Overseers or freedmen?

An awful lot of people would rather be overseers in a slave system than freedmen alongside populations they despise.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant? Is a story of one who saw himself as an overseer in a slave system.

The king had given him freedom from the crushing debt he was owed. But the king had given him freedom…alongside one whom he saw as his inferior, someone who owed him.

And the Unforgiving Servant saw it as his job to demand what was owed to him, when what he owed had been forgiven.

The truth is, we all have the chance to stand alongside our fellow freedmen. It's just that many won't because they see themselves as essentially superior to 'those people'. Sometimes we call them immigrants. Sometimes we call them criminals. Sometimes we call them spics. Sometimes we call them chinks. Sometimes we don't even label them, we just call them 'those people'.

The story of white supremacy? Overseers in a slave system. So many could have chosen to stand alongside freed peoples, even if their skins were a different colour, but they wanted what scraps of power they could gain to lord it over others who were just like them.

Those people blathering on about how the only good Australia is white Australia? Overseers in a slave system.

But so, too, are Christians who think our mission is to stamp out the 'sexually immoral, adulterous, drinkers, thieves, liars, etc.' - the Christians who would rather be God's Police than servants of their fellow humans.

From a worldly wise perspective, everyone would rather be the slave overseer, with authority and dominance over the slave.

From a godly perspective, too many really don't see that we are slaves in the same system, trapped all together, and our job is to be the underground railroad. Less questioning, more getting them out.