ST MATTHEW-IN-THE-CITY
ANGLICAN CHURCH AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND
Life Abundant or Scarce?
November 19, 2017
Cate Thorn
Ordinary 33 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 Matthew 25:14-30
Video available on YouTube, Facebook
The parable of the talents … great, one of my first reactions was to wonder whether this was a manifesto for churches that preach and teach a prosperity theology. If God’s on your side you’ll get rich or the church will, or the leader of the church will – wealth and prosperity are the sure signs of God’s blessing – except it doesn’t quite work here for the slaves don’t get rich, just their master.
How many of you are familiar with this parable? If you are I’m guessing you’ve heard a lifetime of sermons on this parable, how many variations on the theme can there be? The parable of the talents is a parable about money. Accustomed as we might be to slip what talent means sideways, broadening it from being about money to rather or also being about skills, abilities, giving of time and so forth, in the context of this parable talent is talking about money, a lot of money. Unlike Luke, Matthew has the owner entrust enormous amounts of money, millions in today’s terms to these slaves. Money and God stuff are an uneasy alliance at the best of times for money is powerful, often powerfully misused in the world in the time of the telling of this parable and in our world today. If we were to interpret this parable literally, and propose it reveals that God rewards the rich for getting richer and punishes the poor for getting poorer, then I have a real problem with it. Not only could I not align myself with a God imagined thus, but to understand the parable in this way makes God in this parable utterly out of sync with the God of love of Matthew’s gospel thus far. So does this parable reveal something about the nature and character of God, or rather reveal something about humanity, about us? About how we respond to life in this world with the unique life gifted us in all its particular resourcefulness. Should we understand this world and our precious life in it as a divinely bestowed gift, then we’ve responsibility, for the choices we make have consequences not just for us but for the life of the world.
If we accept that talents in this parable is about money can we take a step back from our perhaps emotive response to the mention of money, and see that money is in fact simply a means of trade, an agreed system of exchange. Until fairly recently money has predominantly been physical currency, nowadays often as not it takes form of electronic exchange, a virtual reality transaction, new bitcoin currency’s emerging. Even so the use of money, in whichever form it takes, involves an exchange, a flow of a negotiated and agreed entity to which we attribute value. Because money has value, is linked to goods and services, it’s become a primary means for trade, worth, livelihood, status, the more you have the greater your power. That is if we agree to participate in and give primacy to the value of money as an exchange system. Maybe it is because money has such potency in daily life that it’s the image deployed in the parable today.
Deployed in this kingdom of heaven parable that was spoken into Matthew’s community, a community of people struggling to know how to be faithful, how to live as faithful followers of Jesus in the time between Jesus’ death and his promised coming again. A community endangered for adhering to the way of Jesus, aspiring to live perhaps as those who would inhabit the kingdom of heaven. Money is powerful in this parable about the kingdom of heaven, an image, Bill Loader suggests, for what’s potent in the kingdom and for the kingdom, the potency of the Spirit or at least of the life of God within us. The parable is to do with how and whether we allow the spirit, the life of God to flow through us for it, like money, is powerful.
It can be easy for us to go onto automatic, replay this parable in our heads because we know it so well, to not hear it afresh, not take time to pause and let it speak, to realise what’s actually before us rather than what we think. What we hear is that “it is as if a man going on a journey summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them,” the scale of money entrusted is in enormous. Then the man goes away – that’s all we know. The first two servants take all that’s entrusted to them and double it. The third one buries it. When the master comes back the servants, each in turn tell the master what they’ve done with the master’s property in his absence, what they chose to do in response to his trust in them. The first two, as we’ve heard, leveraged the money to make more money, entrusted with much they chose to make more, the master’s delighted. If it ended here the moral of the story might simply be: “Make the most of what you’ve got.” But this is no straight forward tale. The most interesting part is to come, the proverbial sting in the tail.
We then come to the third slave. This slave is afraid, through his words of fear we hear a summation of the character of the master. The master reaps where he has not sown and gathers harvest from seed that was not originally his - a pretty good description of hard business practice in any age. The third slave perceives the master in this way, through his fear the master is made real for the third slave in this way. Does the master confirm this characterisation by repeating the words of the third slave, or is he simply reflecting the third slave’s depiction, who could have, even in his fear, made a choice that would have generated even some small benefit? No risk was taken yet neither was any gain made. Notice that the master left no instructions. For whatever reason the first two slaves saw the resource they had been entrusted with and decided to do something with it. Discerning there was something to do, that they could do, empowered by their master’s belief in them, with courage and determination they whole heartedly took the risk of trading with the resource entrusted to them.
So in this kingdom of heaven parable, where currency of potency might be named as grace, the spirit, the life of God flowing through us, do we respond with fear or allow this potency to flow? Are we willing to entrust and give ourselves 110% to the enterprise of enabling the flow of divine currency or do we hold back in fear? Fear of what whole hearted commitment, abundant living might do to us, might require of us, might transform us into? Fear of being changed, of not being in control, of not being able to hold onto, to know and claim what is ours, for its benefit may be for the need of another. Fear that more and undeserving and unacceptable others we want to exclude are included. We diminish divine abundance to fit our fearful world view, allow fear and a diminished way of being to be the real.
If fear becomes our master then fear drives our encounter of the world, is the way we interpret the world. Forgetting that our life, our worth and inherent value is already divinely bestowed in us, we feel bound by the demands of fear or outer darkness will be our banishment. The way the world is, rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, is it an outcome of fear made real, as Dawn Hutchings suggests “in the first world … we’ve built an entire economic system that guarantees the rich will continue to get richer just as the poor continue to get poorer. It happens in the developing world where the poor continue to get poor while the rich prosper at the expense of those who are dying from Ebola or AIDs or [Bubonic plague], who have nothing to eat, no hope of escaping the outer darkness of their poverty, despite their weeping and the gnashing of teeth. We all know full well that millions and millions are suffering and dying, yet to protect ourselves we bury what has been given to us, because we’re afraid of being consumed by the wicked master who’ll surely banish us into the darkness if we do not keep safe what we’ve been given. We dare not risk losing anything at all, lest we end up in the outer darkness weeping and gnashing our teeth. So, for the most part we play it safe and we don’t take any risks and we spend our lives living in fear of that wicked master. These days there are a slew of wicked slave-masters. … the god of financial security: we’re supposed to work hard, shop lots, and somehow manage to save a fortune so that we can retire and live to shop some more. So, we live in fear of not, earning enough, not having enough stuff, not saving enough and ending our days on social welfare. Or the slave-master that insists that we all have a successful career, that has us all running around from pillar to post, [smartphone] in hand, from one meeting to the next, checking all the boxes as we climb each rung on the ladder to success … we live in fear of not accomplishing enough, of running out of time, of not pleasing the powers that be and ending up stuck in a rut. Or the master that demands that we always be right and so we live in fear of making a mistake. Or that master that insists that we fit the mould, we live in fear of not looking beautiful, young, sexy, and skinny. Or that master that keeps telling us that unless we are very, very careful everything is going to fall apart, so we spend our lives worrying about maintaining the status quo and we never ever take a risk, cause we know that the only way to keep things just the way they are is to play it safe. These taskmasters, whoever they are have us all where they want us, feeling like worthless slaves, living in darkness and so busy weeping and gnashing our teeth that we can’t see that we are free.” [1]
This parable isn’t a comfortable parable, maybe because in many ways it’s a parable of the way the world is. Every day in each moment we choose how we use who we are and what we have, whether to enact abundance or scarcity. In many ways scarcity is more reassuring for we set the parameters and know what we have. Living, being and doing abundantly is far more risky, taking all we’re given, our life in its resourcefulness and in our context and circumstances living openhandedly. Trading with what we have and who we are to enable the flow not just of divine currency - however we name that, for grace, spirit, love, faith, trust to abound, but also to ensure the flow of real life currency, money, resources necessary for life so each and all have sufficient. We don’t need a lot to be abundant, but we do need an orientation and an intention to utilise what we have to grow that which benefits the life of the world for surely that is to join in the joy of the One who brings life to the world.