01.26. Chapter 6. The Unfaithful Upper Servant
Chapter 6.
The Unfaithful Upper Servant Or, the Judgment of Degenerate Ministers of the Kingdom. In the two parables which remain to be considered ere we bring these studies to a close, judgment appears active within the kingdom of grace. In the second scene of the last parable we already see the judicial activity of Christ beginning to manifest itself in this sphere. But the sub-parable of the Wedding-robe is only a prelude to the judgment of the house of God. There is judged a class who never realised the responsibilities of those who receive God’s gracious favour, who entered the kingdom in the rudeness of nature, untouched by any regenerative influence. But in the parables now to be studied we witness the judgment not of the unregenerate, but of the degenerate, who made a fair start, but have undergone a demoralising process, and declined from their initial spiritual condition as believers. They begin by recognising the claims of holiness, but they do not persevere in this mind. In every process of declension or degeneracy time enters as an element. The phenomena resulting can appear only after the movement with which they are associated has lasted for a while. Perseverance in holiness in the individual and in the community is tested by the occurrence of a period of trial. The parable first considered, that of the Sower, taught us this. Jesus speaks there of those who receive the word with joy, but when tribulation cometh are offended. It is not surprising, therefore, that the parables before us are found connected in the record with an eschatological discourse, in which the consummation of the kingdom, while represented as an event to be looked for at any moment, is at the same time spoken of as an event likely to be deferred so long as to involve a great trial of faith and patience. The virtue specially called for by such a situation is watchfulness. Were the near advent of the consummation certain, watching would not be needed; being possible, yet not certain, that habit is at once necessary and difficult. For delay brings temptation to relax zeal, and yielding to the temptation exposes to the risk of surprise. The discourse on the last things, accordingly, contains frequent exhortations to watchfulness. "Watch, therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour," comes in at intervals like a solemn refrain. And the lesson is enforced not merely by repetition of the counsel, but by the use of figurative representations exhibiting vividly the need of watching, and the danger of neglecting it. We find a whole group of parabolic sayings embedded in the eschatological discourse, all having for their moral: "Watch, for you may be thrown off your guard by delay, and be surprised by the sudden (for sudden it will be) coming of the long expected." In Matthew’s version of the sermon there are three: the Goodman and the Thief, the Unfaithful Upper Servant, and the Ten Virgins. The second of the three is given by Luke in a different connection, prefaced by another parable, that of the Waiting Servants who expect their absent lord with loins girt and lights burning, which was probably spoken at the same time as the others.[1] Mark gives a fifth, that of the Porter; its peculiarity being that the duty of watching, which in the other parables is enjoined on all the servants, is assigned in the distribution of offices to a particular functionary.[2] It is possible, however, that this is not a distinct parable, but an amalgam of the Waiting Servants and the Talents, the watching porter representing the lesson taught in the former, and the assignment of tasks to the servants individually representing the distribution of talents in the latter.[3] Omitting it, there remain four parabolic utterances bearing on the same theme, and all, there is little doubt, spoken at the same time; a sufficient index of the prominent place which the subject of watching occupied in Christ’s thoughts in His last days, in its bearing on the spiritual welfare of His disciples.
[1] Luk 12:35-37.
[2] Mark 13:34.
[3] So Weiss, ’Das Markus-Evangelium.’ Of these four parables only two, those of the Unfaithful Upper Servant, and the Ten Virgins, call for detailed study. The two others merely inculcate in a general manner the duty of watching; these show the evil tendency of delay to demoralise character in different ways, and the doom of such as yield to the baleful influence. The Waiting Servants and the Goodman and the Thief may be regarded as introductory to the parable which is first to engage our attention, as indeed they appear in Luke’s narrative. In the former the coming of the Son of man is compared to the return of an householder from a marriage-feast to his own home at an unseasonable hour of the night, when, in the ordinary course, all the inmates would be asleep. But on such an occasion, when their master is expected, dutiful servants will not retire to rest, but will patiently wait for His arrival, at whatever hour it may take place, with garments tucked up in readiness for service, and with the lights burning brightly in the chambers. Such an attitude Jesus desired His disciples habitually to maintain. "Let your loins be girt about," He said, "and your lamps burning, and be ye yourselves like unto men who wait for their lord." He indicated how difficult He deemed it to carry into effect the counsel by appending to the parable the reflection: "Blessed are those servants whom their lord, when he cometh, shall find watching; verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them sit down to meat, and shall come and serve them." When our Lord used this epithet ’blessed,’ He always meant to represent the thing spoken of as high and rare. ’Rare virtue,’ He here exclaims in effect, in reference to the conduct of the waiting servants. So rare does He reckon it, that He represents the master as not expecting it; counting rather on finding the house dark and his servants in bed, with hardly one left to open the door when he knocks. Finding the facts otherwise, observing the cheery appearance of lights in the windows, sure indication that the household is on the outlook, he is so delighted that, instead of accepting service from his dutiful slaves, he is rather in the mood to turn servant to them, and supply them with refreshment, and so reward rare virtue with equally rare felicity and honour. The scene next changes from servants waiting for their absent lord to a householder whose house is in danger of being broken into by thieves. In this instance we are told, not what the man does or ought to do, but what he would do in a supposed case. If he knew when the thief would come he would watch to protect himself against the risk of having his property carried off. If only he, like the waiting servants, knew the day, it would not matter what the hour was, he would gladly keep awake through all the watches of the night to avoid the threatened danger. But he does not know the day any more than the hour; for while it is for the interest of an absent master that his servants should know at least the day of his return, it is the thief’s interest, on the contrary, that his victim should be ignorant as to the day, as well as the hour, of his attack. Therefore the good-man of the house cannot help himself; he must go to bed and take his risk; for it is physically impossible to do without sleep, and watch night and day all his life long. He acts so from necessity, not because he is indifferent; not even trusting to his poverty as a sufficient protection. A poor man he is, for he lives in a mud house, which can be dug through,[1] so that a barred door is no sufficient defence. But even poverty does not lull him into security; for the little he has is valuable to him, and it would be valuable also to a thief, probably poorer than himself, and tempted by want to steal. The moral is: Let disciples do always what the good man of the house would do if he could, or does on occasion. They have need; for the end is apt to come thief-like, tarrying long, as if it would never arrive, then overtaking men by surprise. They can; for though they know neither the day nor the hour, watching in the moral sense is possible at all times; there is no necessity in the spiritual sphere for being at the mercy of the thief.
[1] The term employed to denote the mode by which the thief gets in is
Such urgent exhortations to watchfulness, spoken doubtless with great earnestness of tone, must have fallen with startling effect on the ears of hearers. We can readily believe, therefore, that Peter, speaking for the twelve, asked such a question as is put into his mouth by the third Evangelist. The question is vaguely expressed,—"Speakest Thou this parable?" he said, though two had been uttered,—and without any indication of motive. Peter doubtless had in view the whole discourse about watching, and his question probably arose out of a feeling of surprise at the severe tone pervading it His thought fully expressed was probably something like this: "Master, you seem to consider watchfulness very difficult, as well as very needful. Whom have you specially in view when you speak thus? Do you think that we, your chosen companions, need to be particularly exhorted after this fashion, or are you not speaking to us at all, but merely addressing general exhortations to the crowd?" Probably Peter’s feeling was that he and his brethren did not need to be spoken to so, but were superior to the vulgar vice of heedlessness. In that case there was indicated in his question the same spirit of self-confidence which revealed itself on the night before the Passion in connection with the declaration of Jesus, "All ye shall be offended in Me this night." If, as is probable, the putting of the question formed an incident in the delivery of the eschatological discourse during Passion Week, we have two characteristic manifestations of Peter’s infirmity occurring within a few days of each other, in one of which he asks, with a tone of injured virtue, "Speakest Thou thus to us?" and in the other declares, "Though all shall be offended in Thee, I will never be offended." In the light of this juxtaposition we can better understand the stern tone of Christ’s reply, which must have sounded almost as harsh to Peter’s ear as the word which foretold his fall—"Verily I say unto thee, that this night thou shalt deny Me thrice." Taking the two together, the announcement of the impending fall and the parable of the Unfaithful Upper Servant, they convey this lesson: The demoralising effect on character of a sudden crisis overtaking an inexperienced disciple is bad enough, but that produced by long delay is still worse. The one leads to humiliating denials of the Lord, the other may lead to shameless profligacy: habitual denial in life, more culpable far than the momentary denials of the tongue. The parable which teaches this lesson is as follows: Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom his lord set over his household to give them their food in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Verily I say to you, that he will place him over all his goods. But if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord tarrieth, and shall begin to beat his fellow-servants, and shall eat and drink with the drunken; the lord of that servant shall come in a day when he expecteth not, and in an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.—Mat 24:45-51.[1]
[1] The version of the parable in Luke is nearly the same as in Matthew. For
First we notice the black picture of the upper servant’s misconduct during his lord’s absence. He becomes a brutal tyrant and a drunken profligate, a man utterly unworthy of his trust, and absolutely indifferent to his master’s interests, whatever he may pretend; whose proper place in character, as in penalty, is among the faithless[1] and the hypocritical.[2] Consider what this means in the spiritual sphere. A profligate clergy lording it over God’s heritage, dissolute in life, sceptical in reference to the future glory of the kingdom and all great Christian verities,[3] and guilty of grossest hypocrisy in combining the exercise of sacred functions with a total lack of personal faith and holiness. It takes a long time to develop such a deplorable state of matters. Not at the beginning of a religious movement, not in its creative epoch, do such scandalous phenomena make their appearance; but when the spiritual force has to a large extent spent itself, and its effects have taken their place among the institutions of the world, as at the conversion of the Roman empire under Constantine, and the ’establishment’ of Christianity as the religion of the State. When He drew the dark picture Christ must have been looking far beyond the apostolic age; for any one of ordinary sagacity, not to speak of prophetic prescience, might understand that the degeneracy depicted could not appear then in a form intense and extensive enough to make it worth while to construct a parable concerning it. The delay of the master’s coming must have meant for Him a lengthened period, during which the kingdom was to pass through a secular process of development, in the course of which hideous forms of evil, as well as new forms of good, would manifest themselves. It is true that in the parable only a single instance of degeneracy is mentioned, which might occur even in the best of times, even in the earliest or apostolic age. It is true also that the case is put hypothetically. If the servant act thus and thus he will be treated accordingly. But parabolic speech suggests more than it says, and it is due to its dignity and gravity to assume that a more serious state of things than a solitary, exceptional instance of depravity would amount to is signified, even a widespread declension; and further, that such declension is not only possible, but probable or even certain.
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[2]
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If this be so, then the second inference above stated is abundantly justified, viz. that Jesus must have had a profound sense of the difficulty of persevering in grace through a protracted period. But this more plainly appears from the manner in which fidelity is spoken of in the opening sentences of the parable. Who, it is asked, is the faithful and wise servant who, being appointed to a place of trust and responsibility in his master’s house, shall act as is expected of him? as ii. such a person were hardly to be found. Who is he? where is he? what would one not give to see him? That such a one is pronounced blessed signifies the same thing; for, as already stated, this word as used by Christ always denotes something high, exceptional, rare. Applied to conduct, it signifies virtue arduous, heroic, and therefore uncommon. Applied to state, it signifies felicity out of the common course. "Blessed is that servant" means he is a rare man, a hero, one among a thousand. It means further, great shall be his reward, and of this accordingly the parable goes on next to speak. "Verily I say unto you, that he shall make him ruler over all his goods." Having proved himself trusty, he shall be rewarded with unlimited trust, and promoted to a position next to his lord, which can be occupied by one only, the first man in the house, the prime minister in the state.
It may appear strange that our Lord took so sombre and discouraging a view of the capabilities of the average disciple to persevere in faith and fidelity amidst the temptations arising out of the mere lapse of time, not to speak of other more positive forms of trial. But it is not necessary to suppose that He meant to represent time in itself as a source of trial. Time is a mere abstraction, and the lapse of time tries men simply by affording scope for the play of influences within or without hostile to their spiritual interest. The real thought underlying the parabolic representation is: the difficulty of persistence in spiritual life throughout a curriculum of trial such as the lapse of years and ages inevitably brings, one of the sorest temptations involved being the disappointment of early hopes for the speedy consummation of devout desires. Even when thus put the doctrine is hard enough, and were it to be found only in this parable, we might well doubt the correctness of our interpretation. But it pervades our Lord’s teaching, and we do not need to go beyond the discourses of the Passion Week to meet with words of kindred import to that now under consideration. In the very same discourse of which our parable forms a part we read, "Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved,"[1] a statement implying that endurance is hard, and therefore rare, at least in times when wickedness is rampant. Then on the Passion eve Jesus said to the eleven, "Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations," so gratefully acknowledging a fidelity which had been far from easy; and to indicate still further His sense of the heroic character of their behaviour, He added, "And I appoint unto you a kingdom."[2] Ye have done nobly, and noble shall be your reward—such is the import of the pathetic utterance. It is in full sympathy with the didactic drift of our parable, though it implies a more genial appreciation of the behaviour of Peter and his fellow-disciples than that which seems to be insinuated in the latter.
[1] Mat 24:12.
[2] Luk 22:28-29. The punishment awaiting the wicked servant is dreadful. His lord, coming on a day when he expects him not, and at an unknown hour, will cut him asunder. Whatever the word