Unprofitable Servants

In Luke 17:7-10 (NKJV), Jesus says the following:

And which of you, having a servant plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down to eat’? But will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare something for my supper, and gird yourself and serve me till I have eaten and drunk, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not.So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.’"

On the way to church yesterday morning I noticed the sign outside a church of another denomination which caused me to do a mental facepalm. Apparently, on the basis of that saying, the sign told us

Jesus says that if you only do your duty, you are unprofitable.

It would be hard to miss the whole point of a verse more completely. After all, what is our duty? To obey the Law of God perfectly. To love God with all our heart and soul and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves. Our duty is something none of us we sinners can ever do. But how hard it is for us to admit that!

The point Jesus is making is that we shouldn't imagine that our obedience and discipleship are heroic things that put God in our debt.  Even if we give everything we have to the poor and suffer martyrdom, we still have done nothing more than our duty- and really, not even that. Whatever good works we may perform, they will always fall short of God's minimum demands of us.

There's a wonderful Yiddish word: chutzpah. It is often defined as the quality exhibited by a person who murders both of his parents, and then appeals to the court for mercy on the ground that he's an orphan! "Unmitigated gall" might be one way of expressing the idea in English, but even that doesn't quite carry the full implication of arrogant, blind presumption involved when any sinner has the chutzpah, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's words, to "stand before God and say, 'I have done my duty.'"

Even trying to do that was Bonhoeffer's definition of legalism.  The author of The Cost of Discipleship. who died because he did what he understood to be his duty as a Christian in Nazi Germany, was no namby-pamby when it came to obedience. But close to the heart of the Christian faith is the realization that none of us can ever claim even to have even done our duty. That's why it was necessary for the Second Person of the Holy Trinity to assume human form and not only die for us, but to obey for us.

Christ's "active obedience," Lutheran theology calls it: the day-by-day living for us which preceded His dying for us, His perfect obedience to the Father's will that would be nothing more than merely our duty if we could do it ourselves. That doesn't mean, of course, that since Christ obeyed for us, we needn't bother. No believer can ever be complacent about being a sinner! But never be frightened by your realization that you fall short of the perfect obedience that is nothing more than your duty. Realize that you fall short, that you have always fallen short, and that you always will fall short of doing your duty is a blessed thing. Only when we realize that is there hope for us!

All that remains is that we trust in Christ's active and passive obedience- His sinless life and His atoning death- as the basis for our standing before God, rather than anything we ourselves achieve. For the sake of that obedience, God counts our miserable and pathetic obedience as perfect.

There's a formula for jokes that begins, "I have good news and bad news." One is supposed to respond, "Give me the bad news first." Well, in spiritual matters, the bad news always precedes the good news. Only in light of the bad news is the Good News good. And in light of the bad news, the Good News is the best possible news.

The bad news is that none of us ever does even our duty. None of us loves the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, or our neighbor as ourselves. None of us ever reaches that plateau of discipleship upon which we can even say to God, "I am an unprofitable servant; I have only done my duty." We are all very, very unprofitable servants. We can't even claim to have done that much!

But the Good News isn't simply that Jesus has paid the due penalty for our sin. It's more than that. It's that He lived a life of perfect obedience that makes up for our woeful failure to even do our duty. By grace, when God looks at the sad and sorry record of obedience- or rather, disobedience- which every believer compiles, He sees the perfect life of obedience led by His Son. Only those who are seen that way are seen by God as having even done their duty.

A person cannot be a believer without wanting to please God with her behavior, to do her duty. But one also cannot be a believer without realizing that he has not, does not, and cannot. To be a believer is precisely to cast aside the foolish notion that we can, in ourselves, even be as profitable as the unprofitable servant Jesus speaks of, who only did his duty, and cling instead to the basic fact of the Christian faith and the central fact of all of history: that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that He might look upon us unprofitable servants as clothed in the precious worth of His own holiness, far greater than any mere human obedience could ever earn.

We who believe are not merely clothed in Jesus's obedience. We do not simply become unprofitable servants who are seen as having only done our duty. We are seen as one with Jesus Himself. We are seen as valuable beyond words. We are precious to God, for Christ's sake, as Christ Himself is precious.

But the sinner in us still wants to think that we can be valuable servants by our own efforts and merits. Large sections of the Church still preach, Sunday after Sunday, in such a fashion as to consider that a possibility. But that way lies despair. Those who read this blog have for the most part been the victims of that sort of preaching and as a result, led miserable lives of failure and guilt. The more strenuously the pastor preaches about the victory of the believer, the more deeply those who hear him are plunged into the quicksand of spiritual defeat.

Victory and peace and salvation are found only in the merits of Jesus. To seek them in our own struggles is death. A believer cannot help but aspire to please God with his every breath. But nobody can be a believer without realizing that she will find that desire fulfilled only in the obedience of Jesus- in the death and life which clothe unprofitable servants like us with more value to God than a universe full to the brim with the finest gold and the most precious jewels.

We can be profitable servants in the eyes of God only through the merits of His Son. And the one who seeks profitability there will always find it. That's God's own promise. That is the very Gospel!