"Bring those mine enemies and slay them before me"

What the parable says

Jesus is near Jerusalem. He has just dined at Zacchaeus's house in Jericho. Luke 19:11 gives the occasion. 'And as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable, because he was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear.' The parable is told to recalibrate the timing.

A nobleman travels to a far country to receive a kingdom and then to return. He gives ten servants one mina each (about three months' wages) and tells them to do business with it. His citizens, however, hate him. They send a delegation after him to say, 'We will not have this man to reign over us' (Luke 19:14). The mission fails. The nobleman receives the kingdom and comes home.

He calls his servants in. The first has turned one mina into ten and is given charge of ten cities. The second has turned one into five and is given five cities. The third hands back the original mina, kept safe in a napkin. He says he was afraid because the master is 'an austere man' who 'takest up that thou layedst not down' and 'reapest that thou didst not sow' (Luke 19:21). The master takes his mina and gives it to the first servant, says the famous line 'unto every one which hath shall be given,' and then closes with verse 27.

Verse 28 then says, 'And when he had thus spoken, he went before, ascending up to Jerusalem.' The Triumphal Entry follows in the next verses. The parable sits at the very last bend in the road into the city.

The four positions

Luke 19 against the Matthew parallel

Matthew 25:14-30 tells a recognizably similar parable. A master goes on a long journey, leaves money with three servants, returns, and reckons with each one. Two have doubled their stake and are commended. The third hid the money in the ground and is rebuked. The Matthew version stops there. There are no citizens. There is no delegation. There is no slaughter. The differences are the reason many readers want to know what Luke is doing that Matthew is not.

Two main accounts have been given for the differences. The first is that Matthew and Luke are using related but distinct source traditions, and the political frame in Luke (the kingdom-trip, the delegation, the slaughter) reflects a version of the parable that included the Archelaus-style setup. The second is that Luke and Matthew are reworking a single Q-source parable in two directions, with Luke adding the political frame and Matthew dropping it. The two-source explanation does not by itself decide what the political frame means; it only locates the difference between the two gospels.

What Josephus says about Archelaus

The Archelaus reading depends on a specific piece of recent history that Jesus's first audience would have known. Most modern readers do not, so it is worth laying out what Josephus actually says. Archelaus was the elder of Herod the Great's sons by Malthace. When Herod died in 4 BCE, his will named Archelaus heir to the kingdom. Archelaus could not assume the throne until Augustus confirmed the will. He set out for Rome to be invested.

Before he left, Passover arrived. Jewish leaders pressed him to redress grievances from the last year of Herod's reign, including the execution of two Pharisees who had pulled down a Roman eagle from the Temple gate. Archelaus refused. A crowd in the Temple turned hostile. According to Josephus, Archelaus sent in a cohort, and then the whole army, against the crowd. Antiquities 17.213-218 puts the dead at three thousand, killed in the Temple precincts during the festival.

Augustus heard both sides. He gave Archelaus the title ethnarch (lower than king) and most of his father's territory: Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. He gave Galilee and Perea to Herod Antipas, and the northeast to Philip. The kingdom was split. Archelaus ruled until 6 CE, when further complaints brought another delegation to Augustus and Archelaus was deposed and exiled to Vienne in Gaul. Judea was placed under direct Roman administration.

Two details in Luke 19 read as direct echoes. 'A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom' (Luke 19:12) reads on top of Archelaus's Rome trip. 'His citizens hated him, and sent a message after him, saying, We will not have this man to reign over us' (Luke 19:14) reads on top of the fifty-man delegation. The parable's opening establishes a frame that an adult Judean listener in 30 CE could place. The thirty-four years between Archelaus's trip and Jesus's parable is roughly the gap between the present day and the late 1990s. The events were within adult recall.

How Christian preaching has handled verse 27

The line has not been hidden. It has been preached, and preached differently in different periods. The patristic and medieval handling tracks closely with the Christ-as-nobleman reading. Augustine takes the slaughter as figuring the judgment of those who refuse the gospel. Aquinas, citing Augustine, reads the order eschatologically. The reformers continue the pattern. Calvin reads verse 27 as the threat against those who reject Christ's reign and finds in it the same warning as Psalm 2:9 ('thou shalt break them with a rod of iron').

Modern evangelical preaching usually keeps the verse but softens the throne-room image. The line is preached as a warning rather than a command, with the slaughter symbolic of final judgment. The standard application is that no one is neutral toward Christ's reign and that the parable's third servant and rejecting citizens are warnings to the reader. The preacher does not usually pause on the visual register of the line, which is closer to a vengeance-king receiving his enemies than to a courtroom scene.

The Archelaus reading entered preaching mainly through Kenneth Bailey's Middle Eastern work and N. T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God. Sermons that follow this reading treat verse 27 as Jesus quoting the world he was actually living in, the world of brutal client-kings, and contrasting that kingship with the kingship he was riding into Jerusalem to enact. On this reading the next scene, Jesus weeping over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44), is the contrast point. Where Archelaus killed three thousand in the Temple, Jesus weeps over the city that will not receive him.

Protest readings in homiletics are rarer but have a presence in liberation and Black-church preaching traditions. Justo Gonzalez's Luke commentary (in the Belief series) holds these together with the more standard reading, presenting both as legitimate options for a preacher who wants to take the difficulty seriously. The protest reading does not usually circulate in evangelical pulpits, where Luke 19:11's framing of the parable as 'about the kingdom of God' is taken at face value.

What each position has to account for

Each reading has a cost. The Christ-eschatological reading has to account for the austere-master traits in verses 21-22 and for why the parable is built on the political frame of a recent Judean tyrant. The Archelaus reading has to explain why Luke 19:11 sets the parable up as about the kingdom of God rather than as a political allegory, and why the audience is left to make the historical connection on its own. The protest reading has to account for the gospel writer's own framing and for the Matthew parallel, which reads the same servant-pattern in the opposite direction. The stewardship-with-coda reading has to account for the closing position of verse 27, which puts the violence in the parable's most memorable slot.

Most working readers hold versions of two or three of these positions in combination. Bailey, Wright, and Snodgrass all accept the Archelaus framing for the opening setup while keeping a Christological reading of the master in the body of the parable. Marshall and Bock accept the Christ-eschatological reading while granting that the historical Archelaus material is in the background. Few commentators hold any position in pure form.

Reading the parable with the question open

Verse 27 is the kind of line readers come back to. The four positions above name what each reader is trading off. Read the nobleman as Christ and the violence becomes the final judgment, sober but distant. Read the nobleman as Archelaus and the violence becomes a portrait of the kind of king Jesus is not, with the Triumphal Entry as the contrast. Read the parable as protest and the violence is the system the parable exposes. Read the parable as stewardship with a separate kingship coda and the violence belongs to a different storyline that closes alongside the main lesson. The parable does not force a single reading. The reader who notices the verse and stops, instead of moving on to the Triumphal Entry, is the reader the parable is asking for.