Difficult Stories

On May 15, 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued a papal bull. As is the custom, it is known by its first words, Ad Extirpanda, meaning ‘to eradicate’. And it was indeed directed toward the eradication of heresy. It was addressed to secular authorities and citizens in and around Lombardy and was occasioned by the murder of an inquisitor, Peter of Verona. He was assassinated in a plot created by followers of Catharism, a Christian movement which was particularly strong in what is now France, Germany and Italy. By the time of Innocent’s papal bull, Cathars had long been condemned as heretical by the Catholic church.

This murky history is unedifying enough. What makes Innocent’s document stand out is that it is one of the first official Christian documents to condone the use of torture in prosecuting heretics. Heretics, Innocent argued, were the robbers and murderers of the soul; they should therefore face the same measures and verdicts applied to ordinary robbers and murderers.

There is scholarly debate about how important this document actually was. There is evidence of the use of torture, corporal punishment and execution against heretics (and misbehaving clergy) well before this, including evidence that priests themselves could administered torture. And Innocent’s document is directed to a specific local situation.

Still, Ad extirpanda is symbolic of the church’s willingness to approve extreme measures, including torture, against its opponents. The principles it sets out are not limited to the situation in Lombardy. And this raises all sorts of questions about our reckoning with the church’s past, and its structures of authority. The church was undoubtedly complicit in the use of torture and provided theological justification for it.

You might think I am making too much of this obscure event. After all, we could compare torture with other issues woth which the church has struggled: keeping slaves, keeping women out of positions of authority, supporting laws that criminalise homosexuality. In these cases, scripture is a key battleground. One can easily find Biblical texts that are used to support – or at the least tolerate - slavery. And we continue to see how the Bible is used in different Christian traditions to justify various acts of subjugation or exclusion in relation to issues of gender and sexuality.

When it comes to torture, however, I – thankfully – do not see much in the way of support from it from enthusiasts for Biblical standards. There are no debates in General Synod about whether it should be allowed. Although, one might argue that some debates in Synod constitute a form of torture in themselves.

However, I don’t think we can just consign the issue to the ‘best forgotten’ past of the church. For one thing, of course, torture is used today by autocratic regimes and non-state movements across the world. Even when hidden away, those who use it will justify it to themselves: it serves a greater good; its victims have lost their claim to dignity or moral consideration. Sometimes it will be carried out by those who claim a Christian backing for their actions; one need only think of war crimes carried out by Russia in Ukraine.

Torture is a means to an end: to obtain information, confessions, deterrence, fear. But it is also an end in itself: it a demonstration of absolute power over vulnerable bodies. As Christians, we have to reckon with our own history – and present – relationship with power, with domination of vulnerable bodies.

And this leads me to our gospel reading for today, to what we find in it and its surrounding stories - and how we might be tempted to interpret it.

The parable of the talents is well known. One conventional interpretation is that we should make the most of the gifts God has given us. We should not hide them like a light under a bushel but let them shine. So standard has this reading become that, in ordinary English, the word talent – originally a measure of weight denoting a huge amount of money – now means some kind of special ability we possess. Of course, we might also read the parable in more literal terms as an endorsement of investment banking or capital speculation: ‘stockbrokers of the world rejoice and enter into the joy of your master.’

However, interpretations like this assume that the master in the story stands in for God. God is the one who gives us our talents and holds us to account. The problem is that the master is a thoroughly unpleasant character. He is a bully, an exploiter, a slaveowner, a parasite who lives off the labour of others and who r’eaps where he does not sow’. He takes from those who have little or nothing. More than this, he consigns them to unending painful punishment: to the outer darkness where there will be ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’.

In fact, references to extreme punishment are a motif running through this part of Matthew. In a succession of parables, masters condemn, kill and punish their tenants, slaves and even their guests. Perhaps the most striking example comes in chapter 18, in the parable of the unforgiving slave. As you will recall, a slave is forgiven a huge debt by his master but refuses to do the same for a fellow slave who owes him a small sum. The parable concludes: ‘in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt.’ To drive home the point, it adds: ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’

The word used for ‘torture’ here can have a range of meanings, including close interrogation. However, in the NT more widely, it always comes with the implication of torment, of real pain.

Is God then a torturer? And is it the fear of torment and death that should motivate us to forgiveness, watchfulness and acts of charity?

Let’s step back from that disturbing question for a moment and ask another: why would we see God as a tormentor in the first place? Or even as a torturer? Perhaps that is one of the questions these parables force us to ask.

The psychology of sadism and torture may be complex, but part of it is simple: the feeling of power that it gives. Torture and abuse reduce a human person to a body that can be controlled. Torture is an obscene act of creation: it creates a world whose limits of pain and fear are entirely in the hand of the perpetrator. It gives the perpetrator a godlike control over what another person feels, thinks. And that is interesting: that we can associate godlike power with something like that.

With that in mind, think about how a Biblical phrase can take on a sinister dimension: ‘it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God’. To be entirely at the mercy of another is a terrible thing indeed.

Perhaps it is inevitable that when we think of God, of our ultimate source and goal, these fantasies of fear and power start coming into play. We project them on to God. Through God we live out stories of subjection, of revenge. How easy it can be to take that language and invest with our own desires, whether for domination or submission.

There is a longing deep in us for some kind of validation; some proof that, despite the chaos and fragility of our identity, the world makes sense or can be made to make sense. God is the big Other we long to come to our rescue. This God stands behind those powers, external and internal, which shape the world through images and experiences of domination.

Of course, Christians have every reason to critique such an image of God. We are called to resist idols, reminded that God’s ways are not ours. Above all, at the heart of our faith is the crucified God: the Word become flesh, refusing the world’s power and glory. Taking on the shame and humiliation of torture and death to raise our humanity and all creation to fullness of life.

But we know how insidious these fantasies of power can be. I’ve no doubt of the depth of Pope Innocent IV’s faith, or how often he would celebrate mass and look on the crucified Christ. But our damaged humanity still finds reason to turn back to the God of torment: even the crucified Christ is depicted coming back in power to get his own back, forever. For some medieval thinkers, one of the joys of heaven was that the saints could witness the torments of the damned and take pleasure in God’s justice.

So what are we to make of these stories and images? I suggest that we should not rush to an interpretation or derive a trite moral from them. Perhaps the point is to stay with them, to inhabit them. What if the master is not God? What if this is a story which turns around on us and asks us: why do you imagine God to be one who exercises arbitrary power? Perhaps the slave’s problem is not that he buried the talent, but that he created a master - a big Other - in the image of his own fear.  

The parables in this part of Matthew are often about closing the gap: the gap between where our heart is and how we act, the distance between God and God’s coming to us. They are also about the cancellation of debt. In the Lord’s prayer we ask that God’s will is done on earth as in heaven and that our debts are cancelled as we cancel those of others. It is as if we have to imagine that gap - between sin and forgiveness, between heaven and earth, between us and God – before we can realise that the gap is overcome. That God is with us and heaven and earth are one. That we have no debt to pay and nothing to prove to earn God’s love. The gap between us and God is a space where all sorts of unresolved fantasies and guilts live. If we let them, they can trap us in alienation. If we let them go, we can meet the God who has no ego to defend, no need to control, whose power is anything but domination, humiliation or torment.

In his book, Torture and the Eucharist, William Cavanaugh writes how torture seeks to isolate its victims, to trap them in the limits of their own bodies, their own pain and fears. To make them utterly dependent on their tormentors. It is the flipside of the absolute power, whether claimed by states or abusive parents, or abusive lovers. It is found in damaged ideas of spiritual care: the idea that the soul is delivered through subjecting the body to pain and control. It is, of course, highly gendered.

None of this is easy to unravel. Our parable does not offer a simple way out. Instead, it calls us into the space of the story, so that we can find its limits, and so find our limits in trying to imagine what it is to relate to God. In suspending our images and fantasies, we can encounter grace.  Ultimately, God does not want to humiliate us, dominate us, or isolate us. Perhaps this is the kernel of truth the standard interpretation of the parable of the talents: it is in hiding, in isolation, that we become buried in fear. And then our God becomes fear.

But perfect love casts out fear. The God of clinging, dominating power is an idol that needs to be dethroned. A world of unaccountable masters calls for transformation. Abuse – in the church in the world – must be named and confronted, not hidden, justified, silenced.

For God is not a bigger version of a human power, but the infinite letting-go of love itself. God seeks our wholeness, in the Word which emptied itself to assume our whole humanity. God seeks our communion, in the body where Christ is for us, and love is not defined by any fantasy of domination. Every single body  - however formed, however marked - is hallowed, cherished by God. All flesh is taken to God’s heart for God delights in us.

Easily said: but to know and experience it requires support, practice, the chance to fall and rise, to start again, ever new. It requires community and liturgy, for liturgy offers a space for the heart to be held. As Cavanaugh argues, in this eucharist, that process can begin and begin again. We celebrate, not torture and power, but the sacrifice which ends all sacrifice, and the God who unites heaven and earth in one life. Here, our imagination can be reshaped, and we need not follow our own fears or the fantasies of others. Here, we can help each other live difficult stories and in them find the grace to be all that God desires.