There’s an iconic moment in The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep (playing a leading fashion critic) explains to Andy (her new assistant) how the fashion industry works.
‘You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.
You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic ‘casual corner’ where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of ‘stuff.’
I love that little interchange between Meryl and Anne Hathaway, because it kind of crystallises how little thought we give to how we got to where we are. There are countless things around us – whether clothing or household items or art or laws or customs that we just accept without considering how they came to be.
I suspect we do the same thing with the bible. We experience the bible as a collection of words in English bound into a single volume, with chapters and verses and page numbers and footnotes, and we don’t give much thought to how it landed in our hands or on our shelves. These days, if I’m honest, I rarely access a physical, paper bible. I have an assortment of apps and websites to help me along. In a couple of generations, paper bibles will probably be collector’s items. At a cultural level, that makes me a bit sad, but as a student of the bible, I’m glad that a new generation is experiencing the scriptures more like a library than like a book, and that even very young students can now easily compare translations side by side.
The text of Matthew 18 that we heard today was read from this jumbo bible, which happens to be from a translation called the New Revised Standard Version. In preparing this sermon, I read the text via a website, and also read a Greek interlinear version and a few other translations – all online. The texts that we read out loud in church or to ourselves at home are translations from Greek manuscripts. The earliest manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel date from the late second or early third centuries, at least a hundred years after the original was written. There are thousands of manuscripts of Greek new testament texts, which were all copied from the original(s). We simply don’t have the papyrus scroll on which someone in Antioch originally wrote, but we can be relatively confident that we have accurate transcriptions because the copies are all pretty much the same.
But, of course, even if we had a copy of the original manuscript of the text we call Matthew, we still wouldn’t have a direct record of Jesus of Nazareth. The gospel is a work of literature, written by and for a particular community. It almost certainly borrows from written sources that we have never seen, and also relies on word-of-mouth transmission for things like parables and sayings.
So, last week we heard about the process for community and relationship management within this early church, which deployed sayings of Jesus to make its point. Some of those were borrowed from other texts (like Mark and Q) and others are unique to Matthew’s gospel. Today, we have a saying and a story. The saying is about how many times to forgive – not seven times but seventy seven times. The story is about the fella who had an enormous loan forgiven by the king, but wouldn’t forgive the small loan of someone else. Then he got busted, and the king handed him over to be tortured, effectively forever.
Matthew adds editorial comment to this section. I think of them as voice-overs.
So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."
This story is another instance of ‘Special Matthew’ - the gospel we call Matthew is the only known place where this story appears. But it sounds familiar, because it has echoes of other stories: the parable of the talents, where the master gives the slaves a certain amount of money each then gets grumpy at the one who doesn’t invest it; the king who summons people to a banquet who don’t come; the king who makes plans before going to war.
Now, I want to do something sneaky. In its literary context in Matthew’s gospel, the parable is clearly intended to be a lesson about forgiveness. If you don’t forgive others, look out! The moral of the story is crystal clear. The author of Matthew puts this parable in this spot to send a lesson to the church community immediately after talking about how to kick people out – forgiveness is central and intrinsic. And, let me emphasise, it totally is.
But, just for a moment, let’s imagine ourselves hearing this story from the mouth of the historical Jesus outside of the literary context of Matthew. Let’s imagine early first-century rabbi telling the story, without Matthew’s particular narrative agenda.
The king in the story has lent an obscene amount of money to a doulos, a servant. I did the maths, and ten thousand talents is 5.8 billion dollars in today’s money. This king, upon discovering that the debt could not be paid, was quite happy to sell the servant, his wife and family into slavery – clearly as punishment rather than in order to recoup the debt. But the servant begs for more time and the king doesn’t give it to him – instead the king forgives the debt completely! The forgiven servant, who is owed $14000 by another servant, throws his debtor in prison when he can’t pay up. When the king hears about it, he sends the first servant off to be tortured.
Now, I have some questions.
What kind of ‘servant’ borrows 5.8 billion dollars? Not the kind of servant who cleans the dunnies, certainly – this is someone who is part of the entourage, a lackey, a yes-man. A crony.
And what kind of king forgives a debt of 5.8 billion dollars of public money? Like, who allows their yes-man to walk away scot-free without consequences? A corrupt king, right?
What kind of character considers it moral and appropriate to punish a wife and children for the failings of their husband and father? Obviously this was common practice in the ancient world, where women and children had no autonomy, but this king is not a model of moral behaviour.
Clearly the servant doing billion dollar business deals was a bad sort, but the king merrily hands him over for torture ‘until he can pay the debt’ (i.e forever). But it doesn’t say that the other servant with a debt is set free. Shouldn’t this be in the story? Shouldn’t there be a verse where the servant with the smaller debt gets treated decently? Or doesn’t he matter?
Which all begs the question – did Jesus tell this parable in order to teach people that God is like the king? That God does billion dollar business deals with his cronies and uses violence to assert power? Is that what Jesus is getting at?
Or did Jesus tell these dangerous stories not in order to align God with worldly power, but to expose the misuse of worldly power and contrast it with the nonviolent, non-coercive, unselfish power of the kingdom of God?
I think there’s a clue in the text. The Kingdom of God may be compared to a king, begins Matthew’s telling. Put this corrupt, degenerate, recognisable king alongside the Kingdom of God and see which one you prefer. Maybe, just maybe, before Matthew appropriated this parable to teach about forgiveness, Jesus was telling a story about systemic corruption and the abuse of power.
It is impossible to hear the voice of the historical Jesus, speaking in villages and on hillsides in a Roman province two millennia ago. But perhaps we can still absorb the subversive voice of Jesus afresh in his stories, if we only have ears to hear.
The Lord Be With You