The Parable of the Net

  • The Parable of the Unfaithful Servant
  • Introduction
  • Audience of the parable
  • Characters in the Parable
  • Understanding the parable
  • End stress
  • My master delays
  • Cut in two
  • Adjacent thoughts
  • Wrong believing, wrong living
  • Salvation by faith
  • Conclusion

The Parable of the Unfaithful Servant

Too long, please open your Bible Matthew 24: 45-51
Too long, please open your Bible Luke 12: 42-46

Introduction

Last week, we read the Parable of the Net and its emphasis on the certainty of the coming judgement. The parable of the Faithful/Unfaithful servant focuses instead on this in-between phase between His departure and His return. This parable is about Christian life in the time between.

Audience of the parable

Jesus aims this parable squarely at His disciples, the people who have already stepped into a servant-relationship with Him. It is not a public rebuke to Israel’s leaders, nor a general moral teaching for the crowds, but a sober word to those who have professed loyalty and been entrusted with responsibility in the Master’s household.

The parable’s imagery assumes people who already belong to the Master, people entrusted with care for others, people who must live wisely in the tension between His departure and His return. In other words, the audience is not “them” but us—everyone who names Jesus as Lord, because every disciple has been given something to steward in the time between.

Characters in the Parable

The parable contains only two characters—the master and his appointed servant—but they stand as compressed symbols of a much larger spiritual reality.

The master represents the rightful Lord whose absence creates the testing ground of discipleship; He entrusts His household, assigns real responsibility, and promises to return in judgment and reward.

The servant represents the disciple, not in the sense of one distinct individual, but as the embodiment of every believer’s vocation. This servant is charged with feeding the household, sustaining others, and embodying the master’s care—all the quiet, steady work of faithfulness.

Yet within this single figure lie two potential expressions of character: the steward who remains loyal in the master’s absence and the steward who collapses into self-indulgence when he thinks no one is watching. The parable’s drama is not in the number of characters but in the moral possibility lodged within the one who serves.

Understanding the parable

End stress

In this parable, the principle of end stress means the story’s true weight falls on its conclusion, not its opening question. Jesus spends far more time describing the unfaithful servant’s downfall than the faithful servant’s reward, signaling where He wants the listener’s attention.

The emphasis, therefore, is not on showcasing ideal obedience but on warning disciples about how easily delay can deform a servant’s heart. End stress tells us the parable’s primary purpose is urgent caution: the danger of drifting, the peril of presuming on the Master’s absence, and the sobering reality of judgment for those who stop living as if He will return.

My master delays

“But if that evil slave says in his heart, ‘My master is not coming for a long time,’ and begins to beat his fellow slaves and eat and drink with drunkards; Matthew 24:48
“But if that slave says in his heart, ‘My master will be a long time in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, Luke 12:45

The servant’s inner claim—“My master is not coming for a long time”—is revealed by Jesus through two vivid behaviors: beating the other slaves and dining with drunkards. In the parable’s own context, these actions are not random sins; they are symbolic of a complete reversal of the servant’s vocation. He was appointed to feed the household, not to harm it.

To beat the other servants is to turn the Master’s people into victims of one’s power—an image drawn straight from Israel’s prophetic history, where corrupt leaders “devoured” the flock they were meant to shepherd. Eating and drinking with drunkards, on the other hand, represents moral dissipation—trading responsibility for self-indulgence, letting desire replace duty, and seeking the company of those who numb themselves rather than those who serve.

To beat the other servants is to turn the Master’s people into victims of one’s power—an image drawn straight from Israel’s prophetic history, where corrupt leaders “devoured” the flock they were meant to shepherd. Eating and drinking with drunkards, on the other hand, represents moral dissipation—trading responsibility for self-indulgence, letting desire replace duty, and seeking the company of those who numb themselves rather than those who serve.

Cut in two

Jesus ends the parable with one of His most jarring images: the servant is “cut in two” and assigned a place among the hypocrites. This is not a literal description of divine violence but a deliberate hyperbole meant to shock the hearer awake.

In the world of the parable, being “cut in two” mirrors what has already happened internally—the servant has lived a divided life, professing loyalty while practicing betrayal. What is acted out in judgment reflects what was already true in his heart.

The casting out “with the hypocrites” reveals the deeper tragedy: he is placed among those who pretended to belong but never actually shared the Master’s character or hope. This is Jesus’ way of saying that unfaithfulness eventually exposes a person’s true allegiance.

The servant’s fate is not random cruelty; it is the natural end of a life that steadily severed itself from the Master through neglect, indulgence, and abuse. Judgment, in this parable, is the unveiling of reality—what was divided within becomes divided without, and the one who refused to live as part of the household is finally shown to be outside of it.

Adjacent thoughts

Wrong believing, wrong living

Too long, please open your Bible 2 Peter 3: 1-13

The servant’s statement is surely a theological mistake and Jesus shows how bad theology always becomes bad living.

Together, those two behaviors show the downward spiral Jesus wants us to see. Note the progression:

  1. He loses sight of the Master.
  2. He indulges.
  3. He harms others.
  4. He eventually destroys himself.

Wrong believing leads to wrong living because our moral vision is shaped by what we think is true about God, time, and accountability. Once the servant rewrites the timeline in his heart, he begins to rewrite his obligations: expectancy gives way to entitlement, stewardship erodes into self-indulgence, and care for others collapses into abuse. This is the downward progression Jesus exposes—distorted eschatology produces distorted ethics.

And this is not far from our moment. A church that rarely teaches Christ’s return trains its people, unintentionally, to think like the wicked servant: as if judgment is distant, holiness is optional, and the Master’s absence grants moral autonomy. The result is the decadence and laxity we see today—leaders who exploit, believers who drift, communities that lose their distinctiveness—because when the hope of His appearing fades, the urgency of faithful living fades with it. In the parable, everything unravels the moment the servant adjusts his expectation of the Master’s return—and the same quiet shift is unraveling many hearts still.

Salvation by faith

Whenever passages like this are preached, people naturally wonder whether Jesus is shifting the ground of salvation—whether faith in Christ is somehow replaced by performance, or whether our eternal destiny now hangs on how well we serve. But the parable is not about earning salvation; it is about revealing allegiance.

The servant is already in the Master’s house, already entrusted with responsibility, already bearing the identity of one who belongs. His faithfulness or unfaithfulness does not purchase his place—it exposes his heart. In the same way, Scripture holds together two truths without contradiction: we are saved by faith alone, and yet the faith that saves is never alone.

Real trust produces real obedience over time, and a refusal of obedience exposes a refusal of the Master Himself. Jesus’ warning is not that our works replace faith, but that our works reveal whether our faith was genuine. The parable’s force is pastoral, not legalistic: it calls the church to live in a manner consistent with the salvation it has already received, holding before us the sober reality that a faith which bears no fruit in the Master’s absence is a faith that was never rooted in His grace.

Conclusion

For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away. Hebrews 2:1

The parable teaches that life in the Master’s absence requires a strange and holy tension: patience and impatience at the same time. Patience is essential because the Master’s delay is real, and His people must learn to serve steadily without visible reward, to keep feeding the household even when the night feels long and nothing dramatic seems to be happening. This is the patience of faithfulness—enduring monotony, resisting discouragement, living as if every ordinary day still matters to God.

But impatience is essential too. The servant in the parable falls precisely because he loses his impatience for the Master’s return—he stops longing, stops looking, stops expecting. A godly impatience refuses to make peace with evil, refuses to settle into complacency, and refuses to live as though the present order is permanent. Christians are meant to feel both: patient enough to be faithful in the long stretch, and impatient enough to stay alert for the kingdom. Without patience, we grow frantic; without impatience, we grow dull. The wise servant carries both in his heart—steady in the present, restless for the future.

The parable is not really a tale about two different servants standing side by side—one virtuous, the other corrupt. It is a tale about one servant with two possible futures, two trajectories contained within a single heart.

He is not describing separate personalities but unveiling the potentiality of every disciple. In the Master’s absence, the same steward who has been entrusted with real responsibility can either remain faithful or slowly drift into neglect, indulgence, and violence. The contrast does not invite comparison with others; it invites self-examination. This is Jesus saying: Look at yourself. Both paths live inside you. What the Master finds upon His return will be the fruit of the choices you make during His delay.

Too long, please open your Bible Jude 17-25