Proper 28, Year A - Sunday, November 13, 2011
Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
Right away I ought to say that the talents of which the Gospel speaks are not the abilities with which we usually connect the word, but rather a standard weight of money of a large value; minor point of clarification.
In the Sundays leading up to Advent we’re treated to a series of Gospel parables concerned with the judgement of ethical behavior by one who gives the means to live wisely, absents himself and eventually returns to see how we’ve done, presumably to prime us for the season of Advent.
Today’s parable is a stern warning against choosing death when life is offered, in this case choosing to do nothing with a talent of money when given you on the basis of your known ability to use it productively. The servant cites the merciless character of the master as the cause of inaction, but the master describes the servant’s forfeiture of native ability as an act of cowardice, a vile and worthless choice.
The story is intended as a stern warning, and if warning and incentive is the principal object lesson for a first century audience, a peremptory condemnation into outer darkness will presumably cut it.
Yet we ought to remind ourselves that the Synoptic Gospels from which it comes must also be measured against the Fourth Gospel, that of the glorified Christ, the Christ who insisted he came not to condemn the world but to save it, and the Christ who defends the adulteress against the vengeance of a misogynist society.
So, let’s rely on the greatness of God to develop a larger ending to the story and let’s cast it in a more inclusive mode.
The parable is a cautionary tale about one in such terror of the master’s mercilessness as to become oblivious to the qualification which gave her the talent. She was deemed worthy of the talent , deemed capable of putting it to productive use; she was capable, she definitely was capable. In the story she could have added in language we’re more accustomed to, “I was so terrified on account of my abusive family history that I forgot who I was and what I could do, so I went and hid your talent in the ground out of sheer desperation. Mister, the most unbearable misfortune is when you lose yourself in that way, when you realize it and even reproach yourself, but you just can’t help it.”
And then there’s what could be called ‘The Workshop Syndrome,’ assuming the master distributed the talents at the same time, the one-talented servant - let us call her Sally - would have regarded her colleagues’ larger number as indication of their superior abilities which fed back to further undermine her self confidence, disempower her.
Sally, for goodness’ sakes, needs a life coach who actually would not address the psychological trauma but rather appeal to a more compelling vision than fear, something she cares about enough to take just one step for its sake, the courage for which comes from another place, enabling a trembling mortal to move forward and bringing along its own progress, step by step, as day follows night.
Those with whom I’ve been privileged to share the experience of bottoming out and resurrection speak of a courage which seems rooted in a god, a god beyond god, who appears when god has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. For a Christian believer the abiding vision when all else has vanished is typically the image or imagination of Christ crucified, as if produced by an unsuspected capacity in themselves , and this god beyond god brings a knowledge of their death and resurrection with a chemical edge which can practically be tasted.
Such bottoming out and resurrection is how we can understand the exclamation of the Apostle Paul: “Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly... God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. . . much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:5 ff.)
The initial backbone of today’s Gospel seems to have been fear-based, about something the culture imagined as the wrath of God, but we’ve seen that it’s possible for the wrath of God to be obliterated by a larger truth which we experience as unearnable grace, to which the tradition testifies, of which Paul once again exclaims in his letter to us today: “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that . . . we may live with him.” (1 Thess. 5:9-10)
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