The first two slaves generate commentary boilerplate and unremarkable. Different abilities, different productivities, both doing their best, both praised. But the third slave.....

“But another one came, saying, ‘Lord, here is your mina that I kept hidden away in a cloth. You see, I was in fear of you, because you are a harsh man; you take what you did not deposit, and you reap what you did not sow.’ He said to him, ‘By your own words I judge you, wicked slave. You knew, did you, that I am a harsh man, taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I did not sow? So why did you not put my money in a bank? Then on my coming, I would have collected it with interest.’” (Luke 19:20-23)

What I like is that the third slave of Luke 19 approaches the master and hasn’t done a thing with his mina; he has hidden it in a cloth and offers the explanation that he knew his master was a harsh man, taking where he did not deposit and reaping where he did not sow.

The Master does not deny it! That 3rd slave may have a bad attitude, but he does not deny it. He does reap where he does not sow. He does reap disciples where he did not directly make them himself. Get used to it.

It is a bad attitude that the slave had but it appears that the master could have worked with it—‘just put it in the bank and I get the interest’ he says. Who knows where the slave picked up his rotten attitude?—maybe he was wronged somewhere In the past. It doesn’t matter. Just deliver the interest and the master can work with it. Depositing it in the bank is not much, but it appears that the Master could have worked with it.

The parallel illustration at Matt 25 has that “wicked slave” burying his master’s talent in the ground, working up a sweat so as to thwart his Master’s will. Why would anyone do that?

When my turn came to comment, I pointed out that when a woman is on full throttle pressing for what she wants, nothing, but nothing, does not yield to her.  (I also pointed out that I knew this only from what others had told me—I did not know it from personal experience.) When I took my wife’s hand just after the meeting, the sister behind me said: “Oh, it’s too late now for kissing up! You should have thought of that before!”

“Look at the poor guy!” I had said of the unrighteous judge pictured on the video screen. “Leaning back in the chair in total defeat, his one hand tugging at his beard, the fingers of his other hand running through his hair! He doesn’t care about God. He doesn’t care about Man. But this woman continually pleading before him is driving him to distraction! He’ll give her anything she wants—if only she will stop!”

And then—who is the unrighteous judge said to represent? God!! ‘Look, if you can pester this jerk into giving you justice, how much more so God, who is not inclined to deny it in the first place!’ goes the thinking. Don’t ever say that Jesus does not relish in hyperbole—it is a staple in his tool box—but this is more than hyperbole. It is ‘hyperbole with a twist’ or ‘hyperbole on the rocks’ or something!

Here is the parable from Luke 18:2-7

In a certain city there was a judge who had no fear of God and no respect for man. There was also a widow in that city who kept going to him and saying, ‘See that I get justice from my legal opponent.’ Well, for a while he was unwilling, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Although I do not fear God or respect any man, because this widow keeps making me trouble, I will see that she gets justice so that she will not keep coming and wearing me out with her demand.’”

Then the Lord said: “Hear what the judge, although unrighteous, said!  Certainly, then, will not God cause justice to be done for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night, while he is patient toward them?  I tell you, he will cause justice to be done to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man arrives, will he really find this faith on the earth?”

Judges weren’t in a hurry back then to bend to the concerns of the poor. They might hold out for a bribe, they might insist on indecipherable procedure, they might just be in a bad mood. To some extent this is true today—they hailing from a class that cannot comprehend the background concerns of the lowly. I had my own slight whiff of this years ago when I took a matter to small claims court and the other fellow simply hired a lawyer who knew his way around whereas I did not. All hell broke out when I went to hand the judge a document without first asking to “approach the bench.”

I also like the detail thrown in about God: will he not “cause justice to be done for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night, while he is patient toward them?” Being “patient toward them” is an unnecessary detail—it doesn’t have to be there. It heightens the contrast between God and the unrighteous judge, to be sure, but the parable would stand without it.

So it must be that the concerns we bring to God are, in the greater scheme of things, quite small to him. “Oh, for crying out loud!” we can picture a pompous human judge saying, “THAT is you silly problem that you can’t solve by yourself and have to pester me with it?”

God doesn’t do that. High though he may be, he is approachable over low things.

The second part of the lesson—this was the Jesus Life and Ministry study for the week of 12/8/19—featured another hyperbole of sorts, the contrast between two who approached Him.

Two men went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and began to pray these things to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like everyone else​—extortioners, unrighteous, adulterers—​or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give the tenth of all things I acquire.’

But the tax collector, standing at a distance, was not willing even to raise his eyes heavenward but kept beating his chest, saying, ‘O God, be gracious to me, a sinner.’ I tell you, this man went down to his home and was proved more righteous than that Pharisee. Because everyone who exalts himself will be humiliated, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

If you brag on yourself, that opens up a superior distance with regard to others. But if you don’t brag and yet put others down, the effect is the same—it just shifts to another position on the scale. This jerk of a Pharisee does BOTH. He brags on himself AND he puts down the lowly fellow next to him. (Tax collectors, by the way, were universally despised at the time, because they were more or less thugs given to shaking people down for whatever they could get, often irrespective of what they were owed.)

It’s an over-the-top illustration that somehow conveys in the most touching manner what flies and does not fly in God’s eyes. One brother at the meeting said how, if you put the fasting as a deed of the tax collector, it would mean something, for fasting was a way of showing sincere grief over past moral failings. The Pharisee didn’t seem to grieve too much, did he? Such a self-satisfied lout would be hard to top.

One young woman at the congregation meeting last night identified with the “missing drachma” parable of Jesus, saying: “When I put my hand in my back pocket and find some money there....Whoa! it is a big deal!” (“Betty Davis style” is how Bob Dylan said it.) I must admit that it inspired me to do the same, slipping a dollar into my back pocket, pulling it out and exclaiming: “Whoa! Look at this!”

It was this illustration at Luke 15 that got her going: “What woman who has ten drachma coins, if she loses one of the drachmas, does not light a lamp and sweep her house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls her friends and neighbors together, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the drachma coin that I had lost.’”

There is a not-so-hidden rebuke in Jesus’ words summarizing a similar parable: “I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous ones who have no need of repentance.”​ Well, they did—have need of repentance that is. Otherwise they would have been out searching for the missing sheep themselves:

“What man among you with 100 sheep, on losing one of them, will not leave the 99 behind in the wilderness and go after the lost one until he finds it? And when he has found it, he puts it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he gets home, he calls his friends and his neighbors together, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’”​

The context was that of the Pharisees sneering at the common people that they should have been tending to, even employing the pejorative term “amhaarets”—“people of the dirt.” Straying a little off-topic, but still fair game, the conductor of that Bible-study portion explored how you wouldn’t want to come across that way in your own ministry:

Bible principles are good and with them people mess up their lives much less than they would otherwise. Sometimes it works at the other end, and they succeed much more than they would otherwise. It depends upon one’s starting point. At any rate, come across someone in the ministry with a host of problems, and realize it could well be you in the absence of Bible principles—I mean, it is no basis for ever feeling superior, as those Pharisees did without even mastering the godly ways.

Again, not part of this particular study, but certainly in the same vein, was Jesus’ rebuke to those same religious leaders on another occasion: “But when the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they began saying to his disciples: “Does he eat with tax collectors* and sinners?”  On hearing this, Jesus said to them: “Those who are strong do not need a physician, but those who are ill do. I came to call, not righteous people, but sinners.”

Sometimes those who dislike Jehovah’s Witnesses try to paint it that they have a higher proportion of ones mentally ill. I have no idea whether this is true or not, for mental illness defines the times that we live in, but I don’t even kick back at this anymore. Instead, I say that, if true, it is exactly what one would expect. I quote Jesus’ words that he came to call, not on those who do not need a physician, but on those who do. “Spiritually sick” is what he is talking about, but if spiritually sick, then maybe emotionally or mentally sick as well—sickness tends to overflow its banks. The people you have to wonder about, in my view, are not those who experience emotional difficulties in the face of the present world, but those who do not—those who sail past atrocities on every side and remain undisturbed.

The two Bible chapters up for review in that mid-week meeting were Hebrews 12 and 13. Discipline was a theme, in view of 12:7. “You need to endure as part of your discipline,” the verse says. There was a video of a circuit overseer taking counsel from his wife as discipline. He was upset over someone he thought had treated him badly, and his wife said: “Well, that’s because he is a yo-yo. But so are you. Get over it.” [precise words mine, not hers] He told of how he had received a letter from the branch telling how he had botched something or other, and he counted that, too, as discipline. Sometimes we get counseled over various things.

Still, the overall sense of Hebrews 12:7 is that even if no one ever says a word to you about anything, simply to pursue the Christian course in a world that either wants to change that course or have nothing to do with it is a “discipline.” The lives of Jehovah’s Witnesses might be described as ones of delayed gratification; they go light or even abstain from certain aspects of life that they would otherwise engage in for the sake of laying hold to a greater prize. That takes self-discipline. Delayed gratification is usually seen as a responsible thing, even by Witness opposers, just not in this case.

That just pursuing the Christian course in the face of an indifferent or even hostile world is in itself a form of discipline is plain from surrounding verses, as well as the overall context of the Book of Hebrews itself. Those members of the Jerusalem congregation were tiring of holding the line. They “ought to be teachers in view of the time but they again need someone to teach [them] from the beginning the elementary things.” (5:12) Hopefully, they would be encouraged by the “great cloud of witnesses” surrounding them—not to mention Christ’s own example, so as to “not get tired and give up.” (12:1-3)

“In your struggle against that sin, you have never yet resisted to the point of having your blood shed.  And you have entirely forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons: “My son, do not belittle the discipline from Jehovah, nor give up when you are corrected by him;  for those whom Jehovah loves he disciplines, in fact, he scourges everyone whom he receives as a son.” You need to endure as part of your discipline. God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?  But if you have not all shared in receiving this discipline, you are really illegitimate children, and not sons. Furthermore, our human fathers used to discipline us, and we gave them respect. Should we not more readily submit ourselves to the Father of our spiritual life and live?  For they disciplined us for a short time according to what seemed good to them, but he does so for our benefit so that we may partake of his holiness.  True, no discipline seems for the present to be joyous, but it is painful; yet afterward, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen the hands that hang down and the feeble knees.” (12:4-12)

Don’t be a lout and don’t miss the point of God’s undeserved kindness [“grace,” many transactions say, but the New World Translation says “undeserved kindness,” since the former term just conveys to the modern man that God is not clumsy and doesn’t topple over things]: “Carefully watch that no one fails to obtain the undeserved kindness of God, so that no poisonous root springs up to cause trouble and many are defiled by it; and watch that among you there is no one who is sexually immoral nor anyone who does not appreciate sacred things, like Eʹsau, who gave up his rights as firstborn in exchange for one meal. (12:15-16)

He is shaking the very heaven and the earth. He is not shaking the congregation directly, but it is sure to feel the aftershocks—hence the heightened need for the discipline of endurance: “Now the expression “yet once more” indicates the removal of the things that are shaken, things that have been made, in order that the things not shaken may remain.  Therefore, seeing that we are to receive a Kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us continue to receive undeserved kindness, through which we may acceptably offer God sacred service with godly fear and awe.  (12:27-28)

(thoughts gleaned from the midweek meeting of September 23-29, 2019)

*Tax collectors were the lowest of the low in popular esteem back then because they were not unknown to shake people down for, not just the required tax, but whatever they could get in addition.

From yesterday's study article with regard to Luke 16:

If the unrighteous riches are not of God's making but of this system's, why not use an unrighteous steward to teach a lesson with them? He uses money that is not his to reduce debts and make friends for himself.

If we are debtors to God (who isn't?) we also can use money that is not 'ours' - all of it, since it is not God's idea - to reduce our debts to him and make him a friend. How cool is that?

The illustration is not a strict parallel, but it works in a quirky sort of way.

Then he also said to the disciples: “A rich man had a steward who was accused of handling his goods wastefully. So he called him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Hand in the account of your stewardship, for you can no longer manage the house.’ Then the steward said to himself, ‘What am I to do, seeing that my master is taking the stewardship away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. Ah! I know what I will do, so that when I am removed from the stewardship, people will welcome me into their homes.’ And calling to him each one of his master’s debtors, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘A hundred measures* of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take back your written agreement and sit down and quickly write 50.’ Next, he said to another one, ‘Now you, how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred large measures* of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take back your written agreement and write 80.’  And his master commended the steward, though unrighteous, because he acted with practical wisdom; for the sons of this system of things*are wiser in a practical way toward their own generation than the sons of the light are.

 “Also, I say to you: Make friends for yourselves by means of the unrighteous riches, so that when such fail, they may receive you into the everlasting dwelling places.

I liked the notion that you can eliminate your footprint in politics and you can eliminate it in unbiblical religion, you cannot eliminate it in the world's commercial system. You can, however, lessen it.

The illustration doesn't exactly line up with modern day principles of 'reason.' The components don't dovetail. But it is close enough that Jesus teaches a vital lesson with it. To me, it indicates that Jesus is not enslaved to today's insistence upon 'reason,' which has not served its world particularly well.