Standing Under the Scriptures
November 23, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Ezekiel 34.11-16: The prophet speaks of his beatific vision of the restoration of Israel’s exiles.

Matthew 25.31-46: Jesus’ final parable concerns the separation of the righteous from the unrighteous, both being unconscious of their status.

After having been in England for the previous three Sundays, I can give an account of last Sunday’s class. Our first reading, Judges 4.10-7, concerned Deborah, who was one of Israel’s judges and who organized its resistance to a foreign oppressor. This was in the difficult time following the conquest under Joshua, when other nations were seeking to take over Canaan as Israel itself had done. That ancient Israel with its patriarchical tradition at one time had a woman as its leader is remarkable, although nothing special is made of it in the text. Evidently Deborah did not hide the talent that the Lord had given her but despite all impediments exercised it fully.

This makes her relevant to the parable of the talents (Matthew 25.14-30), which was our New Testament reading. We saw that like the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids preceding it and the parable of “the last assizes” following it (our reading for this Sunday), it is concerned with the second coming of the Christ and the judgment which this necessarily entails. These parables may be seen as negative, even punitive, in their invoking of punishment for failure properly to prepare. But we saw that in the case of the parable of the talents, at least, this is not necessarily so. Further, its relevance is not just eschatological, it affords a pattern for how as Jesus’ followers we are to live in the here and now---not only as individuals but also as a community. I will try to convey these points by first outlining the parable, then considering what it refers to and, finally, discerning its underlying meaning:

The parable’s outline is familar. A man going on a long journey entrusts his property, which takes the form of eight talents, to three slaves: five to the first, two to the second, and one to the third. (A talent represented an enormous amount of money.) On his return he settles with these slaves. The first two have put their talents to work and are now able to present their master with double the amount he entrusted to them. For this they are commended by their master and invited to enter into his “joy.” The third slave, however, has merely hidden his talent in the ground, so that he must now present it to his master by itself, without even interest. And he is roundly condemned, indeed cast into outer darkness.

The master in the parable is surely Christ as Lord. The Greek word here translated as master is Kyrios, making the identification more obvious than in English. As for the talents, included among them would be such attributes as intelligence and strength. But the main one, in accordance with its surpassing value, we saw as the gospel itself. The putting into action (the French mise en oeuvre is a better term) of a talent necessarily involves risk. This is stated only negatively in the parable, in the form of the third slave’s hesitations over his one talent. But it would have applied to the first two and their trading (Gr. “working”) with their respective five and two talents. Trading was no less risky in the ancient world than it is now. This is especially true of the gospel: proclaiming it, maintaining it against the manifold distortions of it that have arisen, in the church now as in the world. But the gospel is not only the prime talent, it also enables the risks attendant on putting it into action to be taken. In Sunday’s sermon our attention was directed to Paul’s explicit articulation of this aspect: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me... “ (Galatians 2.20). Paul’s reference here is to the gospel and what it has wrought for him. And he was perhaps the outstanding instance of the putting into action of this talent, which Christ had given him, by way both of his personal reconstitution and of his incredible missionary outreach.

In this way the parable provides a pattern for our lives. It calls on us to risk putting into action the talents that we have been given, above all the gospel, as Paul did. It calls us as individuals and also as the church. Taken together with Paul’s account of the interdependence of the parts of the body in 1 Corinthians, it means that all the talents of its members should be employed. To be sure, our talents are not comparable to Paul’s, and we are unlikely to achieve comparable results. But the parable specifies that we are expected to achieve only in proportion to what we have been given. The slave who gained two talents with the two he had been given is commended as warmly as is the slave who gained five with his five. There remains a question, however, about one feature of the parable and thus about its overall validity. This is the apparent harshness of the punishment of the slave who hid his one talent in the ground: he is ordered cast into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth For his offense was that he hesitated to risk his talent, even to entrust it to the “bankers” (perhaps there was no FDIC then). And do we not hesitate to take such risks ourselves? Have we not hung back from them all along? We should note, however, that this slave’s hesitation was based not only on his security concerns. It was based also on his grudging, indeed cramped and crabbed, view of his master: “I knew your were a hard man… “ Further, we should recall that the commendation of each of the first two slaves ended with “Enter into the joy of your master.” Considering the identity of their, and our, master, this joy would have been the blessedness of the kingdom of heaven. And to be cut off from this, indeed to cut ourselves off, would be tantamount to being cast into outer darkness.

There is still the possibility that in taking risks, even for the gospel, we may fail. But the wider biblical context, if not the parable itself, assures us that the Lord will sustain us even so.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted