A Sermon preached on 19 November 2023 (Pentecost XV) at St. Augustine’s, WI
Judges 4:1-7, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Matthew 25:14-30
Last Sunday was our “Stewardship Sunday.” Thank you to everyone who has pledged so far. We have up to now received 39 new or renewed pledge forms and so, assuming everyone who pledged last year gives the same amount as 2023 then we can currently expect income from pledges €94.000 which is 94% of our target. Not only do we still hope and really need to reach 100% of our target, we also hope that 100% of our church community will pledge, i.e. that everyone will make a regular planned financial commitment – whatever the amount, large or small. So, it’s a shame that we did not have today’s Gospel reading last week. Then I could have threatened you all with outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, for not having made more of and fully returned the talents God has given you.
That would be wrong for so many reasons! For one thing it would be a form of spiritual abuse, defined as “manipulative, or coercive behaviour in a religious context” and often including “control through the use of sacred texts or teaching.” That is not how I operate and is certainly not the message Jesus intends with this parable. We do not motivate with fear and threats. “Do not be afraid!” is a recurring phrase throughout the Bible, both in the OT and NT. In Deuteronomy Moses tells the Israelites: “Have no fear or dread of them, because it is the Lord your God who goes with you; he will not fail you or forsake you.” (Deut. 3:16) In John’s Gospel Jesus says to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” (John 14.27) and the author of the First Letter of John (4:18) tells his readers, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” Not forgetting today’s passage from 1 Thessalonians (5:9-11), when we heard Paul trying to take away their fear of the day of the Lord, their fear of judgement or punishment for not being ready or prepared:
“For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.” Threatening you all with outer darkness would not be very encouraging.
The key to interpreting Jesus’ Parable of the Talents is deciding what the talents stand for. A talent was originally a unit of weight of approximately 80 pounds, and when used as a unit of money, was valued for that weight of silver. So as a unit of currency, a talent was worth about 6,000 denarii (and one denarius was the usual payment for a day's labour). That means each talent was worth about 20 years of labour. Whether the slaves received 5, 2 or one talent – it was an enormous amount and a huge expression of trust on behalf of the master! There is a parallel parable to this one in Luke’s Gospel (19:11-27) and in it the servants also receive money, but a different and smaller unit, a minas.
In Matthew, each slave receives a different amount “according to his ability.” That’s probably where the common idea of interpreting the parable with the talents standing for aptitude, ability or skill comes from. The master rides off into the sunset and two of the three slaves immediately start making money out of money. I won’t dwell too long on the morals of making so much money at that time, but it would be difficult to double the investment without some sort of exploitation, or some kind of unethical and aggressive trading. And later in the parable, when the master tells the third slave that he could at least have invested his money with bankers to gain interest, that would seem to contradict a number of OT laws (e.g. Exodus 22:25, Deuteronomy 23:19-20) prohibiting usury, lending money with interest! In that sense the morals of the parable and the morals of the Kingdom of God do not align very well. But of course, Jesus is not describing an ideal world – the setting is the real world.
The third slave does not make any money, he simply buries and hides the treasure out of fear! The parable of the buried treasure earlier in Matthew (14:44) indicates that this was not an unusual strategy. The master returns and, as we heard the first two slaves are rewarded – equally by the way, they receive exactly the same praise: Both are put in charge of many things, and both enter into the joy of their master. He is however not happy at all with the third slave, neither with his strategy nor with his reasoning, and certainly not with just getting his money back and so that unlucky man loses all and is punished.
My Wednesday Bible Study group found this very unfair! And very un-Godlike. Surely our God is generous and compassionate and forgiving. Yes, God is. But this is a parable, and not an allegory. Not everything can be given a meaning or has an exact equivalent. The figure of the master is not God, and the capitalist values of the parable are not kingdom values. There is a rabbinic principle of interpretation called “qal vāḥomer” or “How Much More” that Jesus also uses. For example, in Matthew 7:11 Jesus says: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Jesus doesn’t use the words “how much more” here, but I think it is what he is doing: If a master of this world expects his slaves to do so much with his money, how much more will God expect God’s followers to do with God’s gifts.
So, what do the talents stand for? Not I think our abilities. God sent Jesus to us with the Good News, the Gospel truth of a God who is love and made us to love. Our master’s property is love and compassion. How do we multiply love? By sharing love. By showing love. By loving God and our neighbour. God wants us to work with this “talent” to create a great harvest. We know from the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-23) that when God’s word lands on fertile ground, it produces thirty, sixty, even one hundred-fold. But God’s word has to be used, it has to be spread, it has to be shared. And that will produce great joy – God’s joy and our joy.
Those who do not make use of the talent, clearly do not know, or understand God and Jesus. They hide the Gospel behind rules and exclusion and prejudice. They cling to a God whose primary desire seems to be to set boundaries on love, who hates and punishes sinners, and so they never share the real Gospel. The slave who ends up in the outer darkness put himself there. In his book the Great Divorce C.S. Lewis writes: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done.” And those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there would be no Hell.”
Those who choose to ignore God’s gift and command of love often create hell on earth, that hell on earth that our Ukrainian brothers and sisters experience when their cities are bombed, that hell on earth that 1.200 Israelis experienced during the Hamas attacks on 7 October in towns near the border with Gaza, and at a music festival, and that hell on earth that the Palestinians in Gaza are currently experiencing.
Let me finish with the motto of our stewardship campaign, taken from 1 Peter (4:10) just slightly adapted: “Use whatever gift you have received to serve and love others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”
Amen.
