Scripture: Matthew 25:14-30 — The Parable of the Talents
This is probably the sixth time I've preached on this parable, known as the parable of the talents. It's a tough parable in a tough section of Matthew's Gospel. Let me set Matthew's literary context for a moment. According to Matthew's telling of the story, Jesus had already entered Jerusalem for the last time. He entered to cries of "Hosanna. Blessed is the One who comes in the name of our God." This provoked the city to ask who this man was. One must understand that Jesus provoked the authorities—namely the Romans—for the Romans were in control of the city, and he also provoked some of the Jewish leaders. In the course of events, Jesus cleansed the Temple, driving out the money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals saying, "My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves." Jesus, having provoked the authorities even more, having acted in a symbolic form to cleanse the outer court of the Temple, went into seclusion with his friends and spoke to them in parables.
The parables are varied and different; they range from topics about the Commonwealth of God to parables about what it means to live in the world. Many scholars believe that Matthew edited these parables as a means for teaching his own contemporaries how they must live while they await Jesus' return. Matthew wrote his Gospel, so it is believed, sometime after the destruction of the Temple and the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 of the Common Era. The state of Israel was no more and many Jews scattered to the winds. Matthew and many early Church followers believed that Jesus was going to return before the end of the 1st Century, and so people needed to know how to behave while they waited.
The last two parables of this section of Matthew's Gospel, before Jesus has the Last Supper with his friends, are the parable of the talents and the parable of the sheep and the goats, which we'll read next week. The traditional interpretation of the parable of the talents is that we should use our gifts wisely while we live—a good and wise motto for living one's life certainly, but not, I believe, the meaning of this parable. I also don't believe it was Matthew's intention to suggest that we should reap economic benefits in a usurious manner. I believe that Matthew included the parable of the talents, which foreshadows Jesus being cast out into the outer darkness where there is gnashing of teeth, as a lead-in to the understanding that the Commonwealth of God is about radical reversal where those who are first, those who are wealthy, will become the servants of those who are deemed last and those who are the poorest. For the very next parable, spoken just before the Last Supper, gives us the famous teaching, "As you have done this (fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and the imprisoned, welcomed the stranger) to the least of these my sisters and brothers, you have done it to me." In other words, as we have led lives of compassion, hospitality, healing and love in our dealings with our neighbours, we have entertained the Christ and we have lived the Christ-life. The parable of the talents leads us to this place of knowing that love is the power that builds rather wealth or economic gain. Or more succinctly, "money can't buy you love," to quote the Beatles.
Some have claimed that the third salve in the parable is actually the hero of the story. He is the one who refuses to buy into the usurious practices of his brother slaves and realize 100% profit on the master's talents. We are talking about outrageous sums of money here, which is the biblical meaning of talent; with the kind of sums of money that we are talking about, it would have been virtually impossible to make the kind of gains that are described in this parable. The third slave, risking the wrath of the master, decides to simply bury the talent in the ground and not realize any profit from it, thus living by the Jewish teaching of not exacting interest from lending money. There was great dishonor in employing usurious measures to gain more wealth or status. But, the third slave, according to Richard Rohrbaugh and other cultural anthropologists, practiced honour in choosing not to gouge his friends and neighbours any more than they already had been.
After all, the listeners to this parable would have been poor people predominantly. Jesus would hardly have praised the huge gap between the wealthy and the poor. And this is further emphasized in the last parable in which we learn that we encounter Jesus in the suffering, in the poor, or as Ched Myers has put it, "we meet Christ in places of pain and marginality; the 'outer darkness.'"
To me, this is the good news—that we aren't alone out here in the darkness, in our pain and struggle. One who has lived through the greatest struggle of all, torture and death, is with us. In fact, all who have endured torture and death at the hands of oppressors are with us. The One who was taken and cast out in the most horrible of means—crucifixion, where weeping occurs and gnashing of teeth happens, is with us.
While it is comforting to know that we are not alone in a spiritual sense, and this is no small thing, we must live in this world where there is still oppression, where injustice still occurs, where greed and usurious practices go on. We are called to form communities of hope and love where we can come together to not only support one another, but where we can advocate for a different way of being together. Journalists and authors like Greg Palast, Michael Moore, Gillian Findlay, Linden MacIntyre and Bob McKeown of The Fifth Estate, have shown how those with money and power lobby governments to create more wealth and power. The world economic problems are based in part, on greed and the kind of usurious practices that were depicted in the parable from Matthew. And part of the strategy of some government policies and the lobbying efforts of those acting on behalf of the wealthy and powerful, is to utilize that ancient war tactic of divide and conquer. As long as we are lonely voices crying out in the wilderness, not much will change. It is when we come together to speak together of our lives, to share ideas, to forge bonds based on our humanity that we can create change in the world that is fair for all, where no one then needs to be cast out to the places where there is no light and only gnashing of teeth. We are not alone and must come together to speak of the value of life for all.
The Dali Lama put it another way when he said, in response to a question about what surprised him most about humanity, "Man," he said. "Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."
I think that we are living in a time when new communities are forming, when we are banding together to resist being lonely voices isolated from one another. Whatever you think of the politics of the Occupy movement, or the 99% movement, or the Arab Freedom movement, or the re-energization of unions, they are part of this new struggle to be in community together. The new monasticism movement, which is not about being cloistered and separate from the world, is another example of this desire to be in community together to seek the common good, to seek a new way of living in love, with justice and compassion. The Emerging Church phenomena is partly about living intentionally, with purpose, to seek justice, to live with respect in creation, to seek others out who stand with us so that together we might be the Christ to one another and to the world of which we are a part.
So may it be. Amen.
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