Revnorm’s latest sermon

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Nov 16^th 08 Mt. 25: 14-30

That parable about the three servants, usually called the Parable of the Talents is one of the better known parts of the Gospel.

The Jesus Seminar also suspect that the gist of it was actually spoken by Jesus.

However before talking about Jesus telling this, I will suggest one reason why Matthew could have put it in his Gospel.

Of course nobody knows, and people who talk about things like this, like I am, can do no more than make a bit of a stab for understanding.

I think that Matthew was writing for a group of people who had probably been recently converted to Christianity. It is fair to say that the early Church was a missionary church with the aim of growing in size with new converts being added as rapidly as possible.

This parable is in between the one about the wise and foolish virgins and the final judgement.

It is one of the lessons about being faithful to the way of Jesus. The wise and foolish virgins story is one that tells people to be fervent about their faith, not to sleep in complacency because Jesus might return at any time and they will be judged when he comes. This parable also says that the followers of Jesus must be productive and not lazy in the Christian life. By productive I guess it means living a circumspect life and winning more people for the Gospel. If that is true then the talents these three servants had been given presumably represent the Gospel, and they were to take it out and win more people for the Way of Jesus. Then in the final judgement, all people will be judged on whether they have lived with practical compassion; for in as much as they did it for the least of people, they did it for Jesus himself.

So it seems pretty clear that Matthew is telling his people to put all the effort they can to win people into faith in Jesus so that they all will be found to be living lives of compassionate love when Jesus returns.

Despite saying this is just making a stab for understanding, I think the gist of what I have just said was at least a significant part of what Matthew wanted people to get out of it.

There is a bit of a problem however with the parable of the talents and using it to talk about missionary work, and that is that the three guys receive different amounts to invest. Surely the Gospel is the Gospel? Why is it that the guy who gets least is the lazy loser?

I feel I can’t leave that in the too-hard basket and so I suggest that the guy who only got the one talent represented the Jews who just got the Torah, and not the Gospel, and the Torah was not productive in saving people. That would fit Matthew’s anti-Jewish bias. At the last judgement, the Jews who hadn’t accepted the Way of Jesus would be condemned.

Maybe the servant who had the five talents represented the group who had the Gospel from Matthew which he believed to be the best interpretation of the Gospel. I don’t get the impression that the writers of the Bible in general were obsessed with false modesty.

Another way to take this parable is more literally, and then it tells you that the people who get more to start with are life’s winners, and those who don’t get given much are lazy good-for-nothings and they deservedly get kicked in the teeth for it.

That’s a very right-wing political attitude and I find it hard to fit it into the Gospel message. I’m not going to try to force it, because I don’t think that is what we should get out of it.

However when all is said and done, which it isn’t quite yet, I don’t think that this message is going to affect most of you at all.

You actually do the best you can in a world where we do not think it is fair to be anti-Jewish, and winning people to Jesus in the conventional meaning of that doesn’t usually succeed and if it does it doesn’t usually improve people.

We in the church anyway, but lots of people outside, don’t associate poverty with people being losers.

Also based on 2000 years of history you know quite well that Jesus isn’t going to suddenly appear in the way that the early church people anticipated he would.

However the idea of doing the best we can to create a world where there is more compassionate love cannot be faulted. It was a good goal and it always will be a good goal for life.

So as is often the case what we have in the Bible is conveying a good message but it is so culturally out of touch that it can even do more harm than good.

So I will now assume that Jesus actually said more or less what is written here and really take on the impossible and try to understand what he was getting at.

Jesus would not have put these three stories together, it is unlikely that he ever anticipated a Second Coming; and I think that this parable, like all his parables was aimed at this life.

My main observation is that this story would have grabbed people’s attention. When Jesus told it, it would not have sent people to sleep, far from it, it was startling.

The sums of money, the talents or whatever we call them, were actually completely out of the reach of ordinary poor peasants. I guess that they would have been something like five, two and one million dollars.

In Jesus’ world, wealth like that would not only be completely unobtainable by ordinary people, and would represent the wealth of the rich. Those rich people would have been born into it, or likely got it by completely unethical means. Wealth like that would mean exploitation or privilege.

Imagine me chatting away to a solo mum who was on a benefit, had a lot of debt and who got very little pleasure out of life except in anticipation of winning lotto. In making conversation I told her about my brother-in-law who lives in Cairo. I said we had visited his family. That in itself would make her feel I was from another privileged world. I then told her about how there were three living in the house with nine household servants including two drivers and they owned three cars – not old ones but almost new and very up-market ones.

I then said that the family knew a guy who had lent them his private jet to go skiing in Austria, and this guy had done well out of buying the rights to the TV broadcasts of the soccer world cup over the middle east and Africa for a mere 700 million pounds.

I wouldn’t have exactly made a friend by talking like that.

Jesus told a parable about someone so incredibly rich that he could give his servants a total of 8 million dollars to use to make more. I can’t imagine Jesus' hearers could have identified themselves with the story.

When Jesus told his parables about the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Lost Sheep or the Lost Coin then they would resonate with his hearers. This one about the three guys with all this money would not.

Jesus told another parable that was difficult – it was the one about the workers hired to work in a vineyard and those who got hired at the end of the day and only doing an hour’s work getting paid first and then getting as much as those who had worked all day. That one wouldn’t have seen fair to those listening any more than it seems fair to most people who think about it today.

The best spin I can put on this parable of the talents is that people have different abilities. The three servants were like that. The one who got given just the one talent was obviously seen to be less able than the other two, but the master gave him a chance to redeem himself. Maybe that is the lesson. Everyone, regardless of their inherent abilities is given a chance to make good, and even a little bit of good, like just investing the money would have been OK. But we can’t completely fail and get away with it.

After this sermon I have only four more to prepare, because I don’t include Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This one is No. 702 in my sermon file, and that doesn’t include all of them. I guess I will have written close to 1000 during my ministry. I guess I have spent more time during my life on trying to work out and promote the Gospel than I have on any other single thing.

I think it is a salutary lesson that I am saying “I don’t know” about such a well-known passage as this one. If I don’t understand now, I am not likely to ever do.

I recently showed the movie here entitled “Lars and the Real Girl”. At one point in the movie, the leadership of his church was pondering how they should react to his Real Girl. The minister said at the end of the discussion “As always, the question is ‘What would Jesus do?’”

In the movie they did what was the good thing to do, but I have to say that I don’t think many real congregations would have risen to the occasion as well as this fictional one.

But when it comes to, I don’t think we can always say with confidence what Jesus would actually do. Jesus is a mystery. The Real Gospel is a mystery to at least some extent.

One thing we can say for certain, and that is that the Gospel, and what Jesus stood for, and the way of God is never exactly what we think it is.

The day we are convinced we know the Truth, we know the Gospel, we know what Jesus stood for, is the day when we have irredeemably lost the plot.

Don’t cease to ask questions and don’t worry that you don’t know the answers, because that’s how it always should be.