Talent Quest

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Talent Quest 13 November 2011 The Revd Jenny Wilkens

• Ps 123
• Judges 4:1-7
• 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
• Matthew 25:14-30

http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

Right now we're in exam season - our university students have just finished theirs, and our secondary students have just begun their exams. Everything they have done this year is being assessed, and the results may determine not only next year, but the course of the rest of their lives: what sort of study or training they will go on to, what sort of job they will get. And it's not only the students who are anxious; parents and grand-parents equally share that burden, perhaps some of you here.

There is always the danger that we can see our Christian faith and life as a sort of heavenly exam system. We can think of the Bible as a syllabus to study, things to learn and do, rules to keep. One day God will come and set the final exam, and see who passes and who fails. Maybe there'll be rewards for people who get specially good marks, and punishments for those who fail? I still come across people who say to me plaintively towards the end of their life, 'I hope I've been good enough…'

Of course the whole of Jesus' ministry should make us rail against such a view of Christianity, or of God. Rather Jesus declared that he had come to call not the righteous but sinners; he had come to seek and save the lost. Jesus warned the scribes and Pharisees, who thought they were heading for top exam marks, that the tax collectors and prostitutes, who would have failed any exam in the Judaism of their day, were entering the kingdom of God way ahead of them! And that by simply turning to face Jesus, coming to him in faith and trust, and finding that in turning to Jesus, their lives were turned round the right way up as well!

But we can easily fall back into this rewards/punishment, pass/fail mentality when we look at today's parable from Matthew's gospel, the very well-known but easily misinterpreted Parable of the Talents.

It's actually very topical to be reading this parable in the light of the current Occupy protests of the 99%ers, deploring the obscene salaries and bonuses of the bankers of Wall St or the financial district of London, or the situation in the Eurozone, where the 'successful' powers are putting the squeeze on their poorer relations in Greece and Italy.

And the parable is talking about enormous sums of money here - we of course think of talents in its modern meaning of gifts or skills, rather than a unit of money. But for us to grasp what we're dealing with here, it's actually talking about a huge weight of money. A talent would have been equal to about 15 years wages for a labourer. So 5 talents, or 2 or even 1 talent is an immense amount of money to be entrusted with.

If we read the parable from our current world's outlook, we could tell it like this: two bankers invest the capital with which they've been entrusted, make 100% profit, no doubt at considerable risk, and earn a bonus, while the third one takes no risks at all out of fear of failure, earns nothing and so is sacked.

But we could also imagine another ending to the story in our day, where it might have been that the first two bankers took too many risks, crashed and burned, while the third who wasn't prepared to risk his capital or even deposit it in the bank, took the safest of all options and hid it under the mattress. In the face of our recent experience of bank and finance company collapses, we might even consider his caution prudent and laudable!

But that's not how it appears in the story, and we need to do a bit of work to find out just what Jesus is getting at in the parable, and what Matthew is doing in placing this parable here, alongside other parables we are hearing at the moment about the coming of the Son of Man. Last week we heard about the wise and foolish bridesmaids waiting for the Bridegroom, next week we will hear about Jesus coming in judgement and dividing the sheep from the goats.

So we tend to see the master of the slaves here as Jesus, going away and then finally returning to settle accounts, to reward the faithful and judge the wicked.

But it's worth comparing Matthew's account of the Parable of the Talents with Luke's version (Luke 19:11-27), usually called the Parable of the Pounds. Luke has Jesus tell this parable on his final journey to Jerusalem, rather than as a Last Judgement story. The master of Matthew's story is described as harsh and a bit dodgy, but in Luke's version he becomes a king who is hated and feared by his subjects and uses shocking violence to put down opposition. So it isn't at all clear that Luke wants us to see the king as Jesus, and the 3rd slave could even be seen as a lone courageous voice standing up to a corrupt master. We need to be careful about immediately deciding that the master or king figure is Jesus; parables are not always that easy to say 'this' is 'that'.

And what about that tricky punch line, said by the master as the 3rd slave is stripped of even the little he has: "For to all 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." (Mt 25:29) It sounds a little like tax cuts for the rich, and welfare cuts for the beneficiaries! Is this just a hard-headed statement of the way the world is, the grim reality that it seems that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as we heard in today's Psalm (123:5): 'too long have we suffered the scorn of the wealthy and the contempt of the arrogant.' If we took the parable at face value, we might conclude that God is a hard task-master, that there will be condemnation for the cautious and those who are risk-averse and less successful in life, that in God's kingdom the rich get richer and the poor poorer just like in the world we know…Surely the values of God's kingdom should be different?

Well, a lot of questions, but what interpretations have people come up with, that give some answers as to what this parable is all about?

John Henry Newman decided that there is a bit of all 3 slaves in all of us, he says this: 'They who venture much with their talents, give much, and in the end they hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant", but they have so many losses in trading by the way, that to them they seem to do nothing but fail. They cannot believe that they are making any progress, and though they do, yet surely they have much to be forgiven in all their services.'

Many of us could identify with his words that our Christian journey is a series of fits and starts, and often feels like 2 steps forward and 3 backward. There's something of each of the 3 slaves in our experience, and we may suspect we are going to turn out to be the 3rd one, yet we trust that we will hear God say to us, Well done, good and faithful servant, because God only looks on us, as found in Christ.

Our prayer is as in the Communion hymn : "Look, Father, look on his anointed face, and only look on us as found in him; look not on our misusings of thy grace, our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim; for lo, between our sins and their reward, we set the Passion of thy Son our Lord."

Tom Wright reminds us that we need to first of all take this parable in its context of what Jesus is saying in his own day. Thus the 3rd slave who hid his master's money is like the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' time who were keeping for themselves all the promises of God, the law, the Temple, fencing them round so that others could not enjoy them, keeping people out from God's blessings rather than sharing them with all comers. The 1st and 2nd slaves would then be those who were responding to God's gracious call to them in Jesus to enter God's kingdom, and responding to God's generosity by sharing God's generous love with others. That's quite a different way of looking at the parable, isn't it!

And note too that although the parable has to us a quite unpalatable ending, "throw this worthless slave into outer darkness, where there'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth", we need to remember that this parable comes near the end of Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus will soon enter his own outer darkness, crucified outside a city wall. The Son of Man will not come as judge without first giving his life as a ransom for many (Mt 20:28) and so taking that judgement on himself.

Jesus himself was willing to move beyond the stance of the 3rd slave, beyond self-protectiveness, beyond a fear and caution that paralyses into inaction. God in Christ took the risk of coming into this world, God in Christ took the risk of loving us to the end, a love without prudence or calculation, a love which overflowed at the cross. I guess the challenge to me, and to us, is I who have come to know and love Christ, and trust Christ for my salvation, am I willing to follow Christ in risky discipleship, trusting I will one day hear his voice say, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord."