Zephaniah1.7,12-end. 1
Thessalonians 5.1-11, Matthew 25.14-30
I
love to watch the Antiques Roadshow at the end of a busy Sunday. Perhaps you do
too. There are always interesting historical titbits and moving personal
stories attached to objects people bring along. But I’m less keen on that
moment at the end of each little encounter when the expert says “So, what might
this be worth?” Sometimes it’s rather awkward – the Ming vase is actually a
cheap, mass-produced 20th century knock-off. The brooch bought for a
fiver at a car boot sale, which they hoped would provide for them in
retirement, turns out only to be worth a f£.2.50. The owners try to put a brave
face on it, but their disappointment is obvious. Sometimes there’s a good
surprise though. Great-Granny’s little trinket turns out to be worth tens of
thousands. Everyone gasps and applauds. But where does that leave its owners?
Nine times out of ten, they say “well, that’s nice to know, but, of course,
it will never leave the family, because it was Great-Granny’s”. I’m sure
that for many of them that’s genuine, but I wonder whether it’s sometimes said
through gritted teeth, whether they’d rather have sold it and got the money,
but just feel it isn’t theirs to sell – and now they have the worry of looking
after it and insuring it too.
Treasure,
and what we do with it – especially when it isn’t entirely our own – is at the
heart of today’s Gospel readings.
The
treasure in the parable comes in the form of what are called “talents”, and
it’s important not to be distracted by that word. Talents to us are special
abilities – singing or dancing or playing a sport. It’s easy to read this
parable as if it is telling us that we shouldn’t hide them. And that’s a
perfectly good message. But it’s not the message of this story. A talent, in
Jesus’ time, was simply a standard unit of measurement for precious metals,
often silver. One talent of silver weighed around 4 stone, 28 kilos, and that
represented a huge amount of money then, as it would today.
One
talent of silver represented about 15 years’ wages for an ordinary working man,
so 2 talents were 30 years’ worth and 5 talents, 75 years’ worth of wages… Just
imagine the impact of being given such vast sums to handle, especially for
enslaved people, whose lives were entirely in the hands of their master.
No
wonder the third slave is so terrified. He may have been given the least but
it’s still far more than he would ever have a hope of repaying if it were lost.
We’re meant to sympathise with him, and I am sure most of Jesus’ hearers would
have done. Investments can go down as well as up. Trade is risky. What if he
loses it all? He believes, rightly or wrongly, that his master is a harsh man;
he doesn’t want to risk a penny of what he’s been given. So he digs a hole and buries it, and maybe
heaves a sigh of relief. At least it’s safe. But when his master comes home he
is furious. Surely this slave could have invested it with a banker, he says, where
at least it might have made some interest! And the slave is thrown out.
If
you think this sounds monumentally unfair, then you aren’t alone, and I think
Jesus means us to feel that way. Parables are meant to help us get in touch
with our own experience, our assumptions, our attitudes. Jesus means to stir up
our empathy for this third slave, whose fear of his master, his fear of getting
it wrong, has completely paralysed him, preventing him from taking any risk at
all, but as a result, he loses even what he had – not the talent of silver,
that was never his anyway – but his place in the household, his protection and
support, on which his life depended.
Please
note: Jesus isn’t saying that God is like this master. But he is asking us
whether we think and act as if he is. That’s the point. Because if this is our
image of God, then it will profoundly affect the way we live out our lives and
express our faith. In our Old Testament reading, from the book of Zephaniah,
and in today’s Psalm we meet a God who might feel to us to be like this, but
Zephaniah and the Psalmist are writing from a particular context, at a
particular moment, for a particular purpose, and their words have to be held in
tension with other strands of Biblical writing which emphasize the endless love
and forgiveness of God, despite all the times his people let him down.
The
disciples who first heard Jesus’ parable – Jewish people like Jesus - had grown
up knowing that God had given them great treasures as a people, for which they
gave thanks. They gave thanks for their law, the law God had given them to help
them live together well. They gave thanks for the covenant relationship he’d
called them into – they would be his people and he would be their God. They
gave thanks for the Temple in which they encountered him.
These
were precious things – not burdens but treasures - entrusted to them, just as their
master’s treasure was entrusted to the slaves in the story, but what should
they do with these treasures? There are tensions throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures about this. Should they make their treasured inheritance
available to anyone who wanted it, take it out into the world and share it? Or
should they guard it carefully, acting as gate-keepers, in case people from
different backgrounds polluted or changed the faith they had received.
The
early Christians, many of whom were Jewish by birth, were often accused of
misusing the inheritance of faith they had been given, putting it at risk as
they preached a Gospel of radical inclusion. Was God’s love really for
everyone? Shouldn’t Gentiles be expected to observe all the Jewish laws in
order to be accepted? Could women and men, slave and free really be part of
this new movement on an equal basis? It was a source of huge anxiety and
conflict, between Christians and Jews, and within the Christian church too. It
was a long time before it was settled.
And
we are still grappling with the same problem, albeit over different issues. We
value the faith we have inherited, and those we have inherited it from, but our
understanding and interpretation of our faith has never been static; it changes
and develops over the years. If it didn’t, it would have died long ago. But
every change brings anxiety and often conflict. The Church of England has been caught
up in this again this week at General Synod, over the question of allowing
services of blessing for same-sex couples in church. Synod voted to approve
this for a trial period, and though we still have to wait for the detail of
what’s going to be permitted, I rejoice at what is, in my opinion, a step
forward, albeit a tiny one. I have always taken the view that God is far more
interested in the quality of our relationships than the gender of the people in
them, and rejoices at the loving, faithful commitment of marriage. But I also
understand the anxiety of those who worry about this, for whom it feels too
great a change, even if I don’t agree with them, because I know I might feel fearful
over other things.
Whatever
the specific issues we are arguing about - and each generation will produce new
ones - Jesus’ parable asks us what it really means to us to “treasure” our
faith, what we should do with the precious inheritance that has been entrusted
to us. It asks us not so much where we draw the line on any particular
issue – that may be different in different situations - but why we draw
it. Do we believe, like the slave in the story, that God is a “harsh” master,
who will punish us severely for things beyond our control, or do we dare to
believe, with St Paul, that God has “destined
us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ”,
that in Christ he puts himself into our hands, that he himself is our treasure,
and that he longs for us to take the risk of sharing his love with all who need
it?
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment