Pentecost 25, 2023
Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Soooo . . . I’ve been dreading this Gospel text for over a month now. It just seems like such an outlier. It goes against everything we hear from Jesus when it comes to money. In this parable, the rich become richer, and the poor are cast off into darkness. I’m leery of any story that sounds like a pyramid scheme, where greed is good, and responsible care-taking of someone else’s things is punished. This parable has been used over the centuries to explain why poor people become poor in the first place: They’re bad at banking, you see? Or, you could say, they are too honest to gamble on the stock market using money that doesn’t belong to them.
Now, before we jump in here, I want to remind us that we should never assume that God or Jesus is necessarily the king or master in the parables. Sometimes that seems to be the case, and sometimes it doesn’t. So we always want to be looking for the point of the story, without assuming God is the one in charge. That said, let’s talk about talents.
In Jesus’ time, a talent was a measurement of gold. It wasn’t a bag of cash; rather it was an actual chunk of gold, formed into a thing with a handle, so you could carry it. One talent weighed 75 pounds, and was worth about 16 years of work, or 19 years if you rested on the Sabbath. Using the current median income in the United States, this means a talent is worth something like $1.1 million dollars. And again, weighs 75 pounds!
So, in today’s parable, one servant gets $5.5 million, one gets $2.2 million, and the last gets $1.1 million. Intuitively, which servant would you expect to be the most cautious with the gold he’s been entrusted with? The one with 5 and half million right? Like, if I showed someone else a piece of clear glass, and I showed you our Tiffany Annunciation window here, and said “You two take care of these while I’m gone,” you’d be very careful with that Tiffany window, right? I don’t expect you’d bury it in the ground, but I can’t imagine you’d take it to the flea market and try to get two more Tiffany windows in exchange, right? Point being, we would expect the one who was entrusted with more to be more careful with it.
But this parable also brings up our natural response to our fear of scarcity. So much of our behavior is driven by that very thing. When we’re afraid we won’t have enough, we hold on tighter to what we do have. If they give you a raise, you’re more apt to feel secure in donating to charity. Economists call this a zero-sum game. That is, the pie is only so big, and if you get a slice, then that means there’s one less slice for me. And I won’t even get started on what this means when it comes to governmental policies. Suffice it to say, a scarcity mentality makes us fearful for the future, more careful with what we have, and less apt to share with others.
Now . . . let’s leave the land of money for a minute, and talk about love. When parents have their first child, one kid gets all the attention. Plenty of love to go around, and everybody’s good. When the time comes to adopt a second child or give birth to one, the doubts can start to set in. Parents wonder, will there be enough love to go around? “I can’t imagine I could ever love a baby as much as I love this first child.” And the first child often has similar thoughts, though not quite as refined. Usually more like, “I want you to send that baby back where it came from!” And along comes the second child and, voila, somehow there is indeed enough love to go around. And why? Because love is not a zero-sum game.
But let’s look at what I think is the crucial piece of this parable. The third servant comes to the master with his talent, having dug it up and washed it off, and says, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” Wait. What? When did anyone say that about this master? There is no indication whatsoever that the master is harsh, or that the servant had any reason to be afraid. He’s totally making this up!
And here’s why that is important. The other two servants, the ones who went out and doubled what was entrusted to them, they don’t seem to be afraid of the master, do they? They don’t say, “because you are a harsh man, I will go invest what you have given me.” No it seems that having a negative, frightening view of the master is what leads the so-called “wicked and lazy” servant to do the wrong thing in this parable. His fear is what leads him to bury his talent. He is so paralyzed by fear that he is afraid to do anything with what he is given.
Now, again, I want to remind us not to assume that the master in the story is God. However, the parable hints at a distorted view of God, which can lead us into being so afraid of doing the wrong thing that we do nothing at all. Back in the 1500s, Martin Luther struggled with this very thing. He lived in such fear of displeasing God that he was afraid to do anything. Eventually, he came to the point where he could offer this advice: let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger. Sin boldly, as it often gets translated. His point was, you will sin against God and your neighbor, and you should not pretend that you won’t. However, you should trust that God’s forgiveness is more powerful than anything you can do. You cannot make God love you, and you cannot make God stop loving you.
So back to our parable. The third servant, the “wicked and lazy” one, I still think he did the responsible thing when entrusted with someone else’s money. (Remember, the master is not necessarily God.) But for purposes of the story, it is his failure to trust that leads him to disappoint. He is so paralyzed by fear that he does nothing. He has essentially created the master he was afraid of. The other two servants went out and increased what they were given and they were able to do that because they lived without fear. And, as a result, they were given more work and invited to “enter into the joy of your master.”
And the other servant? Well, here is the hardest part about that. He gets thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Again, if this were a true story, we’d all agree that he did the right thing, right? I mean, people go to jail for gambling with other people’s money! But this is not a newspaper story. This is a parable. And in parables we look for the point, not the facts. And I think the point is this . . .
When we live in fear, whether out of perceived scarcity, or out of imaginary fear of punishment, we turn inward. We circle the wagons and close the drapes and hide, as though some traveling salesman were heading for our door. And a hyperbolic way to describe that fear is that we end up in darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Rather than coming into the master’s presence, we live in isolated fear.
“Fear not,” and “Do not be afraid.” Those phrases appear over 100 times in the New Testament. We could think of today’s parable as being an extended version of that phrase. Let’s go back for a moment and think of the parable using our English understanding of the word “talent” instead of the Biblical one. Three people are given certain talents and abilities; two of them go out and develop more skills and use their talents to bring more joy to life. The third one is afraid, and so he buries his talent and does nothing with it.
Or, perhaps more appropriately, think of the three people as ones who have seen what God has done in their lives. Two go out and share this good news, and the gospel spreads. One lives in fear of sharing and buries this good news.
We don’t need for some traveling master to return and tell us what this means. We have all been entrusted with gifts, mental, physical, financial—time, talents, treasure—and what we do with them is our gift back to God. I don’t expect God to swoop in and punish those of us who live in fear, because living in fear is punishment enough. But in sharing what we have been given, we can find true joy in life. We need not be afraid, because we worship a generous God, who offers us more than we could ask or imagine.
This is a very hard parable, and it is crucial that we not think of it as anything more than an object lesson. But even as an object lesson it is confusing and unclear. One way to approach it might be, don’t take today’s gospel as gospel. And no matter what, always hold onto the knowledge that God loves you and wants what is best for you, no matter what confusing stories we might hear on a Sunday morning in November. God loves you and wants what is best for you, and God is always with you.
Amen
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