The Parable of the Debtor

Let’s talk about the parable of the debtor. I’ll eat my hat if you have not heard it already. I will eat multiple hats.

Summary: this guy gets in debt. He’s run out of time to pay it off. Oh no, he says, how shall it ever pay off this debt? Please Mr. Lender, won’t you have mercy on me?

But the lender says, if I give you mercy I’m out the money. Give me justice.

Then in the canonical versions they go back and forth for a bit. What about mercy? What about justice? But what about mercy? But what about justice?

Then a good friend of the debtor steps in and solves the dilemma. He offers to pay the lender back and give the debtor new terms that involve an extension of time. Then he wraps the whole thing up with a bow. Mr. Debtor, you have your mercy. Mr. Lender, you have your justice.

That is the parable as you have heard it. Obviously Christ is the friend and we are the debtor. The lender is more ambiguous. The lender is the law that we have violated I suppose.

But justice has not been satisfied in one very important respect.

Where is the justice to the friend? What does the poor fella get out of all this? We are supposed to imagine that the satisfaction of neatly solving this little conundrum makes up for the rare privilege of giving a bunch of money to an unreliable friend. Or rather, we are not really supposed to think about that at all because the parable is not really about the friend.  It is about us, the debtor.

But I do think about the friend in the parable and I maintain that justice has not been served.

Where does this leave us? I believe it points to the fundamentally tragic nature of reality. There was no clean and easy solution to resolve the dilemma between mercy and justice.  Only torture and death and suffering of a God would suffice. It also points to how love can itself be a recompense. When you love someone enough, helping them is a reward. You share in their relief. You felt their pain earlier. It still is not justice. It is not right that we made Christ feel pain because he loved us and there is no recompense for that.  But it is still something.

Love goes hand-in-hand with glory. It is not justice, but Christ does receive glory for his rescue. It makes his greatness manifest.

So it seems that on the one hand we can live in a world of justice. Or we can accept Christ and enter a world of love and glory.