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Today I want to start with an image.
A beautiful faceted jewel, shining in the light.
As you turn it this way and that, the beauty of the stone is revealed.
Parables are like jewels.
You can tilt them,
come at them from odd angles,
trusting that the meaning is somehow found in the whole.
This morning we are hearing the second of three judgment parables found in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 25. Last week, it was the wise and foolish bridesmaids. This week it is the story of the talents. Next week, it will be the parable of the sheep and the goats.
Back to our focus scripture—the Parable of the Talents. I don’t know about you—but I have a fondness for this parable. It is often used in Youth Sunday sermons—because it is fairly easy to understand. As we acted out this morning—you are given a gift by God and the question is what are you going to do with it? Invest it? Multiply it? Hide it?
So easy.
So tempting to use at every Stewardship opportunity.
A kind of Godly version of “use it or lose it.”
A simple white and black world,
see our cover for example.
The good servants.
The bad servant.
And the message is just as clear--Be a good servant and hear those wonderful words, “Well done, good and faithful servant, Enter into the joy of your Master.”
Parable of the talents,
understood,
check.
But that leaves me a little unsettled. Because usually parables are NOT easy to understand. Parables often turn things upside down. We hear again and again that Jesus had to explain the parables to his disciples. In fact, he even says earlier in the gospel of Matthew that he uses parables so some will NOT understand.
“To you it has been given to know the secrets* of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. 12For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 13The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13:13)
If that is the case, where are those attributes in this parable?
With that in mind, I want you to listen to another reading of the parable—another perspective—a turning of the jewel, a different light.
First, we need to remember that a talent is an actual amount of money. Not just a nice sum of money, but a boatload of money. One talent, one talanton in Greek, was worth approximately 15 years worth of labor. So let’s say that you make $50,000 a year. One talent would be $750,000. In these terms the master of our story gives $3.75 million to the first slave, $1.5 million to the second slave, and a mere $750,000 to the last slave. I can only imagine that they felt they had just won the lottery.
Also notice that in this imaginary world, that is frighteningly like our own, there are masters and slaves; there are those who have more money than we can imagine, and those who don’t.
Ok, so we have a very rich landowner (we don’t know how he got his wealth), who goes away for a long time—in other words, he is an absentee landlord. He doesn’t really seem to care about Palestine, the land or the people—he doesn’t live there. He just wants his profits. He is not a very nice man, in fact, some might call him harsh.
He calls his slaves, gives them this insane amount of money, and tells them to “take care” of his property. The first two slaves, emulating their master, maybe out of fear, do just that, giving out loans, charging interest, exploiting poor people. They do this, even though charging interest is against Jewish law at the time. They become part of a system that denigrates people, misuses wealth, and crushes the poor.
The third slave rebels. He knows his master to be a harsh man. He knows there will be consequences to defying the “trust” put in him. He buries the money (which many people did at that time to safeguard it)—intending not to swindle the master, but refusing to participate in this scheme of “illegally” making money off of the poor, thus not allowing the Master to “own” him either. In this subversive reading of the parable, the third servant is the one we ought to emulate, not the first two!
How wonderfully this would play in our 99% versus 1% world. We could even rename this the Occupy Parable. The only problem with this is that it doesn’t seem to fit into the ending that Matthew has affixed to it—where the bad people always go into the outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth.
So what can take from this strange jewel?
I want to look at our parable from a third perspective—one of picking an image out of the whole.
You might almost miss the image in the telling of this story, for it gets only a few words. It is sandwiched between setting up the story “A man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them”, and seeing the conclusion “After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them.” I am, of course, referring to the phrase “After a long time…” It’s kind of funny that the words “after a long time” don’t take very long to say. But contained in them is a LOOONG TIME.
Here is our connection to last week’s reading. Here is our entrance into the story. For we are living in the “long time”—the time between when the Master has been with us at first, and when the Master will come again. And the question is how will WE live in that “long time.”
#1. Do we see ourselves as those slaves? Do we know that we have been gifted with abundance in the first place? Do we recognize the “talents,” the gifts that we have been given? Do we count the stores of grace and love that God has bestowed upon us? Do we add up all our blessings?
#2. After giving thanks for all we have received, do we invest it? Do we do something with these talents, these gifts, these blessings? Do we share them? Do we find ways to participate in God’s multiplication? Do we remember to have eyes open to the ways of the world? Do we watch out for the poor?
#3. In all of this, Do we hold on to our place in this timeline—that we are not doing this in a vacuum. Do we believe that the Master will return? That God will come. That there will be a time for justice, for accounting, for showing who we have been, during this “long time.”
If last week’s bottom line was “Be Ready.” This week’s bottom line is “Be Doing.”
And I see this as held in the beauty of the Christian year swirling from the end of one year, and into the beginning of a new one.
For as we wind down our Christian year, as we approach the time of harvest and thanksgiving,
we know that in just a little while,
just a heartbeat,
we will be talking about God coming into the world,
about God being with us,
as a baby,
and how that first Advent,
foreshadows the final Advent
of God coming to be with us for all time.
In just two weeks we will start again to talk about waiting for, watching for, praying for, the end of the “long time” talked about in today’s parable.
God’s Advent.
Something to look forward to.
Something to jostle us out of any apathy
we might have fallen into.
Something that has been promised.
That the Master will come back.
That “the Long Time” will end.
But in the meantime,
Be Ready,
Be Doing.
Make an Investment.
Share God’s abundant mercy, grace, and love.
May it be so, Alleluia, Amen.
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