The phrase that strikes me when I read this gospel is Peter’s question: “Lord, do you mean this parable for us, or for everyone?” Peter has a way of asking a question that calls Jesus to a deeper meaning of his words and I think he did it here too.

This gospel is one of those that talks about the relationship between master and servant that doesn’t always translate easily to the 21st Century. We don’t have masters and servants, owners and slaves. At least we’re not supposed to: we are rightly horrified at stories of what we now call human trafficking.

Because of this I think we often read this as a “you better get your chores done before I get home” or a warning about the end of the world. Readings like these have given birth to what I call the “rapture industry” and I think they miss the point.

We don’t see master/servant relationships, but we do see relationships around us that speak to how power is exercised over others. The master in this gospel leaves his servant with at least some of his power before his departure. This leaves the servant with a question: what do I do with this power? Do I use it vindictively, to settle old scores? Do I use it as a way of getting out of working myself and unfairly burden the other servants? Do I use it to enjoy the feeling of power and authority over others? Or, do I exercise my authority in a way that tells that master that he made a good choice in me?

I think this has implications for some of what we see today. Many of us look at this gospel and think about good bosses we’ve had and bad bosses: we see it through the eyes of the other servants. I once worked for a company that promoted someone to management long before he was ready. I’m not sure when he figured out he was in over his head, but it was clearly long after his employees did. He mistakenly believed that respect and authority could be forced on others. His management style focused on berating people who didn’t fulfill his expectations, placing disciplinary letters in their personnel files, and embarrassing his employees in public meetings. This obviously did not work; his employees avoided him when they could and spent so much energy hiding from him that productivity decreased. This has a happy ending. Eventually, after several members of his team quit, he understood that he needed a new model. He began to partner with his employees and give them the tools and encouragement they needed to do well: productivity went up and so did employee retention. He also found that he wasn’t dreading meeting with his employees as much, and also wasn’t dreading meeting with his boss. He became the wise servant.

It’s easy to look at this only in relationships like employer/employee relationships and there is a cottage industry in labor law devoted exclusively to this. But there are many other relationships that should look to this gospel. Several years ago a friend of mine got a job as a hospice chaplain. He was just getting to know his coworkers, and one day he joined the nurse and home health aide on a visit to a patient. After the visit the three of them went to lunch at a local diner. It was an old fashioned place where the server wrote the orders on a ticket. When they finished eating they got the check and looked to divide up what they owed. My friend saw that while the server wrote down his order she had forgotten to put the price in the column on the right side. When she totalled up the bill she didn’t include his meal and he easily could have gotten a free lunch. My friend immediately took the bill and brought it to the server’s attention and paid for his lunch, and didn’t give it much thought. Several months later the nurse on the team confessed that she was nervous when she saw the error. She wasn’t sure what this new chaplain would do and was greatly relieved to see that he pointed out the error. My friend recognized that the nurse had given him power that he didn’t even know about. Now I’m friends with this chaplain in large part because it had not occurred to him to take advantage of the mistake. But he learned that it mattered to his team how he reacted; had he taken the greedy way out, he would have lost the respect of his team.

I think Peter’s question speaks to his concerns as one of the leaders of this “new way” Jesus was proclaiming, and I think it would do well for modern day clergy to recognize how it speaks to them. In previous generations priests were told they should act “in persona Christi” or “in the person of Christ.” More recently we’ve seen the birth of the “What Would Jesus Do” bumper stickers and jewelry. I certainly believe all religious leaders need to pay special attention to this gospel, but I also think all of us do. We may not be masters who have power over servants, nor are we servants who have power over other servants, but we all have people who look to us and want reasons to respect us. We should all want to be the wise servant, who treated the other servants the way Jesus would have treated them.