Corpses in the Corridor, Proper 19 (A) – 2017

As you heard today’s gospel, did it make you uncomfortable—so that you shifted your weight from one foot to another, or perhaps gazed awkwardly into space?

That parable Jesus tells does not pack a dose of sweet comfort. It challenges us outrageously in a spot where we are most tender: the trouble we have with forgiveness.

The story has two scenes: first, inside the throne room of a powerful king; second, just outside, in a palace corridor. And the story holds up two worlds: the world as we know it, and the world as God wants it.

The throne room changes in a moment—from the world as we know it to the world as God wants it. The palace corridor, however, starts out as the world we know and fails to become the world as God wants it.

The throne room begins as the world we know: a world of calculation and control. The boss man is reviewing accounts, and somebody—a slave—owes him big time. Really big time. The slave gets called on the carpet, but that’s only a formality. No way can this loser pay back what he owes. Might as well sell this guy, his house, his car, his boat, his wife, his kids, and get a couple pennies on the dollar. He is ruined. Financially, he is dead as a doornail.

Everybody there in the throne room thinks his appearance is a mere formality. Everybody, that is, except him. Upon hearing the sentence imposed by the banker-king, this guy drops to his knees, weeps, wails, and writhes around, crying out for mercy. He makes promises he knows he can never keep. What a pathetic sight. And so useless.

This is, after all, a bottom-line world. The king’s guards are not soldiers in plumed hats holding lances. No—they are guys in suits holding calculators. The cold steel is in their hearts.

Do you know this world of calculation and control? Have you ever been there, filling in one role or another? Are you there today?

And then, in the story Jesus tells, something unexpected happens. The king drops dead.

No, I don’t mean literally—right there on the red carpet in front of the throne. But it might as well be. The king dies to the world as we know it, the world of calculation and control. Against the advice his accountants and lawyers would have given him—had he bothered to ask—he goes with his gut and forgives the poor slob his astronomical debt.

And then, to add to the shock, the poor slob drops dead too.

Again, not literally, though it might as well be. He dies to the world of calculation and control, which a moment before had been like an entire mountain on his chest. He is now living somewhere else. So, too, is the boss man.

There we are, my friends. If the cross of Christ and the Christian life mean anything, this is what they mean: that to this world, we are dead—and so is God. By forgiving us the sins we cannot make up on our own, God dies to the world of power and control. God is not playing that game. God has taken a one-way trip out of there.

This is the part of Christianity that is scandalous, shocking, and hopeful. It is good news, hot off the presses, for anyone who even suspects that God is the Great Bully in the Sky. No: God has died to all that. God’s throne room is not a center for calculation and control.

God is dead to that sort of world. And so are we.

We are pulled out from under the mountain that was resting on our chests. We are dead to the world of calculation and control that once held us captive. We are out the door and down the street.

And then—what happens next?

His learning curve is pathetic. He’s not even outside the building when he runs into somebody who owes him something. There, in the palace corridor, he grabs the fellow by the collar and tries—unsuccessfully—to shake the money out of him.

Welcome back to the world of calculation and control.

The second debtor does his own song and dance, pleading for mercy. Is anybody going to die this time? Will there be corpses in the corridor?

You’d think it would be a no-brainer for the forgiven debtor to remember that, just moments ago, he was dead to the world of calculation and control—and that he should act accordingly. You’d think mercy received would result in mercy given.

But it doesn’t happen.

He has a strategically timed bout of amnesia. He forgets he’s dead. And he acts out the world of calculation and control as though it were his big chance for Broadway. He refuses to show mercy. He fails to help his debtor die to a world of oppression. Instead, he’s ready to boot him into the nearest prison for what will be, well, an indefinite stay.

The palace corridor remains stuck. It remains in the world of calculation and control.

And there’s the challenge.

We can keep rehearsing the ancient pattern of the world as we know it—a life that feels like death.

Or we can die to the world as we know it. We can have corpses in the corridor. We can let mercy do what mercy does: kill the old story, end the old accounting, break the old chain.

And then—only then—await our resurrection.