This is an upsetting parable today. In the past, this parable has caused me to call my pastor in an outraged state to demand an explanation. Unfortunately, that’s no longer an option for me. Which doesn’t mean that I’m no longer outraged by it.

I always prefer a neat “moral of the story” at the end. Many people read this parable as if God is the king, settling up accounts. If that’s the case, from God’s point of view, the moral of this story is, “Don’t be too generous, because people aren’t going to appreciate it.” The first slave begs for more time to pay off his debt, the king does more than he asks and cancels the debt entirely. The slave turns around and does in the second slave. No “turn about is fair play”—only retribution. No wonder the king gets mad and has him punished. Certainly, for the first slave, the moral of the story is, “It’s better to be nice.” For the second slave, the moral must be: “God will vindicate you,” since the king punishes his tormenter.

The problem with Jesus’ parables is that they aren’t like Aesop’s fables. There’s no neat morality statement at the end. Things are ambiguous, as if Jesus intends to give his listeners room to walk around and try on different meanings. What works for me, when reading parables, is to find the part that pinches me most, the least comfortable part. It’s that part that contains the message I most need to hear.

What pinches the most for me these days is the first slave. The detail we need to know is the value of his debt. The debt owed by the first slave was something like 4-1/2 billion dollars. This is more than the gross national product of most countries in the world today. It’s inconceivable! How could a slave have such a debt? Whether these are literally “slaves” in the parable, or whether they are sub-potentates to a supreme potentate/king, doesn’t matter. What is at stake is the perception of the first slave. He owes the equivalent of the annual wages for all the day laborers in Central and South America, whereas his fellow slave owes the combined equivalent of three months’ labor for one person. Clueless! He has no sense of his indebtedness. Which is too bad, because the value he then places on its forgiveness doesn’t leave room for him to pass on the mercy he has received.

As near as I can figure, what the parable asks of us isn’t that we act like the king (God?). This parable isn’t about ethics. Because this parable is what scholars call a “kingdom parable,” it is about how we enter the kingdom. “How we enter” is by humble repentance and acceptance of the gift of mercy. It is never about paying off a debt.

Shoot. We are transaction people. We give our employers time and productive work effort. We receive from them the wherewithal to go to a store, and to exchange that wherewithal with a merchant for things which we then take home with us. The bank allows us to sleep in a house and to keep our stuff there, because we have promised to give them the equivalent of a week or two of our time and work every month. We give the government the result of five months’ worth of work every year, and they in turn protect us, maintain our roads, educate our children, and feed hungry people in our names. Give and take, something of value in exchange for something else of value. It’s how the world works.

God is not like that. In Romans today, we read that we can’t judge others because only the One holding the power of life and death can judge, so how can we possibly expect to “buy” the right of judgment, even over ourselves? How can we pay off the debt we owe for our sin? It is hopeless. The debt is too great. When you receive the letter from the bank indicating your mortgage is paid up, the debt has not been “forgiven.” The note is marked “paid in full” because you’ve slogged through twenty or thirty years of house payments. You’ve paid those payments month after month, year after year. Forgiveness does not mean we have more time to pay up. Forgiveness means there is nothing left to pay. What you had owed is forgotten.

Is that hard for you to get your head around? There is nothing you can do to “pay for” your forgiveness before God. What I understand about the Islamic faith, is that a person’s deeds are in a balance, measured in eternity. Good deeds are to your credit for eternity. Bad deeds are punished. Mercy consists in the bad deeds and the punishments being equal. Christians don’t believe that. We already know that no amount of good behavior could hope to balance our debt before God. And that’s good news! The parable tells us again that our mind-bogglingly huge debt is gone--forgiven. Not that we are given more time to pay up, but that the debt is forgotten.

There is a troublingness about God that remains. If God is the king in the parable, the actions taken against the first slave because of his ill treatment of the second slave are troubling. Don’t ask this parable to do more than it was intended to do. This parable isn’t a threat. It’s a “this is like” statement. It’s an invitation. Since you have been forgiven your huge debt, you have no right to demand payment from others. Are you familiar with the term “self righteous”? Unchurched friends of mine will often say to me that what they hate about church is how self righteous “we” can be. As if we are revoltingly confident of how deserving we are of forgiveness, showing a sense of entitlement to God and grace. Sometimes Stinky leans towards self righteousness, especially when she tells Ralph something that she knows is all too “right.” As people of faith, we know the seduction in this term is about “self,” as in relying on our selves to make us righteous, rather than God.

Maybe this week you read editorials about how to interpret the events of last September 11. Remember last year when the spoken and unspoken cry of our hearts was, “Why do they hate us?” This month in various Christian publications, I’ve read editorials that suggest that “they hate us,” not because of our “freedom” as George Bush would have us believe. “They” hate us because we think we are entitled. We think we’ve done something to deserve our wealth. Self righteous.

In the fall issue of the Heifer Project journal, an essay by Barbara Kingsolver made me weep. It was a very uncomfortable explanation of “why they hate us.” Kingsolver suggests that there is a family in which one brother is incredibly wealthy, living in luxury and plenty, while other family members have much less. Some siblings—you perhaps—have only a tiny shack with a dusty, barren garden, and hungry kids to feed. The wealthy brother—the so-called Fat Brother—refuses to send you food to feed your starving children, but does this one favor: he makes a TV program of himself eating. You can watch that, but you can’t have his food.

How is this like—or hopefully not like—the parable of the two slaves? This week I also heard about a visiting theologian from India who is spending the year in the US as part of our denomination’s mission program. It is this man’s contention that we can learn from September 11. What the church must learn is that the globalization of the world economy is destroying poor countries and the poor people who live in them. He says the only hope is the US church—the US church presenting a different, more sustainable way of life. We are people with no resources of our own. Everything we have has been given to us at the hand of God. The only response we dare have to our wealth is humble gratitude. And if humble, if gratitude, then before God we must also “pass it on.” If we have received mercy and gifts—which we certainly have—we have an obligation to pass it on.

Stay away from self-righteousness. Stay away from believing that we have been made righteous by our own power. It is only the righteousness of God that offers us forgiveness. Receive it, friends. And pass it on.