-13
Genesis 50:15-21
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35
With a compelling primary theme of
forgiveness, the readings for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost seemingly
offer little of direct relevance to our concern with care of creation. To be
sure, the attention given to the church community’s ethos in the Gospel and the
second lesson can prove salutary for any effort that requires corporate discipline
and generosity of spirit. The emphasis on forgiveness might be particularly
helpful, specifically, in strengthening the interpersonal relationships of a
congregation that seeks to model the kind of face-to-face web of neighborhood
relationships we proposed in our comment on last Sunday’s readings.
Can
forgiveness be extended to the relationship between congregation and
neighborhood?
F.
LeRon Shults and Steven J. Sandage illustrate the point nicely in The Faces
of Forgiveness: Searching for Wholeness
and Salvation. They interpret Matthew 18:23-35 in terms of a “facial
hermeneutics of intersubjectivity” that reveals a community “struggling with
problems of power in their way of ordering their life together and needed
instruction and exhortation on manifesting grace toward each other.” The
offending slave of the parable, they suggest, shows no “positive movement
toward forgiveness in the sense of therapeutic transformation.” The horizon of
his understanding needs to be extended “both temporally and spatially so that
he could imaginatively envision his own place in the broader human community”
(Shults and Sandage, pp.237-39). Any such extension of understanding within the
community, we can hope, would contribute to a healthier dynamic in the
relationship between a congregation and its neighborhood.
See how
God’s goodness has cosmic dimensions!
Encouragement
for going beyond this modest result to reflect further on these texts in search
of specific direction for care of creation might nonetheless be inferred from
reading the Psalm appointed for the day. Giving thanks for God’s goodness
(“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits—who forgives
all your iniquity”), the psalmist measures God’s “steadfast love” with cosmic
dimensions: “For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his
steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west,
so far he removes our transgressions from us” (103:11-12). The psalmist speaks
of the Creator’s love: “For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are
dust” (103:14, not included in the appointed verses). Is there, possibly, a
cosmic significance, then, to the practice of forgiveness?
Could
this tyrant reflect God’s image?
Furthermore,
the parable with which Jesus’ exhorts the undoubtedly astonished Peter to
unlimited acts of forgiveness is focused rather less clearly on interpersonal
relationships than Shults and Sandage tend to view it. Rather, the frames of
reference are the economic, social, and political relationships characteristic
of imperial rule. As Warren Carter observes,
The king and his reign are usually understood
as images of God and God’s empire (18:35). But the gospel has established that
God’s empire manifested in Jesus is generally not like the death-bringing and
oppressive reign of Rome and typical kings (17:25; 20:25). Yet the parable
evokes precisely this scenario! The king is a tyrant who, like Rome (see
18:24), collects excessive tribute, and in the end inflicts vicious torture on
a servant (Carter, Matthew and the Margins:
A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, pp. 370-71).
Thus, the scope within which the act of
forgiveness is being considered has been expanded to encompass “affairs of
state,” in the phrase of Bernard Brandon Scott.
And there is even more. There is a striking
contradiction in this parable’s presentation by Matthew: It evokes for the
reader that “the familiar image of God as king, but the imperial scenario of
exploitative and oppressive reign . . . indicates that this figure cannot be
God. The audience can discern that God’s empire is not like this, is not
oppressive, does not deal in self-serving ‘mercy’. . , does not forgive just
once only to revoke it.” Nevertheless, to the reader’s great surprise, at the
conclusion of the parable, Jesus insists that his “heavenly Father” will do exactly
what this king does to his servant. The frame of the parable has been enlarged to
embrace the huge and even monstrous question of the relationship of God to the
great conflicts of human history.
Is this
not unjust fiscal policy?
Interpreters struggle to thread their way though
the thicket of this text. Scott is helpful in providing a reading that does not
require strict narrative consistency to reach its result. “A chaotic situation
entraps the audience,” he notes:
The king’s brutal action forces a hearer to
reconsider the consistency building that has held the story together. By identifying
with the fellow servants in reporting the servant, a hearer bears with them
responsibility for unleashing the king’s wrath. By bringing vengeance on the
servant, the fellow servants (and the hearer) have left their own situation in
jeopardy. The demand for “like for
like,” for apparent justice, has left them exposed. If a king can take back his
forgiveness, who is safe? (Scott, Hear Then the Parable, A Commentary
on the Parables of Jesus, pp. 278).
“Who, indeed?” we might ask in our times of
massive public indebtedness generated by the policies and behavior of a global
financial elite. While the fellow servants might have avoided the moral hazard
of “bailing out” the king’s lead tax farmer, in the phrase of our day, they
have lent legitimacy to the crushing disintegration of the economic order that
they themselves depend on for their well being. All of them have become
inescapably more vulnerable to the harsh policy of the king who will destroy
the servant’s business, his family, and his position of power within the
community, in the name of accountability.
But the disturbance goes even deeper, Scott
observes. The fellow servants’ reporting is like the first servant’s own
activity. In the end, the fellow servants have behaved the same way he did,
namely, they failed to forgive and they demanded punishment. And so the
audience is drawn ineluctably “into a threatening world whose boundaries and
guidelines begin to dissolve,” and the hearers are “swept into a vortex for
chaos” in which they fail as the servant fails: they, too, “have failed to
forgive.” The narrative thus leads its audience to a “parabolic experience of
evil, not intentional evil but implicit, unanticipated, systemic evil . . .
where the only option left is repentance” (Ibid., p. 279-80).
How might the
scenario of this parable have gone differently?
The audience’s
conundrum serves to raise the question, beyond the telling of the parable,
regarding how things might have gone differently? How might this terrifying
result of the king’s need for accountability be avoided? Is it really
conceivable that the king might have forgiven his debtor not just once, but a
second and third time, or even “seven times seven times,” as Jesus set the
standard for Peter? In a less troubled but real world, of course, the situation
could have been avoided entirely if the debtor paid his debt, with appropriate
interest. Or being unable to do that, on account of whatever combination of
factors, perhaps he might have succeeded in winning the king’s assent to a plan
that would have allowed him to continue service of his co-servants debt, with
which he might, over time, pay what he owes. Contemporary readers of Matthew’s
Gospel will recognize a set of problems that confront us daily in a time of
extended financial crisis.
Such leniency on the part of king and servant
alike would have the advantage, it might be argued, of allowing the others to
share in the good king’s generosity. It seems that the servant’s better course
might have been not only to encourage his master in this creative course of
action, but to demonstrate its value and power by first taking the initiative
himself, even risking his own wealth, in order to show the others that such a
generous spirit works to the well-being of all. Couldn’t the king then indeed
be the good king of God’s empire, on whom one could rely for a properly
positive analogy for an infinitely forgiving God? Indeed, might one not quite
appropriately imagine that the king of the parable is truly Jesus’ heavenly
father, the creator of all things?
How can we give
account of our care for the Earth?
If that were taken to
be the case, then the servant who was called to give account is clearly the
human being tasked with responsible care of the creation, and we have a parable
very much concerned with care of creation. Ideally, the servant could report
that his care has indeed enhanced the creation, so responsible has he been in exercising
his responsibility. But failing that, again for whatever reason, would it not
be appropriate for him, relying on his king’s generous mercy, to set forth in a
great venture to restore what has been lost, drawing along with him in this
great project of restoration of all those who are in turn accountable to him,
so that they could know and rejoice with the king that not only his original
gift was being honored, but that with each successive allowance of space and
time to further amend their destructive ways, the glory of that creation might
be enhanced far beyond its original state, now understood to have been good
enough for starters, but hardly perfect?
We can be
participants in a web of creation that is re-given in every moment of its
journey through time by an infinitely loving God.
The reader will hopefully understand and
appreciate what this new spinning of the parable is meant to accomplish: as an
alternative to the “parabolic experience of evil” set out above, we propose a
“parabolic experience of good,” as it were—indeed, an intentional, explicit,
anticipated, and whole reality of created goodness, in which both king and
servants participate with great joy! This, we would suggest, is what becomes
possible when Jesus is seen to be truly the servant of creation, who does the
will of his heavenly father, the creator of all things. God is indeed infinitely
gracious in giving the creation for the benefit of humanity, but only as
participants in the whole web of creation that is re-given in every moment of
its journey through time. Precisely in responding to this infinite love of the
creation by properly caring for the creation his father loves, the servant of
creation works out the role that the unforgiving servant refused. Now that he
has been introduced in the shadow of his antithesis, this true servant will
appear in other parables of Jesus’ telling in Matthew, such as “the Faithful
and Wise Servant” (Matthew 24:45-51), “A Man Entrusts Property” (Matthew
21:33-46), and “A Householder Went Out Early” (Matt. 20:1-15), and, of course,
in many parables in the other Gospels.
The new parable
proposes an alternative economy of unlimited grace.
The parable proposes
an alternative economy of unlimited grace as a clue to understanding what
forgiveness is about, and why it must be unlimited. Our resetting of the
parable proposes a narrative of the relationship between the human servant of
God and God’s creation that envisions its restoration as a possible outcome of
a radically forgiving spirit. Support for this re-setting can be found in two provocatively
different essays. Thomas Friedman has argued in his Hot, Flat, and Crowded
(Release 2.0 Edition), that the current financial crisis and the environmental
crisis are derived from one cause. As he puts it, the Great Recession that
began in 2008 was a “warning heart attack” that we ignore at our great peril:
. . . while they might not appear on the
surface to have been related, the destabilization of both the Market and Mother
Nature had the same root causes. That is why Bear Stearns and the polar bears
both faced extinction at the same time. That is why Citibank, Iceland’s banks,
and the ice banks of Antarctica all melted down at the same time. The same
recklessness undermined all of them. I am talking about a broad breakdown in
individual and institutional responsibility by key actors in both the natural
world and the financial world—on top of a broad descent into dishonest
accounting, which allowed individuals, banks, and investment firms to
systematically conceal or underprice risks, privatize gains, and socialize
losses without the general public grasping what was going on (Friedman,
pp.6-7).
This insight is strong reason to attend, as
this reading does, to the origins of the practice of forgiveness of sin in the
practice of forgiveness of debt, as the phrase “forgive us our debts” in what
used to be the standard version of the Lord’s Prayer serves to remind us. Its
implications for the current “affairs of state,” not just its psychology of the
failure to forgive as Jesus would have us forgive, are clear.
Our current financial
crisis is a crisis also of the environment
If the financial
crisis is also a crisis of the environment, are they not together also a crisis
of the creation? If our reading finds surprising resonance with such current
“affairs of state,” however, it also remains faithful to the theological concern
for forgiveness as a relationship between God and humankind. In his discussion
of the doctrine of salvation in The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley
Hart observes that Christian theology effects a conversion “of the story of
wrath into the story of mercy,” replacing “the myth of sacrifice as economy
with the narrative of sacrifice as a ceaseless outpouring of gift and
restoration in an infinite motion exceeding every economy.” Without developing
his argument in full, we see its relevance to our reading in the following
comment:
The sacrifice that
Christian theology upholds is inseparable from the gift: it underwrites not the
stabilizing regime of prudential violence, but the destabilizing extravagance
of giving and giving again, of declaring love and delight in the exchange of songs
of peace, outside of every calculation of debt or power. The gift of the
covenant—which in a sense implores Israel to respond—belongs to the Trinity’s
eternal “discourse” of love, which eternally “invites” and offers regard and
recognition; it precedes and exceeds, then, every economy of power, because all
“credit” is already given and exhausted, because the love it declares and
invokes is prior to, and the premise of, all that is given (Hart, pp. 350).
Jesus
the Lord, the Servant of Creation, restores the Creator’s gift and offers it
anew for our responsible care as an act of forgiveness;
God’s balances, he
concludes, “are not righted by an act of immolation, the debt is not discharged
by the destruction of the victim and his transformation into credit; rather,
God simply continues to give, freely, inexhaustible, regardless of rejection. God
gives and forgives; he fore-gives and gives again” (Ibid., p. 351). Just so,
Jesus the Lord, the Servant of Creation, restores the Creator’s gift and offers
it anew for our responsible care as an act of forgiveness; those who join in
care of creation share in that act, as often as it takes place.
For
additional care for creation reflections on the overall themes of the
lectionary lessons for the month by Trisha K Tull, Professor
Emerita of Old Testament, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and
columnist for The Working Preacher,
visit: http://www.workingpreacher.org/columnist_home.aspx?author_id=288