Luke 17:7-10, Matthew 18:23-34
Welcome! Today we talk about what it means to be a good
servant. Now, as a culture, as a people, we have a really hard time even
understanding or relating to this, let alone living it. The Greek word used for
servant is doulos, which really means
“slave.” In America we still haven’t recovered from the centuries of cruelty of
racially-based slavery that were an important part of our history. To us, any
thought of slavery is repugnant, disgusting, so much so that it is difficult
for us to really enter into Biblical discussions that involve servants without
imposing our modern types of thinking on top of it. This is a form of emotional
baggage, and we need to overcome it if we are to understand the two parables
that we will look at today.
How did people become slaves? You might be a prisoner of war. The Roman Empire was constantly expanding, and although they didn’t make everyone they captured in an area into slaves, they did do this to some. You might be a slave simply because your parents were – in this way you were born into slavery. You might be a slave because you were in debt and unable to pay it off, or if you were a child, your parents were in this situation. In such cases, the judge would often sell you into slavery to help pay for your debt. And you might be a slave because you willingly sold yourself into slavery. This last method may be hardest for us to understand, but although a slave was expected to work hard, generally they were treated reasonably well; they would have a roof over their head and food to eat, and for some people in bad situations, this was a marked improvement over their current state.
Now the terms of slavery varied, but in some cases it was for a fixed number of years. Sometimes benefits were negotiated and thrown in; some people secured an education for themselves or their children in exchange for their servitude. Some people even used a term of slavery under a Roman citizen as a way to position themselves for eventual citizenship themselves. Being a Roman citizen was a big deal, as it provided many benefits and guarantees over that of a non-citizen. Some slaves had jobs that we would consider “professional,” including tutors/teachers, physicians, and managers/administrators. Most however, had more menial duties, including the one in the parable we will look at now.
“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’” – Luke 17:7-10
Throughout the world, Americans unfortunately have the reputation of being almost the direct opposite of this parable. Some of it may be stereotyping, but I have seen enough in my limited travels firsthand to suspect that our reputation is not entirely undeserved. On multiple occasions, both here in the US and overseas, I have seen Americans at airline ticket counters acting as if they were kings and that the world should bow down to them. And you can tell by watching the ticket agents that they see this kind of thing all the time; they are well-trained in how to deal with them. Yet you can also tell that they don’t like it; you will see them communicate without words to their co-workers after the “storm” goes away, something like, “Yep. Another one of those. Glad that’s finally over (until the next one, that is).”
It’s not just Americans, though. (I don’t say this to get us off the hook, but to say that we aren’t alone.) I see this as a professor in my classes from time to time. One of the worst experiences I ever had was a few years ago in a summer online class in which, for whatever reason, I had multiple students from one particular country who refused even to read carefully my syllabus and other key instructions, acting as if they were just suggestions, and believing as if they didn’t ever really apply to them. By the end of that term, I was half-ready to look for another profession.
But let’s look more carefully at this parable. This is apparently a family who has a single servant. This servant works hard in the fields during the day, and then in the evening has to go back and prepare a meal for his master. Only after his master has eaten and is satisfied may he then eat himself. Our daughter Sarah described something a little like this in her visit to Nepal; during their trek, there were places you could have a meal prepared; in these places, the cook would prepare and serve the meal before eating any himself (or his family). On one occasion, Sarah’s group came back rather late for their meal, and she told me she felt bad because the cook and his family had to wait. But wait they did, with an attitude like that of a good servant as described in this parable.
Now the audience of most of Jesus’ recorded teachings included three groups, His disciples, crowds who came to see Jesus (mostly poorer people who probably would have loved to have a servant of their own), and the Pharisees and others of the well-to-do power elite. All three groups would have understood that well, of course, that is what a servant does.
Some of us may struggle with this parable because this sounds hard, even harsh. We think the master should treat his servant better, maybe. But that says more about us and how we have lost the appetite for hard work than it does about the parable. To Jesus’ listeners, and to most in the world even today, nobody would think about fairness, or reasonableness, or anything like that. The servant is a servant – he needs to serve. It is in the master’s own interest to work the servant hard but not so hard that he falls ill or dies, but that is it. There is nothing exceptional about having to work all day and also into the evening before you can yourself eat. We might think maybe the servant could speak up, and try to negotiate something a little easier, but Jesus’ listeners, and again, most of the world today, would have thought such a suggestion to be absolutely ridiculous. The servant serves the master. Whatever the master wants, the servant does to the best of his ability, without questioning, without grumbling, without hesitating, without back talk, without anything like this.
Would the servant expect a thank you? Of course not! Would the servant expect to be receive special praise for simply doing what he was told to do? Never! Now again, a parable is something that presents a thought by coming alongside with a word picture or short story. Our parable here is this picture of the servant who simply serves, without seeking self needs first, without expecting special praise or special handling, who simply does what is asked of him. This picture comes alongside… us. If we say we are servants of God, we should look and behave and preform a lot like this servant in the story. We shouldn’t seek praise, certainly not the praise of men. We shouldn’t expect thanks, although that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give thanks when others join us in serving the Lord.
By the way, the Greek is even more strong than just expecting a thank you. It’s more like asking, “Would the master owe the servant thanks? Would the master be in debt to give the servant thanks?” Of course not!
When it says, Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? More literally, this is “Will he thank the servant because he did his duty?” And this word duty comes up again a verse later when Jesus says we should simply ourselves say “We have only done our duty.”
“Duty” is one of those words that have fallen far out of favor. Ask yourself when was the last time you used the word? Except in the military, the word is hardly used at all today. Another example is the Girl Scout pledge; it once had the phrases “do my duty” and “obey”, but both those terms are no longer in the pledge. (Boy scouts still mostly have these terms, but there is an alternate pledge going around that no longer mentions God and also removes the phrase “do my duty.”)
So if we categorized people as primarily (1) serve God with the attitude of an unworthy servant (2) serve God but with a worse attitude and (3) don’t serve God, note how the point of the parable is don’t be a #2 or a #3; the hypothetical servant who wants to eat first is really a #3; the person who expects a thank you is a #2.
Do you want an “acid test” to see how you are doing in this area? Analyze your prayers to God. Now God welcomes our prayers for whatever concerns and problems we are going through – I’m not saying to stop those prayers – but our prayers should also be of the “Here I am, send me” or “give me strength to serve you better” variety. Look at the prayers of Paul and you see this again and again. In Romans 1 he prays that he would be able to come to them so as to help them be established. In Romans 15 he prays that his service would be acceptable to the saints. In Ephesians 6 he prays that God would give him the words he needs to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. In I Thess. 3 he prays that he would be able to see them again and supply what is lacking in their faith. In II Thess. 3 he asks them to pray for him that the word of the Lord would spread rapidly and be glorified. Mostly, though, he doesn’t pray for himself at all, but prays for those he is writing to. Common themes include that God would help them to live godly lives, in a manner worthy of the Lord, sanctified, with hearts unblamable in holiness, etc. Another repeated prayer is that God would strengthen them. Other themes are that they would know God better, discern His will, know His love, know His power, know His peace, know the hope of His calling, and understand the riches we have in Him. These are servant prayers. All Paul wants is for His master to receive glory. Paul wants no hint of glory for himself. We see this in his prayers and in his actions.
How do we get from a #3 or #2 to a #1? My first answer is to know whom you serve. Remind yourself of the truths of who Christ is, what He has done for us, and why He is worthy of every ounce of our energy to humbly serve Him. It’s not a chore to serve God; it’s a high honor! It’s a privilege. Imagine the white house page who expects to help some assistant to an assistant to a member of the House of Representatives but who instead finds out he will directly assist the President of the United States! Well, that’s nothing compared to us! We get to serve the King of kings and Lord of lords! Even when it’s hard, we should find joy and even be in awe of the fact that we get to serve Love Himself!
My second answer is to get out there and serve! If you are not sure what that should look like, come talk to one of the pastors; we would like nothing more than to help you discover what God would be pleased for you to do. We are aware of many needs within our body, and we also have many ideas on how to share your faith with those who don’t know Him. Please, pour out your lives as an offering to the Lord. Do it not to seek praise, but because He is our Master. He has bought us. We truly are His servants, His slaves. In love, He bought us with His life. In love, we lay down our lives to serve Him, to obey Him, to do our duty for Him.
Let’s go on to our second parable.
“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 bags of gold 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. – Matt. 18:23-25
So how much money is this? Well, if you thought student college debt was bad, wait until you hear this! Literally this is 10,000 talents. A talent over time ranged from 6 to 10 thousand denarii, where a denarius was a common laborer’s daily wage. In today’s numbers, assuming the person made $8 per hour for 8 hours, 10,000 talents works out to $4 to $6 billion dollars! It goes without saying that Jesus chose a number that His listeners would identify as a ridiculously enormous sum, one so large that no one man could possibly get that far behind in debt.
By the way, under Jewish Law, it was forbidden to sell a person’s wife and children to pay a debt. So Jesus is telling a story with a Gentile king. This makes sense, because at that time, there were no Jewish kings (except for Jesus, but you know what I mean). Jesus is once again creating a story that His audience can relate to.
“At this 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. – Matt. 18:26-27
When you realize just how large this debt is, it makes this part of the parable actually a little humorous. When the servant says, just be patient and I will pay it all back, he is being absolutely ridiculous. He owes between 6 and 10 million denarii. Even if he gave his entire days’ wage towards paying this back (and assuming no interest was accruing on the debt), it will take him between 16 and 27 thousand years to pay this off! Even if he was still alive today, working on paying this off, he would only be about 10% of the way there. To give you one more way of looking at this, the Greek financial crisis has been all over the news lately. The issue is that Greek’s debt is so large that financial experts believe they will never be able to pay it off. How much is their debt? Well, it is between 100% and 200% of their GDP (gross domestic product). To put our servant’s debt in similar terms, his debt is between 1,600,000% and 2,700,000% of his GDP. So his statement “be patient with me and I will pay back everything” goes down as one of the most ridiculous statements made by anyone in the entire Bible.
Now that we understand the size of this debt, think about how the master took pity on him and canceled the debt. This is an unimaginably huge thing! Again, nothing about this parable is particularly realistic. But that’s the point. Jesus is going to use this parable as an analogy to us. Our sin is our debt. And just as this servant is absolutely unable to pay back his debt, and is even ridiculous to think so, so are we absolutely unable to fix our sin problem on our own. No amount of time, no amount of good deeds, will even make a dent in our position. Just like this servant, we are absolutely sunk unless our Master forgives us our debt, and that is exactly what Christ has done, by going to the cross for our sin. He has paid the price with His life, thereby canceling our debt forever.
I do want to remind you, though, that parables simply present a story alongside a Biblical truth; they are not allegories. It would be a big mistake in this parable to equate the king with God, as we shall see in a little bit.
“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. 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 it back.’ – Matt. 18:28-29
So this is 100 denarii. In modern money, this is about $6400. Not a small sum, but a lot less than a new car loan. (And a lot less than the average college student loan debt.) Note that in this case, the servant’s statement to be patient and he will pay it back is entirely reasonable. For a single person living on minimum wage it might take a few years to do it, but it is certainly doable.
Notice the extreme violence of the servant, choking the one with in debt. This part of the parable and the part before are mostly very parallel, but this detail stands out as a significant difference. The behavior of this servant is inexcusable.
“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 outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. – Matt. 18:30-31
Sometimes when people were thrown into prison for lack of paying a debt, the reason was that it was suspected that they were holding out, not telling the truth about some extra money they had hidden away. If this was suspected, the one to whom the debt was owed could request that the person be tortured to determine this information. This was especially true in the area of tax collection.
In any case, the other servants were outraged. I love that Jesus put this into the parable. It’s actually very clever storytelling. We the readers (hearers) are drawn even deeper into the story because we completely identify with the other servants; we would do the same thing. And so now, Jesus’ hearers (and us) can’t wait to find out what happened when they told the king!
“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 handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. – Matt. 18:32-34
And so the readers or hearers get the resolution they feel is appropriate! Of course the servant was wicked! Of course he deserves to be taken to task for treating his fellow servant so poorly! Is the response appropriate? Well, maybe a little harsh. Actually, a lot harsh, right? How in the world is torturing going to help procure the billions of dollars this person owes? As we have already established, he can never pay it back.
So I can just imagine the listeners thinking “Good story, Jesus. But why did You tell it to us?”
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” – Matt. 18:35
Anticipating their response, Jesus gives this devastating zinger. Can this really be true, Jesus? Is it even really similar? Well, yes, it is. I am reminded of the parable that the prophet Nathan told to David. Let’s look at it a moment because there are similar parallels on multiple levels. Recall the situation: David basically stole Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and had Uriah killed so that he could keep her. So we pick up the story in 2 Samuel 12.
The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said,
“There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich
man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing
except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him
and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his
arms. It was like a daughter to him. – 2 Samuel 12:1-3
“Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man
refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the
traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to
the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.” – 2 Samuel 12:4
Similar to our parable in Matthew,
we have been set up. This is an outrageous act, just as having the forgiven
servant being so cruel and unforgiving to his fellow servant was an outrageous
act. And in this passage in 2 Samuel, we see the listener’s response:
David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan,
“As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for
that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.” – 2
Samuel 12:5-6
And now, the trap is set. Time for
the zinger:
Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man! This is what
the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I
delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house to you, and
your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all
this had been too little, I would have given you even more. – 2 Samuel 12:7-8
Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is
evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his
wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now,
therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me
and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’ – 2 Samuel 12:9-10
Well, let’s go back to Matthew 18. Jesus’ listeners and we ourselves have joined in with the fellow servants who found the unforgiving servant’s behavior outrageous. And we have heard the king’s harsh judgment, and although we might find it harsh, we definitely agree that some kind of significant punishment was totally deserved.
But then Jesus says,
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” – Matt. 18:35
Now, I’m not sure Jesus’ listeners fully understood the application, because they didn’t yet really understand the gospel. Jesus hadn’t yet died on the cross, and so they didn’t yet understand that they really had been forgiven something like four billion dollars. I don’t think they even understood that they were in “debt”, that the sin they had committed had put them impossibly deep in debt to God, that they were powerless to “pay” for their own sins. They were living in the times of the Temple sacrifices, but they didn’t understand the limited forgiveness this system offered, nor did they understand that it would come to an end. So I would put this parable in the category of one that they would only fully understand after Jesus had died and risen from the dead, only after they understood what that really meant.
But we should understand this, and it does apply to us. Do we know exactly how God the Father will treat us if we hold on to unforgiveness? No. But we know without a doubt that He will be very displeased with us.
In both parables, we have been given some non-simple things to do. In the first, we have been told to view ourselves as humble servants, willing to do anything and everything we can for our Savior, doing so without expecting a thank you and without putting our own needs and desires above that of God. In the second, we have seen that we have been forgiven the equivalent of a kingly sum, and that Jesus has paid the price for our rescue with His own life. Because of this, we should be quick to forgive anyone (our brothers and sisters) who has wronged us.
Now of course we shouldn’t try to do these things in our own strength, but in humble dependence on God. In point of fact, even the act of forgiving others is one of the tasks our Master desires us to do, so we should simply commit to do it. Forgiveness can be quite difficult, but with God’s help it is never impossible. And we would be wise to forgive sooner rather than later, because harboring unforgiveness tends to make it grow over time; forgiving quickly prevents the growth of bitterness and helps prevent the devil from gaining a foothold. Finally, we need to remember that forgiveness is usually not a one-time action, but an agreement to stay ever-vigilant so as to remain committed to having forgiven the person who offended us regardless of where our thoughts drift to, regardless of whether the person does something to remind us again of the old wrongs, regardless of whether it is easy or extremely difficult for us to keep on forgiving that person for those past offenses. Forgiveness in many ways is almost a kind of vow between you and God to stay committed to that one-time decision to forgive.
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