The Gift of Truth
Lent 3a
Matthew 25:14-30
March 8, 2013
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
This is a great stewardship text. It’s mis-timed, of course. It should be happening in September or October when I’m suppose to have one of those, you know, for the fall stewardship campaign. This is a great stewardship text. It urges that each of us make careful use of what God has given us so that we can show our profits to God. There should be something to show for God’s investment in us. Great stewardship stuff.
It’s even better if it’s the stewardship of time and talents we’re talking about, because, in fact, our word “talent” comes from this very text. Talent is a Greek word, a unit of weight of about sixty pounds. It is an amount of money equivalent to sixty pounds of silver. Our use of the word talent extends the notion of value and worth into the arena of our native abilities. Then the parable means that we are obligated to make something of the abilities that God has given us. The person with a gift for teaching is not allowed not to teach. The person with musical talent is not allowed not to make music. That’s what the parable means. Everybody says so.
They say so because when we read the parable we assume that the rich man in the parable is a figure for God. We assume that the disposition of property is a figure for the distribution of gifts to each of us. We assume that the giving of an account is the last judgment when we shall have to justify our use of the gifts that we have been given. And we conclude therefore that the one thing we may not do with the talents that the master has placed in our hands is to bury them. Everybody says so.
Like I say, it’s a stewardship text, useful for getting people to fill out those time and talent surveys. Where’s your talent. Buried in your back yard? Better volunteer for something. Otherwise it’s the outer darkness for you. Volunteer now or practice weeping and gnashing your teeth.
Far be it from me, of course, to dissuade anyone from making use of what God has given them in a faithful and diligent way. And if that should take the form of volunteering for church committees, so much the better.
But I’m not sure this parable is the best point of departure if we want to arrive at that conclusion. And I’m not sure, just because everybody says so, that this is most natural reading of the parable before us.
Jesus’ parables were scenes drawn from ordinary life, scenes that would have been familiar to anyone growing up in Roman Galilee. Parables also worked by mixing the ordinary and the absurd. A woman sweeping the floor is an ordinary scene, but a woman who has ten silver coins does not sweep floors. Day laborers being hired to work in a vineyard is an ordinary scene, but landowners did not do the hiring. And so on. None of this is obvious to us in the way that it would have been if we had grown up in Roman Galilee.
So we have to read with an eye to the out-of-place, the peculiar, the absurd. We also have to read with a suspicion of the received tradition, especially since the tradition has tended to side with powerful men, kings and landowners, for instance, in a way that Jesus clearly did not. So this my rule for reading parables: if the parable seems to be about a wealthy man who deputized his slaves to go on making money while he was gone, then I should suspect that the parable is actually about a wealthy man who deputized his slaves to go on making money while he was gone.
So we begin with a rather odd scene. A wealthy man plans to go on a journey and summons three slaves. He gives them three piles of silver, weighing a total of nine talents or about 540 pounds. That’s a lot of silver. Just how much it was worth is hard to say, but let’s just say it was a lot. This was the kind of money that none of Jesus’ hearers had ever seen. This was the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes grand prize.
We might ask where he got that kind of money. Most of our wealth nowadays is “on paper” but there was no paper wealth then. There was a certain amount of wealth. The pie was fixed in size. For one person to get a bigger slice meant someone else had to get a smaller piece. There was no way to make the pie bigger. So having a lot of money was morally suspect and more than a little anti-social.
So where did this wealthy man get his money? Not from any honest endeavor, we can rest assured. Not content with what he has, he wants the accumulation of money to continue even in his absence, so he assigns capital to three slaves.
When the rich man came back he wanted to know what his slaves had done with his money. The first two slaves, to whom he had given 300 and 180 pounds of silver respectively, had doubled the money that he had left to them. How had they done that. We don’t know, but I think we can safely assume that they made their money by whatever suspect means their master had used. Of course, he called them “good and trustworthy. They had behaved just as he would have. They had paid attention to their master and applied what they had learned. Shrewd, certainly, if morally suspect.
The last slave, though, had responded quite differently. He brought the original sixty pounds of silver. He had invested it in an ITM account—In the Mattress. Now everybody says that he was afraid to take the risks that investment naturally involves, so he hid the money to keep it safe. But that’s not what the parable says. No, the slave presented the money and made an incredible statement. Remember that a slave had no rights whatsoever. If an owner wanted to kill a slave, there was no law to prevent him. So what the slave said showed that he was either very foolish or very brave. “Master,” he said, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.
Let’s just unpack that a little. The slave described his master as “reaping where [he] did not sow and gathering where [he] did not scatter seed.” That is to say his master is a parasite on the labor of others. A harsh man indeed. He was afraid, he said. Afraid of his master. Maybe, although a person driven by fear doesn’t usually speak the way the slave has spoken. I suggest that the slave was afraid of becoming like his master, by making money the same way his master has made it. The slave’s fear, then, was born of moral revulsion. He buried his master’s money to keep it from increasing, to make sure that the master got back what he had given and no more.
Incidentally, he did not invest the money with the bankers to earn his master interest because loaning money to fellow Jews at interest is a practice forbidden by the Torah. The profits from the investment would have broken the Law of Moses.
Now the master got no profit from this third slave. He reacted with rage against this impudence. He was not accustomed to being addressed in this way. No one spoke to him like that.
Too bad, really. He had money. He had slaves to make him more of it. But he had no one who would tell him the truth about his own life.
The ancient writer Cicero wrote a little book called On Friendship. An important feature of friendship according to him is that friends are truth tellers. They do not flatter each other, but instead offer each other the benefit of a kind of ethical mirror. How else can we become the people we should be without having someone who can call us to our best selves. Cicero observes that friends must be social equals. The reason is simple. If we have a friend who is our social superior, we won’t ever tell them the truth about themselves. If we have a friend who is our social inferior, they will never tell us the truth about ourselves.
But there are some truths that our social equals cannot tell us because they themselves are blind to them. This rich man will never hear the truth of his life from his social equals because his social equals are caught in the same lie that he is. The astonishing thing about this parable is that it is the man’s slave who tells him the truth. It is his slave who does the service of a true friend.
I wonder how many times I could have heard the truth of my life, but I wasn’t able or willing. Because it came from someone I didn’t like. Or because it was so far away from what I think of myself that I didn’t want to believe it. Or because I wasn’t listening for it that day. Or because I was too goal oriented to pay attention.
For whatever reason—force of habit, moral cowardice, sheer astonishment—the rich man could not or would not hear what his only truly faithful slave said to him. He valued the coin more than an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth. But that doesn’t mean that we have to. Certainly the kingdom of heaven is to be found in places we do not expect, in the uncomfortable truths that others tell us, in image of ourselves we see reflected in the eyes of others, and these others may not be the ones we had wanted as our teachers in these matters. But the kingdom of heaven is found in this, too, that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment