Grasping and Giving
Matthew 25:14-30
November 16, 2014
There are at least two ways to read
this funky little story that comes near the end of Matthew’s gospel. These
readings are, quite frankly, almost completely at odds with one another, but
each has something to offer. So, this morning, dueling interpretations of the
gospel.
Context, as always, is key. This
parable falls in the midst of Matthew’s extended critique of the Roman imperial
system, and as this famous chapter plays out, Jesus will draw sharp
distinctions and pronounces harsh judgments.
The most common way of reading this
story is to see the wealthy landholding master as God, and to judge ourselves
according to the way we use what we have been given. Such a reading has its
attractions during the middle of our annual November stewardship season when we
are talking about what we have been given and when many of us are making
personal decisions about how much we will give to charitable causes including
this congregation for the coming year.
Read this way, the parable urges us to
account honestly the value of what we have been given. As one popular
commentary puts it, “It is routine for Christians to excuse themselves by
protesting that their gifts are too modest to be significant. This parable
insists that the gifts are precious and are to be exploited to the full.”[1]
Read this way, Jesus’ parable insists
that we recognize a central truth of the psalmist: “the earth is the Lord’s and
all that is therein.” Put a bit differently, we belong to God, and so does all
our stuff. In that light, this parable pushes us to recognize that everything
we have is a gift.
That recognition is profoundly
countercultural. We have, as Americans, been taught from the beginning of our
lives to believe that we get what we merit in this life. We make our own way in
the world. We earn our living from the sweat of our own brows, and all that we
have we deserve, including absolute freedom in deciding what to do with it.
The parable says, “wait a minute; all
that you have has been given to you by the one who created all that is, including
you.” At best, we are tenants in this house of God caring for it for just a
little while before passing it along to those who will come after us.
In this reading, we are challenged to
be wise but also risky with the gift, and warned against the consequences of
hoarding it or hiding it away. In other words, use the gifts you have been
given. You have been given them freely, so use them expansively for the sake of
the gospel.
This reading, as useful as it is,
begins to break down for me right here, because, for me, responding to the
invitation to use my gifts freely for the sake of the gospel depends upon faith.
In other words, for me to take real risks with what has been given to me I have
to trust the giver of the gifts.
If God is, as suggested by this
reading of the parable, a “harsh
man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter
seed,” then I’m not sure I trust that there is steadfast love enduring forever
and for me as I take risks for the gospel.
But, if I let go of all my 21st
century North American privileges and put myself in the place of the poor and
landless peasants to whom Jesus told the story, another reading opens up new
wisdom.
First, let’s clear up one common
misconception about this parable: talents are not gifts or skills or things
that you’re good at. Talents are money, and a lot of it.
One comment I read on this text said a
talent would be worth about $6 million in our currency. We might conclude that
this parable is actually about the one percent and not the 99 percent. Perhaps
the target of Jesus’ anger is not a lazy servant but instead a capricious money
manager.
From that point of view, reading the
text from below, the slave who is cast into outer darkness looks quite
different, perhaps even heroic.
Writer and activist Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, suggests
an alternative reading:
“There
is no theme more common to Jesus' storytelling than Sabbath economics,” Myers
says. “[Jesus] promises poor sharecroppers abundance (Mark 4:3-8, 26-32), but
threatens absentee landowners (Mark 12:1-12) and rich householders (Luke
16:19-31) with judgment. […]
“The
notorious parable of the talents (pounds) shows how Sabbath perspective as an
interpretive key can rescue us from a long tradition of both bad theology and
bad economics (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-28). This story has, in capitalist
religion, been interpreted allegorically from the perspective of the cruel
master (= God!), requiring spiritualizing gymnastics to rescue the story from
its own depressing conclusion that haves will always triumph over the have-nots
(Matthew 25:29). But it reads much more coherently when turned on its head and
read as a cautionary tale of realism about the mercenary selfishness of the
debt system. This reading understands the servant who refused to play the
greedy master's money-market games as the hero who pays a high price for
speaking truth to power (Matthew 25:24-30)—just as Jesus himself did. “[2]
Myers’ reading insists, further, that
we take the parable as one part of the broader story through which Jesus paints
God as the loving father welcoming home the prodigal, as the mother hen
worrying over her chicks.
If we trust that God welcomes us
always and holds us always in loving hands, then, though the risks of faith may
entail a high price – our money most assuredly, and also perhaps our lives as
well – we have already an ultimate assurance, sealed, as it were, by the
unsealed tomb: God will be with us even when circumstance casts us into the
outer darkness.
By either reading, then, Jesus invites
us to lives of risky faith, of giving instead of grasping; or, of giving in
response to being grasped by the gospel.
When I read this parable of Jesus from
below I also imagine a more personal parable that is all about being grasped by
good news.
Once upon a time there was a young man
who thought that God was calling him to use his life in a particular way, for
particular service. The young man, though, had his doubts. He wasn’t sure about
God, and sometimes wondered if the still, small voice he heard in his heart
late at night wasn’t just his own projection, or maybe indigestion. But
sometimes other people would say to him, “you have real gifts; have you ever
thought about using them for the sake of the gospel?”
And then the young man would wonder.
He would wonder about the voice, and he would wonder about the gospel. Just
what was that gospel? What did it mean? What was this good news?
He’d seen it in action since he was a
child: how people who believed that they were really, truly loved could do
remarkable things for others. He’d seen his own mother give her life to the
families of school children who showed up at school in mid-winter without a
coat, sometimes without shoes to cover their feet even though it was snowing
outside. He knew she did this because she believed that God loved her, and that
God loved those kids, too.
He’d seen his own father working with
homeless men in the city’s streets. He’d seen his father brokenhearted when one
of the men died on a cold January night and there was no family even to claim
the body. And he knew that his father did this because he believed that God
loved him, and that God loved those men who lived under the bridge, too.
But the young man had a good job. He
had young children, too, and a wife with her own career and her own goals. What
would it mean to them to quit his job, and to take a huge detour on their
fairly clear path to the American Dream of hard-earned upward mobility? What
would it mean for buying a house? What would it mean for the minivan?
But, after the family had already
traded in about half its income in exchange for more time to raise young
children, the young man began to hear that still, small voice speaking with
more urgency. “Now is the time,” it seemed to say, “come, and follow me.”
So in the next year’s Christmas
letter, the young man chose this way to tell their friends that he was going to
follow the call he had discerned: “last year we cut our income in half and
enjoyed it so much we decided to do it again.”
The young man had been given so much,
but if he believed for a minute in a wrathful God that was about to throw him
into outer darkness because he’d hoarded those gifts and used them mostly for the
good of his own family and his own career and his own wants for a long time …
well, if he believed that God was like that there was no way in the world that
he would risk the radical changes required to respond to that still, small
voice.
What is the still, small voice saying
to you these days? Can you hear it? Do you trust God’s love enough to follow
where it leads?
My little parable does not negate the
traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but I hope I’ve complicated
it a bit because our faith is a complicated and challenging journey. It cannot
stand still, for, a faith that changes nothing is worth nothing. What are you
willing to risk from what you have been given for the sake of the changes that
the gospel demands?
Let us pray.
posted by David Ensign at
11:25 AM
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