Jesus and His Bible Part 5

The Disciples Miss the Point

Jesus declared all foods clean, and then he went into the Gentile region of Tyre. There he encountered the Syrian woman with the daughter oppressed by an evil spirit. After a dialogue with the mother, he healed the daughter. Then he and his disciples traveled to the region of Decapolis (still in Syria), where he healed a deaf person and enabled him to speak intelligibly. Then in chapter 8, the gospel of Mark records the second great feeding of a multitude, this time around 4,000 people, with 7 baskets of leftovers.These three miracles join with the healing of the Gerasene man to show Jesus taking his ministry into Gentile territories and to Gentile people. 

Afterwards, they crossed the Sea of Galilee to the west side, back into Jewish territory. There the Pharisees came out to argue with Jesus and to get him to give them a sign, which he refused to do. Jesus and his friends got back into the boat, and ended up in Bethsaida, home territory.

Now as they were heading back home, while Jesus was warning them about the Pharisees and the Herodians, using the metaphor of leaven, or yeast, the disciples began discussing the fact that they did not have enough bread. 

Jesus said to them: “Do you not yet see or understand? Do you have a hardened (dull, insensible) heart? Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear?” (Mark 8:18). Do you not remember both feedings of the multitudes? With leftovers? Do you not yet understand? 

This rebuke is a quotation from the prophet Ezekiel, to whom God says: “Son of man, you live in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear; for they are a rebellious house” (Ezek. 12:2).  

The context in Ezekiel is this. Ezekiel is a prophet during the Babylonian exile of the Jews. He hears from God that he is to act out a parable among the exiles that relates to the Jews still in Jerusalem, and that parable means that they too will go into exile.  

The allusion to Ezekiel makes me think that Jesus is advising his disciples to observe his actions as if they were parables.  He has fed multitudes with a few loaves and fishes; he has freed those oppressed by evil; he has just given hearing and speech to a deaf man. He is about to give sight to a blind man. By this rebuke to their own sight and hearing, he invites his disciples to bring their imagination and intelligence to bear on what all this means, what these signs point to. 

In Matthew, the story includes the words that the disciples realized he was talking about the doctrine of the Pharisees, not literal leaven. And that doctrine was one which judged people for not following religious traditions, and which always needed one more attesting miracle to prove that Jesus was the one sent by God, the Messiah.

Freedom, Simplicity, Honesty, and Humility: the Human Side of Prayer

Matthew 6:9-13 “The Lord’s Prayer”

October 26, 2014

Preached at Newberg Friends Church, Newberg, OR

The simplicity of this prayer speaks honestly of the simplicity of our approach to God.  Acknowledge God as Father, acknowledge that God is immediately present, acknowledge that God is holy in character. Welcome the coming of God as King and present ourselves as ready to do God’s will. Ask simply for what we need for the day. Ask for forgiveness and to be able to forgive. Ask for protection from pain, trouble, and evil.

So simple, and all we need.  And at the same time, the apex of teaching from the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, about who we are in relationship to God. Jesus invokes the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Law, the Prophets, and personal stories in this simple prayer.  I think it will temporarily defamiliarize it for us and thus enrich our experience of it to hear the echoes from the sacred texts that Jesus read. I have adapted some of these to speak directly to God as prayers.

Our Father

Jesus's scriptures spoke of God as our Father.

Psalm 68:4-5 We sing to You, God, we sing praises to Your name; we extol You, the God who rides on the clouds, by Your name YAH, the One Who is and Who makes things happen, and we rejoice before You. A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, are You, God, in Your holy habitation.  (NKJV, modified per Howard Macy)

Psalm 103 Bless the LORD, O my soul; and with all that is within me, I bless Your holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul; I do not forget all Your benefits: the God Who forgives all my iniquities, Who heals all my diseases, Who redeems my life from destruction, Who crowns me with lovingkindness and tender mercies, Who satisfies my mouth with good things, so that my youth is renewed like the eagle’s. You, LORD, execute righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed…You, LORD, are merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy. You will not always strive with us, nor will You keep Your anger forever. You have not dealt with us according to our sins, nor punished us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is Your mercy to those who fear You; as far as the east is from the west, so far have You removed our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so you, LORD, pity those who fear You. For You know our frame; You remember that we are dust. … LORD, You have established Your throne in heaven, and Your kingdom rules over all. (NKJV)

Isaiah 63:15-16 Look down from heaven, and see from Your habitation, holy and glorious. Where are Your zeal and Your strength, the yearning of Your heart and Your mercies toward us? Are they restrained? Doubtless You are our Father, though Abraham was ignorant of us, and Israel does not acknowledge us. You, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from Everlasting is Your name. (NKJV)

Isaiah 64:8 O LORD, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand. (NKJV)

In heaven

When we say “our Father in heaven”—what does that exactly mean?  I have always felt myself to be directing my prayer “up there” somewhere.  But Dallas Willard tells us in The Divine Conspiracy to look at the places in the Old Testament where God speaks “from heaven” which show us “that heaven is here and God is here, because God and his spiritual agents act here and are constantly available here” (69). Willard directs our attention to Jacob’s dream of the ladder going up to heaven in Genesis 28, and particularly this verse:  And behold, the Lord stood over and beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac…by you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed and bless themselves (AMP). Our Father who is in our atmosphere, in Whom we live and move and have our being, Who “speaks out of thin air” (Willard) is a more helpful way to understand “in heaven.” 

Hallowed be Your Name

The Name of God refers to the entire character of God, all God is known for.  The prayer we pray is that the person and character of God will be revered and known as holy. We very likely underestimate the grandness of God when we get used to being God’s family. Just to give us a picture that depicts that grandeur, here is a description from the prophet Ezekiel while in Babylon with the Jewish captives.  He saw “a whirlwind coming out of the north, a great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself; and brightness was all around it and radiating out of its midst like the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire…Above … was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like a sapphire stone; on the likeness of the throne was a likeness of a man high above it. Also from the appearance of his waist and upward I saw, as it were, the color of amber with fire all around within it; and from the appearance of His waist and downward I saw, as it were, fire with brightness all around. Like a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the brightness all around it. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.  So when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard a voice of one speaking. (Ezek. 1).  Bright light, fire, wind, rainbow, and someone with a human shape towering above him on a toweringly high throne.  Hallowed be thy name, amen! Let us admire and tremble at Your greatness, O God, and treat You with respect and humility.

Immediately out of our awareness of the holiness of God, the perfection and wholeness of the same being who also gives us life and speaks to us out of thin air, comes the prayer that God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

What does God’s Kingdom look like in the Hebrew Testament?

Psalm 89:5-9, 11, 13-16, 19-22, 26, 35-37 The heavens will praise Your wonders, O LORD; Your faithfulness also in the assembly of the saints. For who in the heavens can be compared to the LORD? Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened to the LORD? God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints; all those around You hold You in reverence. O LORD God of hosts, who is mighty like You, O LORD? Your faithfulness also surrounds You. You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, You still them….The heavens are Yours, the earth also is Yours; the world and all its fullness, You have founded them. … You spoke in a vision to Your holy one, and said: …”I have found My servant David; with My holy oil I have anointed him … The enemy shall not outwit him, nor the son of wickedness afflict him… He shall cry to Me, ‘You are my Father, my God, and the rock of my salvation.’” (NKJV)

Here is one picture from the prophet Isaiah: Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, who will teach us God’s ways, and we shall walk in God’s paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. God shall judge between the nations and rebuke many people; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2).

Ezekiel shows us how God’s will is done in heaven: The living beings, the cherubim, four faces, four sets of wings, ready to rush off in whatever direction God tells them to do what God wants, accompanied by the wheels rimmed with eyes, which roll beside them wherever they go—that’s what it looks like in heaven.  Worship, listening, instant obedience.  In this prayer we commit to humility before God: we do not use God; God uses us.

Give us this day our daily bread

We have a picture of daily bread in the exodus narrative miracle of manna. In

Exodus 16, when the Hebrew people had left Egypt and were walking through the desert, they became hungry, and they murmured against Moses and God. God in graciousness sent them quail in the evening and manna bread to gather in the morning.  This prayer remembers the daily provision of God in the past and humbly requests similar provision in the present.  It is humble and temperate in what it asks for.

Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors

This prayer extends the principle that restrained vengeance: Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:23-25).  This defines and limits what is owed for an injury. Jesus takes us into the territory of generosity by teaching us that our forgiving what is owed to us goes hand in hand with God forgiving what we owe to God.

Two clear examples of forgiveness from the Hebrew Testament: After Jacob defrauds Esau of his first-born blessing, Esau swears he will kill Jacob as soon as their father Isaac dies. Jacob flees the country.  When he returns decades later, Jacob hears Esau is coming to meet him. He sends ahead of him many gifts to placate Esau, and even places his wives and children ahead of him to receive Esau’s vengeance.  Jacob cannot evade the meeting, however, and to his surprise, Esau runs to embrace him and kisses him. They weep together.  Then Esau returns all Jacob’s gifts to him because Esau has all he needs already.  Esau deserves all kinds of credit for being a class-A forgiver (Genesis 33).

We can see forgiveness also operating in the life of David when he is on the run from Saul (I Samuel 24).  Saul has tried again and again to kill David, whose popularity and anointing are a threat to Saul’s kingship. David and his warriors/bandits hide out in wild places, and here is what David prays when he is hiding in a cave. Psalm 142: I cry out to the LORD with my voice, with my voice to the LORD I make my supplication. I pour out my complaint before You; I declare before You my trouble. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then You knew my path. In the way in which I walk they have secretly set a snare for me. Look on my right hand and see, for there is no one who acknowledges me; refuge has failed me; no one cares for my soul. I cried out to You, O LORD: I said, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. Attend to my cry, for I am brought very low; deliver me from my persecutors, for they are stronger than I. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise your name; the righteous shall surround me, for you shall deal bountifully with me.” (NKJV, adapted)

Saul pursues David to the wilderness of Engedi, and while there, goes aside into a cave to relieve himself, as the Amplified Bible puts it with some degree of restraint.  As Saul is in this unguarded moment, David and his warriors line the darkness at the back of the cave, watching.  David’s men whisper to him, “God has delivered your enemy into your hand. Kill him!” Instead, David cuts off a bit of Saul’s robe. When Saul reenters the light of day, David follows him out, bows to the ground, and shows Saul the bit of cloth.  “See, my father, see the skirt of your robe in my hand! Since I cut off the skirt of your robe and did not kill you, you know and see that there is no evil or treason in my hands.  I have not sinned against you, yet you hunt my life to take it. May the Lord judge between me and you, and may the Lord avenge me upon you, but my hand shall not be upon you….May the Lord be judge and judge between me and you, and see and plead my cause, and deliver me out of your hands.” And then Saul wept, and he replied to David, “You are more upright in God’s eyes than I, for you have repaid me good, but I have rewarded you evil…Therefore may the Lord reward you with good for what you have done for me this day.”

David’s honest prayer to God makes it possible for him to respond to Saul in a peace-making way, deferring judgment and justice to God. We have no need to hide our anger and even our hatred of our enemies from God, who sees our hearts.  Much better to express it to God as colorfully as we need to and then trust God to judge between us and those who have done us harm.

Lead us not into temptation

The very provision of God in the wilderness, the quail and the manna, was a trial of the wanderers. God said to Moses: I will rain bread from heaven, and the people will go out and gather it at a certain rate every day and I will test them, I will prove them, to see whether they will do as I direct them. God left the nations of Canaan in the land that the Israelites settled to test them, to prove them. Out of this context, Jesus teaches us to pray instead along the lines of the writer of Proverbs, who prays: Remove falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with the food allotted to me; lest I be full and deny You and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal, and profane the name of my God. (Prov. 3:8-9). Both abundance and scarcity test us, and each has its own temptations.

Deliver us from evil, from the Evil One

The Psalms are chock-full of prayers for deliverance from evil—from persons who want to harm us, from our own tendency to do evil, and from evil itself.

Psalm 25:19-20 Consider my enemies, for they are many; and they hate me with cruel hatred. Keep my soul and deliver me; let me not be ashamed, for I put my trust in You.

Psalm 17:13 Deliver my life from the wicked with Your sword, with Your hand…

Psalm 39:7-8 And now, Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in You. Deliver me from all my transgressions; do not make me the reproach of the foolish.

Psalm 116:3-5 The pains of death surrounded me, and the pangs of the grave laid hold of me; I found trouble and sorrow. Then I called upon the name of the LORD: “O LORD, I implore You, deliver my soul!” Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yes, our God is merciful.

Psalm 23:4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

My hope today is that we will sense the richness of the stories and poetry and prophecy that echo through this simple prayer, and that we will pray with greater freedom, simplicity, honesty, and humility as a human creature addressing a divine Creator, a God Who chooses to be in loving and tender relationship with us and Who is near to us at all times, Who hears our wails and our hurrahs, and Who is close enough to hear our whispers and even what we cannot speak.

Taboos, Judgment, and Provision: The Ravens and Elijah

Preached at Klamath Falls Friends Church
April 28, 2013

I was driving through Newberg on a side street and came upon what is called “a murder of crows”—6 or 7 dragging a squirrel carcass to the side of the street to enjoy a free meal. Crows are in the same general species as ravens, birds that eat everything and are particularly drawn to carrion.  The crows I drove by illustrated the verse from Job 38: “Who provides food for the raven when the raven’s chicks cry unto God, when they wander for lack of meat?” This question is answered in Psalm 147, which says, “Sing thanksgiving to the Lord, sing praises to God on the harp…he gives food to the beast and to the young ravens which cry.” And then Jesus wraps up this thought by reminding his followers, “Take no thought for your life, don’t worry about food; don’t worry about your body, about what you will clothe yourself in.  Life is more than food and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens.  They neither sow nor reap, they have neither bank account nor pantry; and God feeds them.  How much are you different from these birds?”

So the dead squirrel was God’s provision for the crows that day.  And God subtracted one squirrel from the total also, since God pays attention to both sides of the food chain, to prey as well as to predator; God listens to both the vulnerable and the strong.

But that’s not the meat of what I want to talk about.  I’ve been thinking about Elijah in hiding from Ahab and how God sent him meat via Raven.  This story is in 1 Kings 17.  In order to explore its implications, we need some background in ravens.

First, avoiding ravens is a sign of obedience to God.  When God led the Hebrew people out of Egypt and slavery, God provided them with community laws they were to live by, what we call the Mosaic Law. In the Mosaic Law, ravens are unclean animals, ritually taboo.  Here is what the Law says:  The Lord has chosen you specifically; you are set apart from all other nations for the Lord your God.  You shall eat no abominable thing. 

You may eat the cow, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the antelope, the gazelle; every animal that has cloven hooves and chews the cud you may eat. 

Do not eat the camel or the rock badger or any animal that either has cloven hooves but does not chew the cud, or chews the cud but does not have cloven hooves. Do not eat pigs, and don’t even touch their dead bodies. 

You may eat fish with fins and scales; don’t eat anything else that lives in the water.

You may eat clean birds, but none of the raptors, whether eagle or owl, none of the vultures, none of the ravens, none of the fishing birds.  Don’t eat bats or most other things that both creep on the ground and fly. Don’t eat weasels, mice, tortoises, lizards, snails, moles. However, you may eat locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers.

And don’t eat anything that dies on its own.  If you even touch the dead body of an unclean animal, you are also unclean for the rest of the day. You can sell it to foreigners and feed it to outsiders, but don’t eat it yourselves.  You are separated unto the Lord.

Some of the prohibitions may relate to the uses of various animals in the worship of idols. Some may relate to healthfulness. The instruction to sell or give the carcass to a non-Hebrew with no penalty for the Hebrew seller or the non-Hebrew buyer (and eventual eater) suggests that these dietary restrictions help identify the Hebrews as set apart from other nations, as peculiar in every sense of the world. 

Even though the actual translations of the Hebrew words may include animals that are no longer around or that we don’t understand, these instructions are quite clear.

Second, ravens are signs of the judgment of God.  Isaiah 34 depicts God saying, I will bring my sword upon Edom and judge them for their quarrel with Israel, and the slaughter will be great… the raven shall dwell in this land.  In Proverbs 30:17, the result of mocking one’s father and despising one’s mother is that one’s eyes are plucked out by the ravens.  This likely means that dishonoring parents bends one’s steps toward death rather than life.  In both cases, the ravens are present to clean up the carrion.

So two things about ravens as background to Elijah’s story:

The Hebrews are forbidden from eating them; eating ravens is abominable. Even touching a dead raven makes a Hebrew unclean.

And ravens show up when sin has resulted in death.

So here in 1 Kings 17 is the story of Elijah and the ravens. King Ahab married the pagan princess Jezebel from Sidon and built an altar to her god Baal and angered the Lord more than any king before him.  Elijah stood before King Ahab and prophesied that God would withhold rain from Israel because of Ahab’s sins.  Then Elijah took off for the wilderness.  We pick up where God hides him by a brook and sends him meat by ravens.

“And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and in the evening, and he drank of the brook.  When the brook dried up, God said to him, Go into the land of Sidon and live in Zarephath.  I have told a widow there to take care of you.”

What an interesting story, full of challenges to the ways we think God ought to obey the rules.  First, God’s own prophet lives from day to day on unclean food, food brought him by unclean birds, meat that may well be from an unclean animal, certainly one that died “on its own.” (See Lev. 7:24, 17:15.) Elijah leans into the provision of God, even though it comes unconventionally, even though God breaks God’s own food purity rules. When he goes to Sidon and lives in the house of the widow, all the food she prepares is likewise unclean because she herself as a non-Hebrew is unclean. Yet Elijah eats it.

This reminds me of two other moments in the interaction of God and God’s messengers:  the priest and prophet Ezekiel cried out in pain when God told him to cook his food over a fire fueled by human excrement, saying, “I have never broken your laws; please don’t make me do this.”  (See Deut 14:3, 23:13.) God lessened the sting by allowing Ezekiel to burn animal dung instead.  Yet what God asked of him was still outside the laws governing priests.  The other moment is the vision of Peter when a sheet of unclean animals was lowered from heaven and God said three times, “Peter, kill and eat.” Peter’s argument with God ended with God saying, “What God has called clean, let no one call unclean.”

Jesus said this about the good news he came to bring.  John 3:  You must be born anew, born of the Spirit who, like the wind, blows wherever the Spirit wants to blow, descends on whomever the Spirit chooses, and distributes gifts as God wills, not according to rules.  You must worship in that Spirit and in your own spirit and in truth—actual worship that looks like the way Jesus worshiped—by listening to God our Father and doing what God says to do each day, each moment.  Where you worship is irrelevant because God’s Spirit, God’s Truth, God who is Truth, is everywhere. 

The founders of the Quaker movement among Christians witnessed to this by simply recording the gifts of ministry among them.  This witness allows God to choose, to gift, to pour out God’s spirit on young and old, men and women, Jew and Gentile, slave and free.  God provides all we need and has more where that came from.  There is no scarcity in God’s love or God’s Spirit.  Our boxes and restrictions ought not to be applied to things that are God’s prerogative to choose, not only because we are out of line when we do this, but because God looks on the heart and knows what we do not know. 

We can trust God to lead us in the uncertainties we face.  If we don’t know what to do, what is wise, we can ask God, who gives what we need to us liberally—generously and freeingly—without ever scolding us for not knowing in advance. 

The raven, the bird associated with judgment and uncleanness, is also a sign of God’s providence.  As Jesus said, “Take no thought for your life, don’t worry about food; don’t worry about your body, about what you will clothe yourself in.  Life is more than food and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens.  They neither sow nor reap, they have neither bank account nor pantry; and God feeds them.  How much are you different from these birds?”

Think about this.  God provides even for ravens, unclean birds, and how much more God will provide for you what you need.  So ask God for wisdom, then be quiet and see what rises in your heart and mind.  Try acting on that in faith that God is being generous to you.  Keep track of what happens.  You will find that you can rely on God in more than a theoretical way, that God actually lives in you and sends you what you need to live a free, whole, redeemed life.

Pay Me What You Owe Me

Ezekiel the prophet lived during the time of Israel’s exile to Babylon, an exile God brought about to purify and restore Israel to a faithful relationship.  Chapter 20 tells us that the history of Isarel is the story of Israel’s unfaithfulness, idolatry, and disobedience.  It is also the story of God’s faithfulness, outrage, and patience.  God says to Israel through Ezekiel: I will not allow you to ask me anything.  You have made up your minds to be like the heathens around you who worship nature.  But I will not allow it.  Angry as I am, I will rule you with a strong hand.  I will gather you and speak your doom to your face.  I will make you obey my covenant and I will send away those who continue to rebel and sin.  I will act with honor despite your wicked, evil actions, so I will not deal with you as you deserve. 

There is a true mystery in the relationship of our free will and God’s free will.  How is it that God makes space for us to choose against God’s will?  Just from looking around us we see that God does make this space, and the consequences ensue.  At the same time, the freedom to choose against is the freedom to choose for, and I want to encourage each of us today to choose for God and do what we know is right to do that lies immediately before us today and each day.  When you choose to ask God into your life, God takes you very seriously and will do all God can to make you resemble your elder Brother Jesus.  But, of course, you are still choosing whether or not to cooperate with God. 

In this post, I am going to focus on what the Bible tells us is the will of God for each of us with regard to our opponents, our enemies, our adversaries.  

Matthew 5

I haven’t come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them.  Anyone who breaks the least of the commands and teaches others to do so will be least in the kingdom of heaven, but anyone who practices and teaches these commands will be great in the kingdom of heaven.  You have to be more righteous than the professionally righteous people around in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Not only can you not murder someone, you also must not hold another person in contempt because of being angry with that person.  You can’t offer a gift acceptable to God with contempt for another person in your heart.  God will be sure your heart is right, so cooperate as quickly as you can.

Not only must you limit revenge to the harm done you, but you must be generous with those who harm you or want something from you.

Not only must you love your neighbor, but you must love your enemy and pray for those who make your life unpleasant.

Try being more like God, your Father, who sends sunshine and rain to both evil and good people.  Extend your love to all.

Matthew 5:25 (Luke 12:59)

Be well disposed, of a peaceable spirit, wish well toward your opponent, your enemy, your adversary without delay while you are still traveling together on the same road so that your opponent will at no time deliver you into the hands of the judge and the judge turn you over to his officer who will throw you into prison, into confinement, where your every move is watched. Amen.  This is the truth. I tell you, you will never by any means go freely from that jail until you have restored what you owe that opponent to the very last penny. 

I owe a lot of how I understand this passage to George MacDonald, a 19^th century preacher who often focused on holiness.

First:  do today what you know you will have to someday.

George MacDonald, “The Last Farthing,” Unspoken Sermons.  “I think I do know what is meant by 'agree on the way,' and 'the uttermost farthing.' The parable is an appeal to the common sense of those that hear it, in regard to every affair of righteousness. Arrange what claim lies against you; compulsion waits behind it. Do at once what you must do one day. As there is no escape from payment, escape at least the prison that will enforce it. Do not drive Justice to extremities. Duty is imperative; it must be done. It is useless to think to escape the eternal law of things; yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you.

Second: this parable does not threaten punishment so much as it explains the natural consequences of God’s nature and of human nature.  Our response to it reveals our own hearts.

“To the honest [person] the word is… sweet as most loving promise. He who is of God's mind in things, rejoices to hear the word of the changeless Truth; the voice of the Right fills the heavens and the earth, and makes his soul glad; it is his salvation.

Third: God will judge between us if we will not come to agreement by our own choice.  This satisfies our love of justice even though we ourselves will be judged as we judge others.

"If God were not inexorably just, there would be no stay for the soul of the feeblest lover of right: 'thou art true, O Lord: one day I also shall be true!' 'Thou shalt render the right, cost you what it may,' is a dread sound in the ears of those whose life is a falsehood: what but the last farthing would those who love righteousness more than life pay? It is a joy profound as peace to know that God is determined upon such payment, is determined to have his children clean, clear, pure as very snow; is determined that not only shall they with his help make up for whatever wrong they have done, but at length be incapable, by eternal choice of good, under any temptation, of doing the thing that is not divine, the thing God would not do.”

…

Fourth: therefore, choose to do the right thing now.  And you know what it is.

“I read, then, in this parable, that a man had better make up his mind to be righteous, to be fair, to do what he can to pay what he owes, in any and all the relations of life--all the matters, in a word, wherein one man may demand of another, or complain that he has not received fair play. Arrange your matters with those who have anything against you, while you are yet together and things have not gone too far to be arranged; you will have to do it, and that under less easy circumstances than now. Putting off is of no use. You must. The thing has to be done; there are means of compelling you."

MacDonald includes the following dialogue.  I've put the words of God in bold italics to clarify the parts.

'In this affair, however, I am in the right.'

'If so, very well--for this affair. But I have reason to doubt whether you are capable of judging righteously in your own cause:--do you hate the man?'

'No, I don't hate him.'

'Do you dislike him?'

'I can't say I like him.'

'Do you love him as yourself?'

'Oh, come! come! no one does that!'

'Then no one is to be trusted when he thinks, however firmly, that he is all right, and his neighbour all wrong, in any matter between them.'

'But I don't say I am all right, and he is all wrong; there may be something to urge on his side: what I say is, that I am more in the right than he.'

'This is not fundamentally a question of things: it is a question of condition, of spiritual relation and action, towards your neighbour. If in yourself you were all right towards him, you could do him no wrong. Let it be with the individual dispute as it may, you owe him something that you do not pay him, as certainly as you think he owes you something he will not pay you.'

'He would take immediate advantage of me if I owned that.'

'So much the worse for him. Until you are fair to him, it does not matter to you whether he is unfair to you or not.'

'I beg your pardon--it is just what does matter! I want nothing but my rights. What can matter to me more than my rights?'

'Your duties--your debts. You are all wrong about the thing. It is a very small matter to you whether the man give you your rights or not; it is life or death to you whether or not you give him his. Whether he pay you what you count his debt or no, you will be compelled to pay him all you owe him. If you owe him a pound and he you a million, you must pay him the pound whether he pay you the million or not; there is no business-parallel here. If, owing you love, he gives you hate, you, owing him love, have yet to pay it. A love unpaid you, a justice undone you, a praise withheld from you, a judgment passed on you without judgment, will not absolve you of the debt of a love unpaid, a justice not done, a praise withheld, a false judgment passed: these uttermost farthings--not to speak of such debts as the world itself counts grievous wrongs--you must pay him, whether he pay you or not. We have a good while given us to pay, but a crisis will come--come soon after all--comes always sooner than those expect it who are not ready for it--a crisis when the demand unyielded will be followed by prison.'

Fifth: God can use the consequences of our bad choices to move us toward redemption.

“The same holds with every demand of God: by refusing to pay, the man makes an adversary who will compel him--and that for the man's own sake. If you or your life say, 'I will not,' then [God] will see to it. …

“If the man acknowledge, and would pay if he could but cannot, the universe will be taxed to help him rather than he should continue unable. If the man accepts the will of God, he is the child of the Father, the whole power and wealth of the Father is for him, and the uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If the man denies the debt, or acknowledging does nothing towards paying it, then--at last--the prison! God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light, who never in the light sought but the dark.”

My Experience

I share this with you because my own experience makes clear to me how true this is.  When I identify someone as my enemy, essentially I am saying, “You are not giving me what you owe me.” Often this is true. However, if I do not choose every day to align my will with God’s will as much as I can that day, I am choosing to be imprisoned by my own sense of having been wronged.  I can’t ever get out of that prison by focusing on how right I am.  A friend of mine described this as putting a barrier across the neck of an hourglass.  My state of mind freezes time at the point where my sense of being treated unfairly or unjustly occurs.  Every day my mind rehearses how badly my enemy has treated me.  It comes into all my significant conversations and colors all my relationships with others.  I had a high school friend who cut herself to remind herself of how other people had betrayed her.  She did it on purpose to prevent herself from accidentally forgetting the wrong.  This is a picture of how we treat our souls when we refuse to obey God's will to reconcile with our opponent.

I usually have to start by asking God for justice.  Essentially, I am turning my opponent over to God to judge.  I also, against my own inclination but with my will, start praying for God to bless my enemy.  I hate this part but I do it.  I try and fail to let the person off the hook.  But I’m trying.  I am by sheer act of will removing the barrier in the hourglass so that time can move on from the moment of injury.  So that the cut can heal from the inside out and then scab over.  God honors my efforts, feeble and incomplete though they are.  God loves me in them and lets me know it.  Often I end up blaming God for how things have gone so wrong: "You could have stopped this, you could have done something, I hope you know what you’re doing."

My experience, and I am not lying to you, is that God shows up when I express honest anger toward him.  It is a lot like the book of Job—Job insists that he did not deserve the suffering he received, he blames God for it, and God shows up and is friendly.  I will tell you two stories.  I was complaining out loud to God and added, “And on top of that, you have let me have a hemorrhoid. Don’t you think that’s piling on.” And God said, almost aloud, “Piling on—that’s funny.”  You see, the plural of hemorrhoid is piles. I laughed out loud for about 10 minutes, and something deep inside me eased up the pressure.  Because God showed up when I got really honest about what I was feeling.

The second story came after a huge disappointment, when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to achieve what I dreamed of.  I was in church, with my head bent down on the pew in front of me, crying with rage, really, and asking God why God favored my enemy over me.  God said to me, very clearly, “Look up at me.” I kept my head down.  And I felt as if God placed a finger under my chin, lifted my head, and made me look into God’s eyes.  “What do you see?” God asked.  “Love, nothing but love,” I replied. I cannot get over that experience.  I hope everyone reading this knows what is in God’s eyes for you. 

Finally, as things turn out, God helps me get to a place where my heart is no longer at war with my enemy.  God pinned me down in the car once to tell me that simply saying “You can let that so and so into heaven if you have to, but I don’t want to sit close to him,” was no longer the best I could do, and God, unsurprisingly, was right. I said, “OK, God, please let that so and so into heaven,”

That’s a good place to end.  Dear God, please let our enemies into heaven.  If you can’t get there yet, start here: Dear God, please decide justice between me and my enemy.