Debits and Credits

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. (Matthew 18:23)

Readings

Deuteronomy 15:1–11
Be generous with your neighbor

At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release. This is how the release is to be done: Everyone who has made a loan to a neighbor shall cancel it, not requiring payment from the neighbor or community member, because the time of the Lord’s release has been pro­claimed. You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt that a member of your com­munity owes you.

However, there will be no one in need among you, for the Lord will richly bless you in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, if only you listen obediently to the Lord your God, and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised you, and you will lend to many nations, but will not borrow. You will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you.

If there is a poor person among your community members within any of your gates in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. Rather, be open-handed and freely lend enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. Be careful not to harbor this evil thought: “The seventh year, the year of release, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward your needy neighbor and give nothing. Your neighbor may then cry out to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. Give generously, and do so without a grudging heart. Because of this, the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed toward your community members, and toward the poor and needy in your land.

Matthew 18:21–35
The unmerciful slave

Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? As many as seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but sev­enty times seven times.

“Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. As he began the settlement, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. Since he was not able to pay, the mas­ter ordered that he be sold, along with his wife and chil­dren and all his possessions, and that payment be made.

“The slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Mas­ter, have patience with me, and I will pay you every­thing.’ Filled with pity, the slave’s master released him, and forgave him the debt.

“But when that slave went out, he found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’

“His fellow slave fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’

“But he refused. Instead, he went out and had him thrown into prison until he paid back the debt.

“When the other slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and went and told their master all that had happened.

“Then the master called him in and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow slave, just as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master turned him over to the torturers until he paid back his entire debt.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat you unless you forgive your brother’s offenses from the heart.”

Heaven and Hell #357
Rich and poor: literal or spiritual?

There are various opinions about being accepted into heaven. Some people think that the poor are accepted but not the rich; some think that rich and poor alike are accepted; some think that rich people cannot be accepted unless they give up their assets and become like the poor; and all of them support their opinions from the Bible.

But when it comes to heaven, those who differentiate between the rich and the poor do not understand the Bible. In its heart, the Bible is spiritual, though it is material in the letter. So if people take the Bible only in its literal meaning and not in some spiritual meaning, they go astray in all kinds of ways—especially about the rich and the poor.

Reflection

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. (Matthew 18:23)

In this chapter I am going to talk about debits and cred­its. In other words, I’m going to talk about money. I will also talk about that paper stuff that’s in your pocket or pocketbook.

There is a great misconception floating around that money has little or nothing to do with religion, the Bible, and God. But in fact, one of the Lord’s favorite topics was wealth and poverty, great treasures and small pittances, gold and silver, and little copper coins. More than once he compares the kingdom of heaven to trea­sure. And in today’s parable, he speaks of heaven as a king settling his accounts.

You don’t have to be an accountant to know that account books consist primarily of debits and credits. Debits are everything that goes out—or debts that are (or must be) paid by us. Credits are everything that comes in—or debts that others pay (or owe) to us. Deb­its go on the minus side, and credits on the plus side. And even though it doesn’t make much sense in reality, at a gut level we like credits, and we don’t like debits. In other words, we think money coming in is good, and money going out is bad. That is because we tend to focus on the money itself, and not on its usefulness.

After all, what is money? Today we do not actually have money in our pockets—except the coins. Instead we have “notes,” or “bills,” both of which mean “debts.” In our current monetary system, it is hard to figure out exactly what debt is represented by a “dollar bill.” How­ever, the bills are issued under the auspices of the U.S. government—which is trillions of dollars in debt. The paper bills in our pockets and pocketbooks are essen­tially debt that we have all agreed to use as a medium of exchange, so that they represent money.

Money itself is a store, not of debt, but of positive value. In the earlier history of our country, and through­out most of the history of civilization, that store of value was primarily gold and silver. These metals provide an excellent store of value because they are durable, easily carried, have intrinsically useful qualities, and are suffi­ciently plentiful to provide enough to go around, but scarce enough that the law of supply and demand keeps their value high.

In material terms, gold and silver, and to a lesser extent other useful metals such as copper and iron, have real value in themselves, while providing a convenient medium of exchange. That is why gold and silver are the most frequently mentioned, and the most desirable, forms of money in the Bible. Gold and silver are used in the Bible to mean something valuable. But what is the Bible really talking about when it mentions this money?

On the strictly literal level, when the Bible is talking about money, it is talking about what we ordinarily think of as money: a material thing that we use as a store of material value, with which we can buy material goods and services. But the Bible itself also points to a deeper meaning of money. In the Psalms we read:

The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold. (Psalm 19:9–10)

And the Lord tells us:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Mat­thew 6:19–20)

Now we can begin to understand Swedenborg’s state­ment in our reading from Heaven and Hell about why people are so confused by the Bible’s teachings about money, and about rich people getting into heaven. As Swedenborg points out, when the Bible talks about money—about gold and silver, treasure, pearls, dia­monds, and so on—it is not concerned with material money, but with spiritual money. Spiritual wealth is real wealth, whereas what we have here on earth is only a crude and temporary form of that real wealth.

We are back to the question: What is money? We can find out what real, spiritual money is by learning the spiritual significance of gold and silver in the Bible. Gold, Swedenborg tells us, corresponds to the goodness of love, while silver corresponds to our understanding of the truth—especially spiritual truth. In other words, real money, real wealth, is the only real value in the universe: love and truth. And these come from God. All of the “money” we carry with us physically is only a material shadow of that real wealth, which we carry, not in our pockets or pocketbooks, but in our hearts and minds.

This can be hard for people to accept in this materi­alistic culture. But the old saying, “You can’t take it with you,” sums it all up. When we die, we leave behind all the “treasures on earth” that we may have built up here. But we will carry with us all the “treasures in heaven”—the love and goodness, the truth and understanding—that we build up within and around ourselves while we are here on earth. In an entry in his diary of spiritual experiences, Swedenborg expresses it this way:

Being promoted to honor and wealth in the world are not real gains or real blessings, both because they seduce us and lead us away from heaven and because they are temporary, and thus nothing in eternity. Therefore, relatively speaking, they have no reality in themselves. The Lord’s gifts are eternal gifts. He gives these gifts by means of things that lead us to heaven—and riches and honors do not lead us to heaven. (Spiri­tual Experiences #5710)

To borrow a phrase from Paul, the wealth we possess materially here on earth is only a “copy and shadow” of the wealth that is in heaven (see Hebrews 8:5). And we are being rather foolish if we work only for temporary wealth that we know we will eventually lose, and neglect working for eternal wealth, which we will continue to enjoy forever. That eternal wealth, as I already men­tioned, is God’s love in our hearts, and God’s truth in our minds.

With all of this in mind, we can begin to understand what the Lord was talking about in our parable from Matthew: the parable of the unmerciful slave.

This parable is prompted by a question from Peter: “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? As many as seven times?” And the Lord’s answer means, in essence, that there should be no limit to our forgiveness. Jesus answered Peter, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven times.” He then went on to tell the parable of a man who was for­given a huge debt (millions of dollars in today’s cur­rency) by his king, but who then turned around and refused to forgive a small debt (a few dollars in today’s currency) to someone who owed him money—and the consequences of that man’s lack of mercy when he him­self had been shown great mercy by his master.

As Jesus indicates in the final line of the story, the king in the parable is none other than God, our heav­enly Father. And the fact is, all of us owe a huge debt to God. If you have any trouble accepting this, here is a simple demonstration: That big old universe out there, and the earth that we live on, the air that we breathe, the sunshine that sustains life on earth, and all the plant and animal life that we depend on for our sustenance? God created them all. It’s simple. If God hadn’t made the universe and everything in it, including us, we wouldn’t exist. So we owe our very life—everything we have and everything we are—to God.

This is a debt we can never repay. We simply don’t have the ability to create a universe and give it back to God in payment for the one God gave us. Every single one of us is in the position of that slave who owed the king millions of dollars. When the Lord settles spiritual accounts with us, we will have to admit that we simply cannot repay all that the Lord has done for us.

In fact, each one of us would have to admit that not only can we not repay the Lord, but we have actually squandered much of what the Lord has given us. Instead of using all of our abilities and all of this world’s goods to do good to others as the Lord has done to us, we have used much of it to gain benefits for ourselves, even at the expense of others. We humans have laid up a lot more treasure here on earth than we have in heaven. We are all hopelessly overdrawn on our spiritual bank accounts, and we can never catch up on our own.

If the old Christian theology were correct, and God was a God who condemns us, we would all be heading straight to hell, and all we could do would be to beg God’s mercy and hope for the best. But the parable clearly shows that the old theology is not correct. It shows that God is not a God who condemns us, but a God who has mercy on us, and forgives us our debts. When the man who owed ten thousand talents fell on his knees, begged the king to be patient, and promised to pay it all back, the king took pity on him, cancelled the debt, and let him go.

This is how God will treat us, also, if we recognize that we are hopelessly indebted to the Lord, and commit ourselves to do what little we can to repay that debt.

We will get to that in a minute. But first, a word about the nature of God’s forgiveness. The parable makes it sound as if God’s forgiveness is changeable and conditional. First the king demands repayment of the debt, then he forgives the debt, and then, when he sees how hypocritical the slave is, he demands the debt again, throwing the debtor into prison. The reason the story gives the impression that God’s forgiveness is con­ditional is that when Jesus spoke to the people—and when the Lord speaks to us—he has to do it in terms that we will understand. So he uses human character traits to illustrate divine ones. In this case, he uses the character of a king whose forgiveness is conditional.

In fact, it is not the Lord’s forgiveness of us that is conditional. God forgives everyone “until seventy times seven times”—meaning always, continually, forever. In the words of Jesus, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). It is our acceptance of God’s forgiveness that is changeable and conditional. The slave who owed the ten thousand talents was happy to have his debt forgiven. But he turned around and refused to show the same mercy to someone who owed him a far smaller debt.

Spiritually and psychologically speaking, we cannot accept the Lord’s forgiveness when we do not have for­giveness in our own heart. If we are hard-hearted and unforgiving of others, we simply do not believe in our heart of hearts that the Lord forgives us for the wrongs we think and do. So we laugh at the idea of God’s for­giveness, and close our minds and hearts against accept­ing it. We spiritually condemn ourselves to prison.

Then, like the unmerciful slave, we will find our­selves “turned over to torturers until we have paid back our entire debt.” In other words, if we refuse to learn love, mercy, and forgiveness the easy way, through lis­tening to the Lord, we will learn it the hard way: through pain, struggle, trial, and temptation—until from hard experience, our hearts soften and our minds open to the Lord’s truth, the Lord’s love, and the Lord’s forgiveness.

The parable does speak according to how we humans see things. When we are facing the pain and struggles of this life, we tend to blame it all on God. When some­thing particularly hard has happened, we even say things like, “Why is God doing this to me?!”

But God does not do anything evil to us. God merely allows us to experience the results of our own individual and collective actions. When those actions are wrong, they bring pain and suffering not only on us, but on those around us. That is why the Lord wants us to build up our spiritual capital.

The Lord offers us fabulous treasures of love and understanding. We do not have to repay that incredible debt. We are simply asked to show our fellow human beings a little bit of the infinite love and mercy that God has shown us.

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(This post is the eighth chapter in my book, On Earth as it is In Heaven, originally published in 2005. For a description and Table of Contents, please click here. This material is copyright 2005 by Lee Woofenden.)

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