33rdSUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME 2005
November 16, 2008
Matthew 25, 14-30
This week, after special feasts for the last two weeks, we come back to a parable from Matthew. It is the parable of the talents given to different servants by their master, for their use and investment.
A ‘talent’ in the old days meant a measure of weight. It was the heaviest weight in the measuring system. It was used in measurements of gold, silver, iron, and bronze. Later on, it meant a measure of money. One talent, for Jews, was equivalent to 3,000 shekels, or ‘as much as a man could carry’. In later times of Jewish history, and in the time of Jesus and Matthew, one talent was equivalent to 6,000 denarii (Roman coins). 6,000 denarii would be about the earnings of an ordinary worker for fifteen to twenty years. It was in ordinary parlance ‘a ton of money’.
The master in our story is going away for a considerable period of time. He gave five talents, two talents, and one talent to each of three of his servants, to each according to their ability, and he did not dictate to them how to use these talents. He treated them as individuals and respected their freedom and initiative. Don’t think he left the second and third man ‘short’ – as I said, one talent was indeed a ‘ton of money’.
You know the story. The first two used the money diligently and actively. They made a good profit and returned it to the master. The third man did not. He dug a hole and put the money there for safe keeping – a bit like a safe-deposit box, without investment or interest. It was a very safe, very conservative investment: no profit, but certainly no loss. No potential for growth, but no chance of losing out. He gave back exactly what he had been given, and not used. You couldn’t even find his fingerprints on the money. He never did anything wrong, because he never actually did anything at all.
In the parable, the first two are rewarded, handsomely, they are called ‘good and worthy’. They get increased responsibilities, and increased joy. The third one is called ‘wicked and lazy, good-for-nothing (literally), dis-interest-ed’ (again, quite literally, he made no interest). He is condemned. It’s a surprise to us: but he didn’t do anything wrong, did he? Did he?
I think Matthew has two well-known and quite important groups of Jews in mind, in this symbol of the third man. They are the people of the Qumran community, and the leaders of the Pharisees in Matthew’s time.
Qumran was the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. There was a Jewish community living there who had deliberately gone into isolation from society (and from the Jerusalem temple) into the desert, to get away from it all in a world they considered hopelessly bad. They lived in the caves around Qumran. They had been destroyed by the Romans in the war of 68-70 and were not still in existence when Matthew wrote (perhaps around 85), but he knew them quite well. Matthew remembers them: they buried their religious talent in the caves.
The Pharisees were very much around in Matthew’s time, and were his chief opposition. Jesus had been friendly to them, and they to him, but the world had changed forty or fifty years after Jesus. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70, the Pharisees emerged as the leading group among the Jews, and regathered them and reorganised them for the future. Their original intention was to apply the Jewish Torah (Law) to the circumstances of daily secular life. By Matthew’s time they hardened their position, and wanted to show everyone, in enormous detail, how to lead a safe life in terms of the Torah, and to withdraw from the bad situation the Romans had imposed on Israel. It was a spirituality of avoidance of the ‘modern’ world of that time. They were burying their devotion to the Torah behind the fences of the law.
There is another group. It is the group around James in Jerusalem. They revived their earlier dreams of a glorious Messiah. They tried to include even the risen Jesus in those dreams. You might think that they ‘buried Jesus again’ in the tomb of their Jewish Messianic hopes?
Matthew does not like the position of any of these groups. He lives a Jesus-spirituality of open and inclusive relationship. He uses and trades with the ‘talents’ that Jesus and the Spirit have given him. ‘Talent’ does not just mean metals, or money, but is also used metaphorically for other gifts – as we use it now, to speak of a talent for music, or for languages, or for mathematics, or whatever.
For Matthew, the ‘greatest’ talent is a talent for relationship…. You could call it ‘grace’. In contrast to all the others, Matthew’s message is simple, but direct. Grace employed abounds. Grace buried does nothing. Use your grace. Let it live. The result is: more and deeper relationship.
We are faced with a serious decision about this. Are we funeral directors burying our grace- talent, or active people using it? Matthew, throughout his gospel, insists that decisions we take on earth about this have eternal consequences. Earthly behaviour determines afterlife outcome. There is an interactive relationship between events on earth and things in heaven. In whatever way we choose. Whatever human groups (two or three) actually do, God comes to the party and takes part in the process. [It is not always true that God takes the initiative: God often chooses to let us – as partners – start something, and God goes along with that.] We are not in a preordained play with a prewritten script. We are meant to improvise as we go. All we are told beforehand is some boundary lines we ought not to cross. If we are real ‘doers of the Word’ we will go to a heaven where there’s lots of ‘doing’. But what if we don’t actually ‘do’ much in or with our life? Then, I take it, Matthew would tell us that there won’t be much ‘doing’ when we get to the kind of heaven we have made for ourselves… Maybe there’s a lazy section in heaven for dull people who have never ‘done’ anything! If you’re bored here, maybe you will be bored there too!
Present ‘rest’ continued eternally?
It is beautiful to be a Christian, it gives a person wings to fly. The Christian way is a project into the future we make by relationship. It is a living out of a great total idea, with a concentration on what is important and essential - relationship. If the church lives like that, it grows younger all the time, it doesn’t grow old. It is in touch with a God who is at the origin of new youth and new life through relationship.
It is imperative now that we get past feelings of lassitude and self-condemnation, and look at what is truly great in our Christian inheritance - relationship. That is the ‘talent’ we have been given. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to use it and build a relational future for our world. Get going!
Remember PearlHarbour. A ship anchored in harbour isn’t actually safe.
We are not here to play safe. We are here to play.