Too Much Debt!
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
September 14,
2008
Understanding the parables of Jesus can be a challenge sometimes. First of all, Jesus warns his hearers that his meaning is not necessarily obvious; as he puts it on occasion, “He who has ears, let him hear!” Often those who hear him don’t understand very well; in the gospel of Mark, for example, the disciples only understand his meaning when he explains it to them afterwards, away from the crowds. More than that, these stories were told two millennia ago to peasants in a backwater of the Roman Empire. They lived in a world we no longer inhabit, with kings, emperors and vast kingdoms. The notion that they might have an opportunity to vote for the leaders they preferred or influence the actions of their governments would have been incomprehensible to them. Most of them were quite poor and probably illiterate, and many of them were barely managing to make a living under very difficult conditions.
Sometimes it helps to retell the stories a little closer to our own context so we can grasp the gist a little better. Here’s a retelling of the Parable of the Ungrateful Servant from Matthew which we read earlier in the original, this one by Edward Beutner:
It should be obvious by now how the kingdom of heaven compares with this one drug lord who decides to settle up accounts with his dealers:
On day one this dealer is escorted in who, as it turns out, is ten million dollars in arrears. Since the dealer couldn't come up with the cash, the drug lord decides to recoup his losses by arranging to have the dealer sold: lock, stock and barrel; wife, children and home.
Faced with these prospects, the dealer gets down on his knees, grovels and pleads with the drug lord, "Please, please: if you will show patience with me, I promise I will show up with everything I owe you, down to the last penny." The drug lord (hardly famous for compassion) lets him off the hook, and even writes off the ten million as a bad debt.
Having barely escaped [suffering only a loss of face], that same dealer now has to go face-to-face with one of his own underlings who owes him a hundred dollars. "Pay up, and pay up now," he [demands], all the while holding the man in a collar choke till he collapses. The underling gasps and begs, "I promise I will pay you back; just be patient with me."
But the dealer couldn't care less; no, he turns his back on the slacker and orders him to be pimp for his own family until they earn enough to repay the debt.
Meanwhile, his fellow dealers got word of all these goings-on, and everybody on the street got very jittery. Some see to it that word of this gets delivered back to the drug lord, a blow-by-blow account.
That did it. The drug lord calls the dealer on the carpet: "You [expletive deleted]," he lets him have it, "I wrote off your whole debt after you begged me on your knees. Since when do you think you can get away with not extending the same 'consideration' I extended to you?" In fact, the drug lord gets so enraged that he hands the dealer over to his strong-arms, who [as we all know] have ways of persuading a dealer to pay back every last dime of his debt.
—Matthew 18:23-34, rev. EFB[1]
Now we’re back on more familiar ground. Of course, most of us have nothing to do with people like the drug lord and his subordinates, but we can see them on television; and after all, Jesus’ hearers also had nothing to do with the world of kings and high-rolling tax-farmers. But the parable would have evoked a similar emotional distance, a feeling of fear and disdain for these adversarial, crooked, alien and dangerous rulers who had all too much influence over the lives of those who were listening to Jesus.
On the other hand, this retelling doesn’t actually clear up all the puzzles about the way Matthew tells the story. Remember, the parable is told in response to a question from Peter; here’s the frame in which the parable is told:
Matt 18:21 Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" 22Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. 23"For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves.”
… and the story goes on from there. The problem is that it doesn’t seem much like the Kingdom of Heaven in this particular snake pit. If this is supposed to illustrate forgiving seventy-seven times – which means, essentially, as many times as you’re asked to forgive – it’s not a very good example. The ungrateful servant doesn’t forgive even once, despite having been forgiven, and the master forgives exactly once, and then he takes it back, too. Some Kingdom of God! Some Beloved Community! More like the world we know only too well. So I think that when Jesus told this story he had a sly, mischievous look in his eye, as if to say, “This is what the Kingdom of God is like – Not!” He was about to head down to Jerusalem for Passover where he would come up against the rulers of his people and their overlords, and if we listen closely we can hear him saying something like this: “When the wealthy and the rulers get into trouble, they get bailed out; but don’t expect them to extend any consideration to you under the same circumstances. In the end, though, it won’t work out for them, and there is a better way for you to live together in community than living as masters and slaves.”
We could, if we chose, extend the application of the parable into a political and economic direction in our world. There are many corporations and individuals today who are overextended like the ungrateful servant in our parable or the drug dealer in the contemporary version, and it is true that bailouts have been available to the biggest players in ways that are not available to lesser borrowers like homeowners. It is clear that many people, acting as individuals or as mangers of institutions, made very bad choices in taking on debts or investments whose real nature they didn’t understand. There has been a great deal of speculation on all sides by lenders, borrowers and investors, and there have also been exploitive mortgages peddled primarily to reap commissions rather than to serve home owners. We can only hope that lessons will be learned without too much damage to individuals and to the institutions of our economy.
We might also mention another sort of indebtedness, into which one may sink when falling just a bit short of money before the next paycheck comes out – payday loans. Here’s a story of one person trapped in a cycle of debt by Bob Dreihaus in the New York Times recently:
Tracey Minda [of Cincinnati] needed cash to buy clothes and school supplies for her 6-year-old son before the 2006 school year. A preschool teacher and single mother, she was broke after making her mortgage and car payments.
The quick and easy answer was a $400 loan from a payday lender. When payment was due two weeks later, she needed another loan to keep afloat. Nine months and 18 loans later, she was hundreds of dollars in debt and paying the lender about $120 in monthly fees from her $1,300 in wages.
“Once I was in the cycle for a few months, I couldn’t get out of it,” said Ms. Minda, who was on the brink of losing her car and her home in Washington Courthouse, Ohio, before turning to family members to pay off her debt.
Ohio lawmakers sought last spring to aid borrowers like Ms. Minda by capping annual interest rates for payday lenders at 28 percent, a sharp reduction from 391 percent….
“The business model is a debt trap,” said Uriah King, a spokesman for the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, N.C., which supports rate caps. More than 90 percent of customers are repeat borrowers, he said, and two-thirds of lenders’ revenue comes from borrowers who take out a dozen loans annually.[2]
Credit cards with escalating interest rates and penalties have also become a trap for many borrowers.
The book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible recounts the laws laid down to guide the creation of a just society when the Children of Israel entered the Promised Land. One of the principles laid down is our Centering Thought for today: “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Justice is repeated here to emphasize that justice is to be pursued vigorously. Among other laws, Moses instructed them:
Deut 23:19 You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. 20 On loans to a foreigner you may charge interest, but on loans to another Israelite you may not charge interest, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings in the land that you are about to enter and possess.
Having been slaves in the land of Egypt, the Children of Israel were instructed not to use debt as a means of enslaving one another.
I do not mean to suggest the abolition of interest or the dismantling of our financial system in citing this ancient law, but I do believe that our faith imposes upon us an obligation to avoid any involvement with dishonest financial dealings that victimize others. This commitment to fairness is expressed in our Second Unitarian Universalist Principle, where we covenant to affirm and promote “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations.” There are good, solid religious grounds in our Jewish, Christian and Unitarian Universalist roots for standing against injustice to the poor, against rapacious loans, against business practices which take advantage of the least among us, and we are obligated insofar as we are able to speak out against such practices and avoid participating in them ourselves. The character of our society is shaped by the way we care for the disadvantaged, the weak, the incapacitated, those least able to protect themselves, and we as individuals and as citizens have an obligation to participate in public life, in voting and in civil society, in ways which promote justice, equity and compassion.
But the thing about parables is that they are much more complex than simple directives like “don’t charge interest” or “don’t beat people up for owing you money.” Parables invite us to enter into the story and find ourselves there, and in that way we all find some part of ourselves in the forgiving and then unforgiving king, the ungrateful servant, or the fellow servant who is never forgiven. This story invites our identification with each of the participants in turn and then through a quick twist shows the foibles of each. There is the king, the master, who forgives when petitioned but then, in outrage, takes back the generosity, breaks his promise, and finally tortures the ungrateful servant until he repays what he can’t repay – that is, forever. Matthew invites us to compare this king to God, but is God really willing to forgive only once when we are expected to forgive seventy-seven times? Is God merciful only once and then punitive? Is God not endlessly merciful and long-suffering? Then there’s the ungrateful servant: have you ever struggled under an unendurable burden, a mistake you have no way to correct, a horrible decision which hurt someone else, a debt? Have you ever found your way to forgiveness, to a point where you could put that debt behind you and be restored to life and hope? You are that servant, forgiven, restored to favor, redeemed. Have you then in turn done the same to anyone who crossed you, slighted you, owed you a debt? Or did you simply regard being forgiven as your due and go on with your life unchanged by having experienced mercy and healing? And have we not all been in the role of the fellow-servant, the dog who gets kicked and can’t do anything about it, powerless to remove our own burdens, our own debts, treated without compassion and resentful when no mercy is shown?
We are all literal and figurative debtors. We have all been loved into existence by our parents, our grandparents, generation upon generation, by the Spirit of Life, by God, and we are alive by grace; we can never repay the debt we have incurred for the great gift of life. We all go astray from time to time, transgress our own expectations and fall short of our obligations to others, we all miss the mark. We all have debts that we can never make completely right.
In this parable, Jesus invites us to live our lives in a different way than any of the characters he sketches. He invites us to start a virtuous circle by responding to the forgiveness of indebtedness which is extended to us, and then to do the same to others. He invites us to behave as members of the Kingdom of God, of the beloved community, and to invite others to join us. He invites us to take responsibility for ourselves and then to help others take responsibility for themselves, to create the kind of community we were created to be part of.
We commit each week to this way of life when we say, as Jesus taught us, “forgive us our trespasses as we forget those who trespass against us.” There’s a public message in this parable, but there’s also very much a private message, not only about money and literal debts as about all of the interactions which bind us together with each other and sometimes make us trespass.
May we find our place in this parable and above all in the kind of blessed community Jesus preached and promised.
Amen.