Sermons Online ...
Sermon: The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 13th November 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 and 10 am
Readings: Judges 4:1-10 Psalm 123 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 Matthew 25:14-30
Today’s Gospel reading is the middle part of the 25 th chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, commonly called the Parable of the Talents, neatly tucked in between the Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Bridesmaids and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Its location hints broadly that this parable too will be addressing the issue of those who respond to God with faithfulness and those whose heart and mind are often elsewhere.
In looking at a parable, we need to try to grasp the immediate lesson it would have had in its context for those hearing it fresh from Jesus’ lips and then we need to work out the contemporary and ongoing lessons it has for us in our day and age. The main impact on us, and I suspect on the first hearers of the parable of the talents, is one of shock about the so called worthless servant. It is quite verbally violent and seems to stand in contrast to what we are taught about people being made in God’s image and of our being of infinite worth – such a turnaround to hear “worth-less” and such condemnation.
There seems little doubt that those first hearing this parable would have understood that Jesus was referring to the Scribes and the Pharisees as the worthless ones who were being condemned. The Scribes were students of the Scriptures, whose primary occupation was writing out copies of the Jewish scriptures and teaching people what the law said. They were thus very familiar with the words of scripture and as knowledgeable people, were trusted as lawyers when questions arose that needed interpreting. They had been emerging as Jesus’ most adamant opponents. The Pharisees were religious leaders in the synagogues and in their communities, an estimated 6,000 of them in Jesus’ time. They were fundamentalists in their religious beliefs and focused on strict observance of the Jewish laws, ceremonies and traditions. They strongly encouraged people to pursue righteousness by closely following the law.
Part of the aim of these two groups was to keep the law exactly as it was. In their own phrase, they sought to “build a fence around the law”. They wanted nothing to change. One scholar describes their method as “paralysis of religious truth”. Another says that Jesus was condemning the Scribes who presumed to keep the treasure of God’s word to themselves by “hedging the Law around with endless prohibitions”. Perhaps this parable was an original condemnation of the self- serving exclusiveness of legalistic Pharisaism. Some even suggest it is a denunciation of the
Jewish people as a whole for not making proper use, God-directed use, of what was entrusted to them. It could well have been part of Jesus’ denunciation of the Scribes who had buried the treasure of the law under a mass of traditions and regulations.
When we hear the parable of the talents read, for many of us, it sounds very familiar. If you were brought up as I was, it would have made you think this morning of your own talents, your gifts, your natural endowments and the skills you have developed and whether you are making good and proper use of them. Sometimes that is not helpful. I have to be very alert not to be caught in a pincer movement between feeling I have to keep working hard to use fully any talents I have and a scary awareness of what happened to the person who buried his talent. It is easy in a different response, to develop a ho-hum approach to such a familiar passage, especially if we have heard predictable and sometimes pedestrian sermons on it over the years with little scholarship brought to bear.
Let’s go back in our minds to the first time this parable was told, or to imagining the hearers’ conversations about it. “Do you think Jesus really meant …?” or “What do you suppose he meant when he said …?” One thing is clear. A talent then was not a talent as we know it today. A talent was originally a measure of weight – it was not originally a coin though there is some justification for translating the passage using units of money to convey what was entrusted to the servants. Coins were weighed out in payment for something, and depending on whether the coinage was made of copper, silver or gold, so the number of talents of them varied to make up a price. The word then became a monetary unit, the highest denomination. It was not until the Middle Ages, literally hundreds of years later, that the word “talent” passed into the English language as a synonym for abilities or natural endowments. So, to the first hearers, who took this story as applying to themselves as well, rather that just to the Scribes and Pharisees, the most basic meaning was teaching on how they handled their money, their God-given resources. There was actually one later Rabbi who taught “Money can only be guarded by placing it in the earth.”. But guarding one’s money was not what the master in this story had in mind. The watchfulness and the preparedness commended in the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids earlier in the chapter is carried on in this story, in the call to us to faithfulness in responsibility, individually and as a community. It is for his failure to heed this charge from the master that the worthless servant was berated.
I was interested that someone with whom I discussed this parable during the week said “I feel really sorry for that servant. He was so afraid and that is why he did not do anything with the money he was given.” I am not convinced of that interpretation, although the servant said to the master “I was afraid.”. Several things convince me otherwise:
- The master knew his servants and had given to each according to his ability. The master had over a period of time got to know this servant and had not demanded a lot of him. He had not asked for significant risk, for skill in investment or business acumen, but faithful responsibility.
- The fact that the master called the servants on his return to settle their accounts, would indicate they had been given the money specifically to use in trade to make gains with it. This would have been clear to all three servants who presumably during the master’s absence, had opportunity to discuss with each other the task they were undertaking.
- If the master was, as the servant put to him, a hard man, harvesting where he has not sown and gathering where he had not scattered seed, isn’t it ironic that the servant dared to say so to his face and claimed it was fear that made him hide the money by burying it? The master’s response to the other servants…”Well done!...Share your master’s prosperity” is not the response of an unappreciative, unsympathetic, harsh master, but of an encourager. The master’s careful allocation of responsibility at the outset, according to ability, does not seem to portray a man careless of his servants nor too demanding of them. I think that genuine fear of the master’s anger or even his anticipated disappointment on his return, would have been a motivation greater than any other fear.
Whichever interpretation is correct, the important truth is that the master applauds venturing forth, being active, taking risks whereas being inactive
because of fear or laziness or for whatever reason, is strongly rebuked. Being active and doing is an emphasis in Matthew’s gospel. We are not simply to rely on the relationship we have been called into with God through Christ, but we are to be active in our faithfulness. We are not setting out to earn God’s favour and justify ourselves by our works, but having become Jesus’ disciples, experiencing the grace of God, we reflect that faith in gratitude in our life and activity.
It is pretty obvious from this parable that we are called on not to bother to compare talents, but to get on and use them as fully as we can. What matters according to the gospel story is not the nature or size of our talent, but how we use it.
This is a view that is commonly proclaimed in our community, that it does not matter if our talent is small as long as we do our best and use it. I would suggest, however, that that is not the real view, the one our community actually lives by. In practice, we applaud and reward winners, not faithful triers, except as a concession. It is horrible that the word “loser” has moved into common speech to imply someone who does not quite make it in life on a number of fronts. We rarely respect or encourage those who try and who serve as best they can although we give lip-service to this idea. We Gospel people need to think this through clearly and to adopt the stance of the parable, that we are asked, not necessarily to be high fliers to gain praise and adulation, but to be faithful in our use of our gifts, as a response to God, as our contribution to his people and his work.
But these are the more self-evident applications of the parable. I often refer to the work of William Loader, a Western Australian Uniting Church theologian. His thoughts on today’s gospel reading are more deeply insightful, so I want to quote him:
“Matthew’s community might be thinking of the controversy over the expansion of the gospel into the Gentile world and the refusal of some Jews to accept that the doors should be flung open so recklessly. God is misbehaving again and they cannot believe it and refuse to support the adventure.
“The parable challenges us not to sit on the life of God in us. …our narrow values will not allow us to keep up with God’s generosity. The talents of the parable are really about God’s life and power, not about our natural abilities. The appropriate response is to allow God’s investing hand to employ our abilities.”
He goes on to say: “The tragedy is that many people are afraid of losing or endangering God and they seek to protect God from adventures, to resist
attempts at radical inclusion that might, they fear, compromise God’s purity and holiness. Protecting God is a variant of not trusting God. Sometimes we find God is pulling in great profits in areas which we had deemed beyond God’s interests. “God’s mercy never ends” is a way of saying grace has capital, love is rich.” Loader says we need to encourage people to stop putting God under the mattress. As we begin to trust allowing God to move through us, our individual lives change and our communities have a better chance of change. There are rich pickings and the harvest is ripe.”
What then does this parable mean for us? What do you and I need to think about in the coming weeks for ourselves and for the parish?
Firstly, there is the responsibility for using our money wisely and in a God-directed and unfearful way.
Secondly, there is the need for us to harness our talents, our skills and abilities, and put them to use for God and for the community, allowing God’s investing hand to employ them.
Thirdly, there is the need to ensure we do not put our version of God under the mattress to protect Him. We need to avoid ensuring that everything remains as it always seems to have been or as we like it to be, and thereby paralyzing the parish in the future. There is always something self-serving in behaving like this, as it protects our comfort zone. It is great to see the Sunday School reaching out to new ideas and new ways and to see people refreshed and enlivened and excited by that. I realized when I was preparing this, that it refers too to the postponed outreach event at St Aidan’s and to our attitude towards the development that is inevitably going to come to this property. With some responsibility in the planning and decision-making I need to remember this is about God’s life and power in the parish rather than about real estate.
In summary, this parable is one of the important lenses we all need to bring a right focus to all our activities as we review them strategically and from time to time.
Perhaps the compilers of our lectionary had some of these insights when they chose Psalm 123 for today… “As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master… so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he shows us his mercy. And from 1 Thessalonians reading, “Therefore, encourage one another and build each other up.”