Luke 12:45-48 basically says that if the slave doesn't get the house ready by the time the master is home, the master is well within his right to beat the shit out of the slave. I just read the passage in my own copy of the NT.If nothing else, I've caused you to crack open that Bible of yours. Keep reading it.
How convenient that any unpleasant implication of Jesus' advice turns out to be a parable.
Not convenient at all. It's to be expected. Jesus didn't beat people up for their sin. He took their sin to the cross and took the beating himself.
But I think in order to understand it you need to grasp the other side of the parable. He's not talking about how a servant in that day should behave. He's talking about how we should behave as we we look forward for the coming of the Lord. Jesus is not saying that slaves should be beaten for no reason. He's talking about punishment. In those days, that was the reality. A slave would be severely punished for disobedience. Jesus is not teaching about the rightness or wrongness of that act. It's just an illustration for the point he is making.
In your job, if you screw up, you get fired. Yet you don't call that immoral. You expect that.
The point of the parable is to be ready for Christ's coming. If you start taking it and using it as an example of how Jesus endorsed beating up slaves, you are simply using the text for your own purposes. You're not actually reading it for what it says.











