The Uncharted Path and Joy of the Master
Christopher H. Edmonston - HMPC
November 20, 2005
Matthew 25: 14-30
I.
By now you must have noticed: it’s almost Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is my favorite Holiday – and my
love of it, even though you will find this hard to believe, has nothing to do
with
But, regardless of how I feel about Thanksgiving, when Thanksgiving comes it means that Advent is near. It means that alongside mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, rice and sausage dressing, gumbo, duck-sauce-picant, turkey dressing, black eye peas, cream corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, blueberry muffins, hot biscuits, fried turkey, cinnamon blessed sweet potatoes – see, I told y’all I like thanksgiving – that alongside all that good stuff, God is about to remind us that in the coming of the Christ child God has giving us a main course of grace large enough to feed the whole world. I challenge you to consider the size of the gift – 1 savior, 1 world (the ratio is something like 1:6,500,000,000). It’s an awesome thing this grace that comes as Advent dawns and then dusks and gives way to Christmas.
II.
So, when Advent comes, it
ultimately means that it is almost Christmas. And Christmas means theologically that we are
able to be saved by the grace and power of God: no manager – no cross; no birth
– no death; no
Socially, and culturally Christmas typically means lots of shopping, decorating, buying, partying, writing, and wrapping…and the list could go on and on. After this week the next four weeks promise to more busy and tiring than most any other weeks the whole year through (especially for you mothers and Grandmothers – you Sisters and Aunts). Someone very wise once told me, “Never ask a woman to do anything for your church in December. She’s already overwhelmed and she’ll decline no matter how important or easy the job is.” So far, I’ve not broken that rule.
I always wonder at this time of year – is there sometimes too much of a good thing? Human nature tends to lead us down a path that suggests that if something is good and pleasing we should get more and more and more and more of that thing until we are overwhelmed by the goodness of it all. That goodness quickly leads to gluttony and soon we are consumed like the little boy in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe who eats so much “Turkish Delight” that he is lost in the spell of the Witch and doesn’t even know it. Or maybe we are like the character Brewster in Brewster’s Millions, a really awful 1980’s movie about a guy who can inherit hundreds of millions of dollars if he can spend something like 30 million dollars in 30 days. He winds up miserable beyond all imagination – just like most of the folks who win those Power Ball lottery things. When the lottery arrives here in the Old North State, in our valley of humility locked between the two mountains of conceit that border us north and south, I suggest you avoid the Power Ball altogether. And if you do win, then I suggest you give it all away. Find some missionary somewhere who is feeding people and give it all away. Too much is sometimes too much and too much is often a bigger problem than it is a benefit.
III.
Now as strange as that might sound, that is really what this parable is about. With all due respect to the well delivered and well intended sermons on the parable that have suggested that it is about actual talents – things like good voices and good abilities and maybe even good looks used in service to God – the truth is that this parable is more about the lottery, or the amount of money in the Power Ball than it was ever about how to use our gifts for God.[1]
The parable is hyperbole: it’s an overstatement. The word talent comes from the Greek word, talanta. And the translation into the English word talent is more than a little misleading. A talanta was the largest denomination of money is the ancient world. It was equivalent to about 15 or 20 years worth of salaries – it was about 6000 denarii in Jesus’ day – and often could be something like a 50 or more pound gold brick or precious metal or a chest full of coins. It was a RIDICULOUS amount of money. More than any one of Jesus’ hearers would have ever seen or ever made. Think millions and millions and millions of dollars. Thus it’s hyperbole.
In fact, the amount of the money is only one hyperbole of many in this parable. Just as ridiculous of the amount of money involved is the act of the master. No master would have ever left that amount of money with a slave. Never. It doesn’t happen now in modern business it wouldn’t have happened then. Everything here is an overstatement – the amounts, the behaviors, the reactions of the characters – everything!
James Howell is the pastor of a
huge Methodist church here in
There is a book that is really popular right now called the Kingdom Assignment about a pastor who gave 100 families in his church $100 dollars with three rules – 1) the 100$’s belongs to God; 2) you must invest it in God’s work; 3) report your results in 90 days. Sounds a little like the parable, right? Well, the Kingdom Assignment really, really worked. People made money hand over fist, lives were changed, ministries transformed – the story was on Dateline even. James Howell writes, “So why did I shudder a little when a church member brought me the book and said, ‘Let’s do this?’ It feels so American. In the culture, and now in the church, we’re dealin’ we’re investin’ – More is better! We think.” The danger that Howell finds here in this idea is the same one I would find – “why would I,” he asks, “give somebody $100 and say this belongs to God and in so doing imply that the rest of the person’s half million investment portfolio does not?”[2]
For the truth is that it all belongs to God. Every dollar in every bank, every inch of every square yard of earth – all of it. Yes, even the ridiculously big talantas – the megabucks; those too.
IV.
In a somewhat surprising turn, really, the parable has almost nothing to do with the slaves at all. The parable is most complete about the absurd love and grace of the master. He breaks the rules and he trusts the non-trustworthy – owing the slaves nothing he quite literally saves the unworthy. The question for us, as we seek to find ourselves in the text is “Who is the master?”– well, of course, it’s God. Why does he give us so much – such a big talanta – such absurd love and grace? Because He wants to. Because God chooses to – this, this love, this mercy, this unending care is just what God does.
It is not the master who is judgmental and harsh. The one who is judgmental in the parable is the third slave – for he judged the master, he judged God to be harsh and demanding. He totally misses the true nature of God – thinking only of judgment where God, thought Jesus Christ, offers grace. This third slave, a metaphor really for all of us who do not trust in God, hasn’t been listening to Jesus since the beginning of Matthew and he misses the point of the gospel, the good news of God, all together. Jesus warns at Matthew 7:26 – a full 18 chapters before this parable, “that those who hear my words and do nothing” in other words, those who hear and do not change the way they see and think about God – “are like the foolish man who builds his house on sand.” Here, in the third slave, the one who has the master completely reverse the standing orders of the world in his presence; the one whose master trusts him in a way that no one, especially a slave, before him had ever been trusted; here finally we meet the foolish man.
And with hate in his voice, with malice in his heart, with disdain for God and condescension on his brow, he shoves the gift of gifts back in the master’s face and says, “Here, take what is yours.” Imagine rejection of the greatest gift that can be given. Imagine the pain and the rejection. Imagine the misapprehensions and misappropriations that would have gone into such a rejection. Imagine the painful silence and awkward gap in the conversation. Imagine the self-righteousness in the eyes of the one rejecting and the grief in the eyes of the one rejected. Do you have that picture in your mind? Then you have seen this parable completely. The question is: will we heed its warning?[3]
V.
One of the lessons of our faith is that in the economy of God, great reversals happen…things are not always as they appear. What we de-value, God values: the slave, the poor person, the brokenhearted one down the road whom we would never trust – to these people God often hands the keys to kingdom.
This reversal of God, finding value in the valueless is much like the character Gloucester in King Lear – blinded, suicidal, ready just to die, he fully believes himself worthless and not worthy of saving. And then his son, literally down in the dirt with his father, trying to pull him off of his mental and literal precipice speaks to him - “thy life is a miracle, speak yet again.” And through the son’s efforts the life of the father is spared; and hope arrives in the drama that has been completely hopeless for four acts.[4]
The question before us as we stand on the brink of Advent is the question that we must always answer whenever God serves His plate of grace to us as we wait at the banquet: do we dare to squander the gospel as we await the coming of the Lord in Christmas? Do we dare waste the grace that he gives us by burying it in the ground to attempt to secure a future that is not guaranteed?
To be sure, I think the example of the 3rd slaves is an unforgettable one: I dare not think that any of us would bury the gift in spite of God as he does. No, I would be worried that in our comfortable lives we might waste it in ignorance, unaware of how badly we have needed God and His fathomless mercy. Do we dare make this mistake?
Or do we dare to share it? Do we share word of this grace through word and act and deed? Share it like we would share peas and collards from the backyard, or a pumpkin pie recipe passed on from a grandmother to a granddaughter? Do we spread it around like the first two slaves, in gratitude for what the Master has done?
VI.
Well, regardless of whether it is easy or expedient, I think the point is that we are called to share the cup of grace that God has offered to us. We are called to share it in Mississippi, hanging drywall; we are called to share it with Operation Christmas Child, sending boxes all over the world; we are called to share it with a neighbor in distress, a friend who is depressed, a person desperate for a word of hope; we are called share it in our testimony this Christmas as we continue to believe and say that despite the darkness in the world the light of God might yet, and will yet, shine.
May God grant us his grace, as we share our talanta with friends and neighbors both near and far. And may we have the courage to share it all, holding nothing back. After all, wouldn’t that be a befitting response to a God that held nothing back when he gave so greatly to us? My prayer is that the light of the Spirit would shine upon you that you might find this uncharted path – that we would walk this road whose destination, like the parable portrays, is nothing less than the joy of the master.
Amen.
[1] Most of this next, exegetical section is derived from numerous sources. The finest treatment on this parable that I have found in is Thomas Long’s commentary on Matthew. His voice sounds loudest in the section that immediately follows.
[2] This is from his article in The Christian Century from November 1, 2005 – see page 19.
[3] Again, much of the “biblical meat” of the preceding sentences is based upon Long’s work in his commentary.
[4] There is something about Shakespeare that I think appeals to most every Presbyterian minister. King Lear is just about the finest thing I know – to read this reference in its fullness look in Act IV, scene VI.