“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done.”
I start with this slightly different translation—both the RSV2CE and the NAB have “servant,” not “slave”—to emphasize what is maybe the most difficult part of the passage.
In 21st-century America, after all our history, we are rightly taken aback by a story in which slavery—or even just menial servitude—is mentioned in a positive light, much less a story whose model character is basically a slave who “knows his place.” The slave, having worked a hard day in the field, comes into the house and, rather than going straight to the meal, is expected to serve the master first before taking a break.
We find this story in Luke 17:5-10, which we heard last Sunday. “So should it be with you.”
We can lessen the sting of this story a little bit by making some qualifications about slavery in the Roman world. First, it was not the racial chattel slavery we know from modern American history; in other words, to be in a state of slavery in the first century did not imply that you were less than human. Second, slaves in wealthy households often held positions of great authority and respect; people actually aspired to such positions. For many of Jesus’ hearers, the idea of being an important slave was, in some ways, a large step up in social and economic terms.
Okay, fair enough, you might say, but what’s the point? Even without the lens of modern Western history, Jesus’ story remains challenging, doesn’t it? Because in the end, the message is pretty clear: know your place; know that you’re just a servant. And even putting aside anything we might want to say about equality, liberation, individual freedom, and all the other ways that this message goads our contemporary sensibilities, it’s just hard to hear in basic human terms. As human beings, we don’t want to know our place. We want to do as we like. We sure as heck don’t want to be slaves; we want to be free.
We are wrong.
I know this is a difficult thing to say. I know that as a citizen of this country and a modern enlightened person, I am supposed to say that individual freedom is the greatest thing ever and that come hell or high water, give me liberty or give me death, here I stand, I can do no other, and various and sundry other sentiments of self-determination.
Jesus isn’t interested in that. He wants faith, and he wants service. And slavery to him is the only true freedom.
Let’s just take that seriously for a moment. Why is it, I wonder, that we find slavery to someone else so objectionable? It’s not a hard question. Slavery is objectionable, morally, experientially, for a simple reason: human beings do not make good masters. Even the best master can be abusive, manipulative, selfish. In a slave economy, even the best master, the kindest master, operates in a system based on this one foundational problem: the conversion of human life to commodity, to financial value. And that is a horrific thing, whether in the first century or today, because human life is much more than that. Human life is mysterious, transcendent, beautiful. No one, however great, is trustworthy enough to own that life in its fullness, to spend it in a way that squanders its power. It is far too valuable, far too wonderful, to be subjected to the whims of someone who may use it for some lesser end.
But what if, just for the sake of argument, we could find the perfect master? It’s hard to imagine, I know. The perfect master would use his slaves in a way that heightens rather than squanders their dignity. Slaves of the perfect master would feel not coerced and oppressed, but free to do what makes them happy. Being “owned” would be less a burden than a liberation from burdens.
We are told all the time in this country that freedom isn’t free. This is obviously true when it comes to our particular civil freedoms. They have to be defended and held at great cost, as we have seen over and over again in the wars of the last century. But is such freedom the best there is? Is it really so impossible to imagine the fullest possible freedom, which includes the freedom from constantly having to negotiate and purchase and assert our freedom? The truest freedom, the perfect freedom, the final freedom, can exist only as the perfect gift from a master whose freedom and authority are absolute.
But how would we know this master? How would we trust him? He would have to persuade us, somehow, that his intentions are pure. He would have to persuade us that his desire to own us is not just a bigger, more maniacal version of the usual human desire to rule, the usual human thirst for power and control. He would have to persuade us that his desire to own us is, actually, of no benefit to him at all—perhaps, even, that his desire to own us is, in some ways, against his interests, even to the point of his own life, his own dignity, his own freedom.
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this.
The God of Jesus Christ is trustworthy. Jesus is trustworthy, and he shows this in the most dramatic and persuasive way on the cross. He’s not in it for himself; he’s in it for us. He’s not out to control us in a selfish way. He’s not out to manipulate us for his own interests. He gains nothing. In fact, he loses everything. He sacrifices his freedom. And in his broken life, his slavery to the consequences of human evil, we begin to see the possibility that maybe this God-Man, in asking for our faith and service, isn’t asking for us to give up our dignity and our will, our individuality and our freedom; he wants to save it. He wants to save it all. He wants us to be really and truly free.
And actually, that’s what faith is: freedom that comes from trust. We tend to think of faith as something in our heads—a question of believing that this or that thing is true. That is an important kind of faith. But the faith that Jesus speaks of, the faith that can move mountains—or, as he puts it in Luke, mulberry bushes—is the life of freedom based on trust in a perfect master. We can glimpse it, maybe, in the innocent, absolute, and yet completely rational trust of a child leaping from a high place into his father’s arms. Faith is the willingness to follow this strange, crucified God away from all the other things clamoring for our allegiance and into the future of God’s kingdom.
Know your place; know that you’re just a slave. If we’re talking about a human master, those words are chilling, oppressive, evil. But with God, they are the most beautiful, liberating words in the world.
And we need to hear those words. We forget whom we belong to. We belong to God, which means we don’t belong to our families. We don’t belong to our friends. We don’t belong to our careers. We don’t belong to our countries. We don’t even belong to ourselves.
It is so easy to be enslaved by all those things. I’m not going to say that none of those things matters. Of course every one of them matters. But they don’t have anything to do with who we are. We belong to God, and we are free because God loves us, not because of how successful we were at managing our own tiny moments of history. If we can accept that now, and live in the confidence of that knowledge, Jesus says we can move mountains. We can move the inner mountains of the soul and become the saints we were created to be. And we can move the external mountains of this life—whatever those are—and show the world God’s saving power.
As St. Paul writes in 2 Timothy, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control. So do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord . . . but bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.”