Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2020

Lectionary Gospel reading: Matthew 18:21-35

In the Gospel reading set for this Sunday, Peter (representing the Church) tries to assert his moral superiority. Jesus responds with a parable that reveals God’s nature as merciful, and calls on God’s people to make that mercy manifest in the world. In this parable, everyone is equal before God; they are all slaves of the king. And this parable of the merciless slave has particular relevance in a year in which we have seen the international rise—and backlash against—the Black Lives Matter movement; and, closer to home, the toppling of statues honouring slave traders. Because, you see, Jesus tells a story, and invites the Church to the work of discerning how to apply it within our community in any given historical context. But as with the preceding verses (indeed, as with so many of Jesus’ parables) those who believe they are more wronged than in the wrong, more sinned against than sinning, are being led into a trap.

Into the story, Jesus introduces a certain slave who is summoned to an audience with the king. On can presume that this slave appears before the king with a certain degree of confidence. After all, to date the king has lent this slave ten thousand talents. A talent was worth more than fifteen years’ wages of a labourer; and so, we can say that this sum was the equivalent of fifteen years’ unpaid labour by 10,000 slaves. This man is, himself, a slave—he is no different, inherently, to anyone else—and yet he is living a life that is unimaginably removed from his fellow slaves. Indeed, as we shall see, he believes himself to be de facto king over them. But the actual king has summoned him to ask that the loan be re-payed.

The slave protests that this is quite impossible. And so, the king determines that the slave be sold, along with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment be made. This clearly implies a broader redistribution of concentrated wealth and power; and has consequences for successive generations. And as the king in this parable represents God, such a solution should be understood to be perfectly just. But the slave pleads for patience to repay—apparently it is only hard, not in fact impossible—and the king, motivated by compassion, moves to write off the man’s debt entirely.

No sooner had the slave departed, but he meets a fellow slave who owes him a hundred denarii, the equivalent of three-and-a-half month’s unpaid labour by one slave (contrasted with fifteen years’ unpaid labour by 10,000 slaves). There is a power dynamic at play. For the slave who lent the money, it is a trivial sum; but not for the one who borrowed. He cannot pay off the outstanding debt in one go—who can survive for three-and-a-half months on no money at all?—and this slave is doubly enslaved paying back the interest on his loan. Now, because the first slave has neither compassion nor empathy, he is about to be triply enslaved, thrown into debtor’s prison, with some physical violence and psychological terror thrown in for good measure.

When his fellow slaves saw what happened, they were greatly distressed. They went before the king and reported the injustice, and, because the king was just, he acted justly. Because the slave who had known the king’s mercy had not participated in the king’s mercy, he would now know the king’s justice. His participation in the king’s justice would be to experience torture until he would pay his entire debt. This, then, Jesus concluded, is what it will be like for those who do not participate in mercy.

In 1791, the French-owned Haitian slaves revolted. In order to prevent territorial loss to the British, the French Republic abolished slavery in 1794, restoring it in 1802. Throughout the 1790s, Britain, who had recently lost her American colonies, fought to capture French territory in the Caribbean and re-establish slavery there, while also crushing slave revolts on her own islands (including the genocide of men, women and children), spending £4 million and losing between 50,000-100,00 men in battle or to yellow fever. In 1804, two years after Napoleon reinstated slavery in French colonies, the Haitians declared independence and abolished slavery. Three years later, in 1807, a bruised British parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Not until 1833, and after ongoing slave rebellions, was this followed by the Slavery Abolition Act. As part of this process, the 1837 Slave Compensation Act paid out £20 million (an estimated £17 billion in today’s money) to former slave owners “compensating the Persons at present entitled to the Services of the Slaves to be manumitted and set free by virtue of this Act for the Loss of such Services”. Freed slaves did not receive any compensation.

The British government—or, the British taxpayers; including the descendants of the slaves—finally ‘paid off’ the loan in 2015. The families of slave owners and the families of investment bankers have been benefitting from slavery from its abolition until the present. Meanwhile, France extorted a debt of 91 million gold francs for the loss of property which Haiti finally paid off in 1947; and Britain systematically exploited her colonies and former colonies; and has treated those we asked to fight for us in two world wars and then to come and help rebuild the motherland after the Second World War utterly shamefully, to this day. This is not history, separate from current affairs.

If I were to announce that, this year, we will not be marking Remembrance Sunday, there would be uproar. If I were to suggest that ‘it all happened a long time ago, and we just need to move on,’ angry letters would be written to my bishop and I would be the subject of hostile articles in the press. But ‘it all happened a long time ago, and we just need to move on’ is the argument I hear again and again (not seven times but seventy times seven) in relation to slavery, despite the legitimate calls of Caribbean Heads of State for a program of reparations there, and of Black British voices calling for justice here. It strikes me as ironic that, despite the fact that no one alive today fought in the First World War we habitually claim that ‘we’ won the war; but that when it comes to the reckoning of debts relating to slavery, we cannot be held responsible as it all took place before we were born.

But the consequent injustice is ongoing; and for that, we are called to take responsibility. We cannot move on, until justice is done. Regardless of whether wider British society can accept this, the Church of England should. The thing that strikes me most about Jesus’ parable of the merciless servant is the line, ‘When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed.’ They were greatly distressed at the injustice they witnessed. I wonder whether we are even capable of such a response, to the pain of injustice felt by our Black sisters and brothers.

We don’t remember the First World War because ‘if we forget we will repeat the mistakes of the past’—our government hosts the world’s largest arms fair and we profit economically from ensuring instability across the world, while refusing to take responsibility for the lives ruined, let alone for our own veterans. No, we remember the First World War to recognise a communal trauma, passed down the generations; and, increasingly over recent years, to reassert ourselves over others. And, before you write to my bishop, we shall mark Remembrance Sunday. But we are called to recognise the communal trauma, passed down the generations, of our fellow slaves; and to recognise that we are not inherently superior but inherently equal: and to repent of sin and make material redress for injustice, though it be to our cost. Black Lives Matter because our society repeatedly demonstrates that they do not matter, dismissing justice by labelling people Marxists, looters, terrorists, criminals, lazy, disruptive—and allies as naïve self-haters.

The alternative is that we find ourselves tortured until we pay off our entire debt, not to the enslavers and their descendants but to the wrongly imprisoned and their descendants. We do not torture ourselves, but we do bring it upon ourselves. Where we reject mercy, justice demands it. As with all of Jesus’ parables, we ought rightly to be troubled.