I have recently been struggling with the Parable of the Pounds in Luke 19, in particular verse 27 where the king has his enemies slaughtered in front of him (I have literally lost sleep over this). If this parable is meant to be, in some way, an allegory for Jesus’ work or his return, how do we reconcile this violent imagery with Jesus’ nonviolent message. I know that many people think the parable is a reference to Herod Archelaus, which seems to exacerbate the problem! I have the sense that something subversive might be going on, but I am unsure. I think one way to understand this verse is as a reference to the Destruction of Jerusalem as opposed to a purely eschatological reference. In general I was wondering if anyone could offer any insights about the nature of parable and about how we can reconcile this image of a king slaughtering his enemies with the Messiah who dies in order to free all humanity from sin and death (while praying for the forgiveness of his enemies!!), and with the image of a loving Father who ultimately saves all of his children.
I have a few ideas, but I’ll wait for others who may be more knowledgeable about this parable to weigh in. I just wanted to subscribe to see what they say.
Israel rejected Jesus, but he became King nonetheless and returned to his Father’s house.
Christ then calls Israel to account. They have been entrusted with great treasures, the Law and the Prophets. What have they done with them?
Some (like David) did much. Others (like those who rejected Jesus) did little, and were now about to lose even the little that remained. Jerusalem would be overthrown, the Temple desecrated beyond recovery, the people scattered.
Without getting into the merits of how far that parable functions as a prediction of violence to come (although I don’t have any problem seeing it as a prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem–the question being whether it’s a double prophecy going farther than that), I will observe that even on a theory that it only means the destruction of Jerusalem it’s still a violent (and very messy) result. We can’t even on that application say that Christ is talking metaphorically!–lots of very real people suffered horribly, often to the death, sometimes to fates they themselves might regard as worse than death. And it wasn’t only evildoers or rebels against Christ in some obvious sense either, it was women and children and people who stayed out of religious disputes but who were worshiping God the best they knew how and trying to respectfully keep the Law.
Part of my answer would be that on the evidence of scripture, while God may be ultimately pacifistic in His goals and intentions, He’s willing to support military action (or even directly engage in it Himself) temporarily and decisively. Whatever Christology is true, we should expect the Son to follow suit; and both the NT and the OT (especially where referenced in application to Jesus in the NT) have strongly militaristic and combatative prophecies and reports of what the Son has done and will do. This starts as early as the hand of God closing the door of the Ark (whatever degree of historical truth there is to that), and just goes on from there.
Part of my answer would also be that God (at least in Christ, I would say in and as Christ) voluntarily suffers along with the people He believes has to die in order to accomplish His goals. (There is a famous painting showing Jesus standing outside the Ark, preparing to suffer the Flood with those He has shut the door against. Because He loves them too.)
And while they can expect to put that suffering behind them someday, He can’t ever put that behind Him, being both omniscient and omnipresent and transcendent to spatio-temporal nature. So it isn’t as though He’s dictating this and inflicting it from on high, or only acting like a superviolent hero going out to slaughter the largest army in the world by Himself: He voluntarily shares the experience on the other side, too, and always does and always will. God the ultimate Judge and Executor of Destruction hangs on the cross with both of the rebels against God, the penitent one and the impenitent one; and indeed by doing so He convinces one of the rebels to repent of His crimes. (Putting GosMatt and GosLuke together, the bandits both start out hurling abuse at Christ, but one of them repents.) The slayer of the firstborn sons of Egypt voluntarily sacrifices Himself as well: the only-begotten suffers with the firstborn sons.
And I think this connects with the idea that the innocent suffer for the sake of the guilty. God could cleanly execute evildoers whenever He wanted to (and if some theories about the millennium reign are correct that’s how things will go during the coming reign of Christ on earth), but instead He chooses to (usually) work in messy ways and I have a feeling that’s so we don’t become complacent about ourselves compared to those-sinners-over-there whom God is punishing. We’re supposed to be in interpersonal communion; when one suffers all share in the suffering.
I observe, relatedly, that on those same theories about the millennial reign, after a thousand years of the occasional rare sinner being pinpoint cleanly zorched, the whole thing ends with a massive rebellion against Christ by people nominally loyal to Him unlike those other sinners, leading to the largest slaughter that will ever occur in world history. Why is the chief sinner of spiritual pride able to successfully seduce away the vast majority of people who by all the direct evidence never sinned even a little against God or each other?–why does God reinstate the sacrifices and Temple rituals, and instate what amounts to a benign dictatorship with the Son at the head? Why does God allow people to have what they think they most want in either case? I expect so some lessons could be learned which couldn’t be learned any other way than by experiencing it.
I also observe that up until the final judgment there, it could not be plausibly said that followers of Christ have ever done greater things than Himself. There has to be a transition to a condition where everyone can see that the greatest authority, even the highest authority of foundational Reality Himself, is the authority to serve not to be served. That’s the only way any followers of Christ could ever be said to fulfill His promise that someday we would do greater things than He: the Greatest acts as the least of us and we thereby have learned to recognize and acknowledge true Greatness.
Until then, as long as we have, at the bottom of our hearts, the notion that ultimately power is about causing effects, instead of self-sacrificial service, God’s goals of peace can never be realized, even if He sends the Son to rule in the way that most of humanity thinks they most want. And consequently there will be wars, not in the sense of harmless games of skill and chivalry (like a game of football–American or real 
), but soul-scarringly horrible wars, with people merely inflicting effects on other people, and learning in various ways (including by personal loss) how and why that is so indescribably wrong.
Until we get that notion of power out of our hearts, we’re either sinning or we’re going to sin eventually. And every sinner has no advantage over the chief of sinners–all of us eventually are put in the place of Satan. But part of Satan’s lesson, which we have to learn as well, is what it means for the innocent to suffer for the sake of the guilty.
Job may or may not have learned that lesson from his own suffering; Satan (or whoever is the chief of sinners at any time) hasn’t learned it yet.
But I ought to regard myself as the chief of sinners, as an important first step in learning that lesson myself.
What I am trying to say, in other words, is that the safest way I have found so far of looking at something like the parable of the talents, is to put myself not in the place of the man with ten talantons of silver, or the man with five (or the man with ten minas or with five minas in the other version of the parable), but in the place of the lazy servant who thought to save himself by flattering his King as though He is a chief of brigands, who is to be thrown into the outer darkness where the weeping will be and the gnashing of the teeth --and if in the place of the lazy servant, then even more beyond that: in the place of those who did not want the Son to reign over them at all and who are slain in His presence.
Until I can recognize myself in those places, I will deep in my heart think of myself as superior to those evildoers over there, with no real pity or sympathy for them, no expectation and hope that they have hope in God of being truly righteous some day. I probably won’t even have more than a dim and warped understanding of what it means to be righteous.
And the result of that will be, in my own way, rising against God in the worst of rebellions to be slaughtered by Him, just like those people at the end of the millennium. If we’re surprised about that and think we would never do that because we’re faithfully better than them, we haven’t yet recognized we are them.
I should be getting down there and asking to be slain with the rebels who didn’t want the Son reigning over them.
Because the Son Himself is down there, too, dying with them. Even though, unlike us, He truly is innocent of even the smallest sin.
If I’m not down there with those who are slain in the parable of the pounds, I’m not cooperating fully with the self-sacrificial action of God. And so I am still rebelling.
And if still rebelling, I’m still the chief of sinners.
Allan, I have heard similar interpretations, I think that is how N.T. Wright understands the parable.
Jason, thank you for your thoughts, a lot of what you said was very helpful and insightful (in particular God suffering with those who suffer). I think I should make some of my own perspectives clear. I fall in the amillennial camp, with sympathies to partial preterism, so I didn’t identify much with the views of the millennium and Revelation that you put forward. I am also really committed to the idea of nonviolence, so I tend to view the New Testament in a more subversive paradigm in which violent imagery is used for spiritual warfare and nonviolent tactics. I am not convinced that Jesus will himself be committing acts of violence upon his return, considering the sword he uses comes from his mouth and not from a sheath at his side. I am, of course, not opposed to the idea that God allows acts of violence to occur, or that he withdraws his protective presence to allow human beings to act in violent ways towards each other for his redemptive purposes. My thinking on this is more heavily influenced by people like Gregory Boyd (and his Warfare Worldview). I admit I am not qualified to really argue these points in much detail, but my thinking tends in this direction.
The way I have tried to answer this question of the parable for myself is by trying to rid myself of the tendency to read Jesus’ parables as coded stories in which the nobleman or the king or anyone is just a code word for God and by getting rid of the notion that we can always apply these characters’ personalities and actions to God or Jesus directly. This is at least my own understanding. I lean towards the view that a parable is a story designed to make one central point or have a specific effect on the hearers, rather than simply a coded story where Jesus is the nobleman and he will literally slaughter his enemies (of course in the parable the nobleman doesn’t, his attendants do). So those are just some of my thoughts on the matter.
Here’s a quote from St Gregory the Great:
“The Lord sends fire on earth when, by the breath of his Holy Spirit, he sets fire to the hearts of unspiritual men. And the earth catches fire when the heart of flesh . . . becomes inflamed with the love of God.”
On hearing that God will set fire to the earth, most people think in natural terms, that God is an angry tyrant who is both able and willing to fry the planet to a crisp. ie. They completely miss the point, create God in their own image, and are blinded by fear. It reminds me of the Dufflepuds and their Magician.
I really liked Jason’s insight. If God throws us into hell to burn away our sins, he also will come with us (and to us, and for us) with healing in his wings. We will not suffer alone, nor will it be without point and purpose.
Whatever the reality is behind the very very very numerous depictions of divine violence in the scriptures (even in the NT, even in the Gospels), at the very least the salient point is that God takes (and even insists on) ultimate responsibility for their occurrence.
And if that’s true, then the difference between whether He ever directly pulls the trigger Himself or not is, to me, irrelevant.
What is relevant, though, is that the judge on the seat Who is responsible for the punitive violence, regardless of whether he gets down there with the axe Himself or not, is (as St. John says in His first epistle) also our defense advocate Who insists on standing with us. He doesn’t abandon us if the judgment has to go south. And in doing so He acts, both on the seat and down in the dock with us, as the propitiatory-seat in regard to our sins: the seat of mercy. (And not only regarding our sins, the sins of those who are already significantly loyal toward Him and recognize Who He is, but in regard to the sins of the whole world, too!)
Not because He himself has to be convinced to lean toward us or to smile upon us (the metaphors of the Greek or Latin words being translated there) – He wouldn’t be standing in the dock with us if He was the one who had to be convinced!
But rather in order to convince us, the sinners, to learn toward and smile upon Him.
That was a shockingly different and absolutely reverse notion of the commonly prevalent ideas of religious propitiation, which were all about somehow convincing the deity to smile at us or lean toward us.
It’s still a prevalent idea of religious propitiation today, too. One doesn’t have to go far to hear Christians, who of all people ought to have learned and to teach better, read the terms for propitiation and reconciliation in the normally expected but grammatically reversed fashion, and claim that Christ died to reconcile God to us. It is always the other way around in the NT: God, Father or Son or Both, is always the doer of the propitiation and the doer of the conciliation, and we or our sins are always the object of the action, never God.
(Trying to get people to realize this is almost as difficult as hanging on a cross. And sometimes results in a principally similar rejection! But it’s a key principle pointing toward Christian universalism, too.)