Canter Bridge

The institution of slavery and the concept of duty no longer arouse us to noble thoughts. We find the first offensive and the second pedestrian. More often than not our moral aesthetics not only incapacitate us for sympathetic reading. They also betray us by the extreme selectivity with which we assign deficits to the moral codes of other times and other places while skating over the incoherences that afflict us in this time and this place.

All of that is to say that Jesus’ parable does not fall lightly on our ears. Yet with the proper effort, it gets at the essence of grace and gratitude:

Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’

To some degree the measure of Jesus’ instruction can be taken by the presence of paradox. The narratives and the discourses that the gospel writers use to frame Jesus underscore the dignity that he brought—or restored—to all manner of people, chief among them the marginalized and the blemished. So when he comes to speak of ‘worthless slaves’, it is to be assumed that the reader will have the wider context fixed in his mind. Jesus’ pedagogy is hardly simplistic. Yet neither is it confused. Hyperbole works precisely in those moments when the fixed points of respect, relationship, and character have been firmly anchored by prior events. The outcome is that those of Jesus’ listeners who numbered themselves gleefully among his ‘worthless slaves’ would have chuckled rather than grimaced to hear the expression on his lips.

The bottom line of this parable is the erasure of conventional expectation about what we owe and what we are owed. When the master is about, a servant serves. He does not invest his time in calculating how much or how much longer or even why and why not. Those things are determined by context’s non-negotiable reality. One responds within the parameters that are one’s inheritance in space and time, not outside them.

When a long-awaited household master is about, one returns from one duty to another and does not whine about it. Such is the lot of a servant. It is one’s reality.

Paradoxically, joy comes in the very embracing of this thing. Resentment is, here, the flight from reality.