Strange Profit
Strange Profit
It feels like it’s been an entire liturgical season of Strange Stories by Jesus Christ, with Luke as the ghost writer, the more proper name of the strange stories being parables. So, one more time for those who’ve heard this already: According to the British biblical scholar C.H. Dodd, a parable is, “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” Jesus’ metaphors today might feel like we’re being set up to fail, and in the story of slaves and masters, downright offensive. Keep in mind, first, that Jesus is speaking to his apostles as one group. Second, slavery was not a metaphor in Jesus’s time, it was a fact of life that he and his disciples would have been all too aware of, and one they couldn’t ignore.
So, when Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you,” I need to clarify what is meant by “if” and “you.” Greek has root words whose prefixes and/or suffixes tell you, in this instance, whether it’s the singular “you,” or the plural “you.” English doesn’t, which is why it’s not always clear whether it’s you or y’all, or as they say in the Diocese of Alabama, y’all or all y’all. And the “if” here is not conditional, as in “if I were you,” but a statement of fact, as in, “if you have the right.” So, Jesus is telling us that all y’all, as one, already have such faith that when you speak and act as one, in one faith, you can do amazing things together.
Of course, that means we can’t do these things on our own, without God. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”* If we can revive that sense of total dependence on our Creator, that might give us a way to see ourselves in Jesus’s parable of the slave and master. It is extremely unlikely that any of Jesus’s apostles or disciples would have had the means to purchase a slave. They were more likely to have potentially been in the position of being taken into slavery for being unable to pay Roman taxes, having to sell themselves into slavery for failure to pay debts, or being so desperately poor that they had no other way to live. They may well have seen it happen to their neighbors.
And yet, Jesus asks them to imagine themselves as masters, not as slaves — “Who among you would say to your slave…” Maybe some of them hoped that Jesus might turn the tables on the wealthy and powerful and make his followers the new masters. He does say to his apostles at the last supper, “I confer on you, just as my Father has conferred on me, a kingdom…and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” But hopefully they would remember this parable and remember that before the Father they were “unprofitable” servants who had done no more than their duty to their Creator. Not so much “worthless,” which today is often taken as a personal comment, but more a statement of perceived economic value, in which the world too often does not recognize our value as heralds of the Good News of God’s love in Christ Jesus.
But for most of the two millennia since Jesus first proclaimed the Good News of God’s kingdom with these strange stories, our “value” has been recognized by the Western Civilization which that Church helped create in Europe, and then helped export to the so-called “New World.” Our “value” has been recognized in the “profitable” ways of wealth and influence. What our Lord might be trying to tell us in this year of his 2025 is not to imagine ourselves the moral masters of Civilization. Instead it might be to remember that what have we to give the world is not our possession. It is a gift. It is grace, unmerited and underserved. It is love, which ceases to be love the moment it is not given. We are indeed “unprofitable” slaves, for our profit cannot be measured: It is infinite.
* Attributed to King David in 2nd Chronicles 29:14 and used as an Offertory sentence kin the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer
Luke 17:5-10
The apostles (1) said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith.’ The Lord replied, ‘If you (2) had faith the size of a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you. Which of you, who had a servant (3) ploughing or minding sheep, would say to him when he returned from the fields, “Come and have your meal at once”? Would he not be more likely to say, “Get my supper ready; fasten your belt and wait on me while I eat and drink. You yourself can eat and drink afterwards”? (4) Must he be grateful to the servant for obeying orders? So with you: when you have done all you have been told to do, say, “We are useless servants: (5) we have done no more than our duty.” ’
1) which for Luke, can mean the Twelve, or any disciple of Jesus who is "sent."
2) The "you" is plural. And this "if" in Greek expresses, not a condition contrary to fact, but a condition according to fact -- "if you had faith (and you _all_ do!) [Craddock]
3) Lit. "slave," Jesus' disciples (and apostles) are the ones challenged to see themselves as slaveowners [Levine & Witherington]
4) Downton Abbey
5) Not "worthless" (NRSV) but more like "unprofitable," with an economic, not a personal, connotation. "The idea is that the slaves or servants have not accrued any sort of bargaining power or social capital by doing what they would have, or should have, done anyway." [McGowan]
The 17th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 22, Year C,
October 5, 2025
The Rev. David Kendrick