Matthew
25:14-30
It’s
funny what lingers with you. I remember a movie I watched growing up called The Wind and the Lion. It was a Sean
Connery flick about a Berber uprising in Morocco while Theodore Roosevelt was
president. The uprising is led by a man named Raisuli the Magnificent, a
roguish but appealing character. The insurrection fails, largely due to
American intervention, but Raisuli gets away, and what I recall most vividly is
the final scene. It is sunset, and Raisuli is with a close friend and follower.
His friend says, “Great Raisuli, we have lost everything. All is drifting on
the wind. We have lost everything.” And Raisuli responds, “Is there not one
thing in your life that was worth losing everything for?” And they both start
laughing, and the movie ends.
I
want you to hold that question in your mind for a moment while we look at this
parable from the Gospel today.
I’ve
told you before we should never try to domesticate the parables of Jesus. Like
they say of Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus is not a tame lion. And
his parables are not meant to be light and fluffy. But one way we try to tame
them is to turn them into simple allegories, and that would be easy to do with
this one. The master in the story represents God, and the first two slaves are
good disciples and the last slave is a bad disciple, and God punishes bad
disciples that don’t produce results. Simple and easy . . . and almost
certainly not what this parable is about. For one thing, making the master into
a symbol of God is highly problematic: the master is a slave owner, and a harsh
one at that: not the way Jesus presents his heavenly Father at all. So let’s
drop the allegorizing and just hear the story, which is challenging enough.
Listening to any parable is like entering a parallel universe: it looks a lot
like ours, but it’s not. So, we can easily recognize a master and slaves,
trading and profits. But this master does what no master would do in this
world: he hands his slaves money and then disappears. And I mean, lots of
money. A talent was a weight, about 75 pounds. It would have taken the average
laborer twenty years to earn one talent of silver, and this parable may well
refer to talents of gold. In today’s terms, one talent of gold would be worth
$1.4 million.
These
guys are given some serious cash. So that third slave is handed a million
bucks, and then quickly buries it out of fear. And we may well sympathize with
him, but let’s take a moment to think about those other two slaves. One is
given some $7 million, and the other is given around $3 million: that’s a ton
of money, and the potential for disaster is high. And both of these guys double
it. Now, I’m no investment guru, but if they are getting that kind of return,
they’re taking some chances: they’re obviously not putting it into some kind of
first-century money market account. In the story, the master acknowledges that
investing safely with bankers would only have provided modest returns. But in
the strange world of the parable, the issue is not the amount of money made: it
is the trustworthiness of the slaves. The first two slaves take risks, and the
master applauds them. The third slave is not willing to risk anything: he’s so
afraid of losing that he doesn’t even try to succeed. And it is that failure to
go out on a limb, any limb, and take a chance that the master condemns.
I
wonder how the story would have gone if that third slave had invested his
talent and then lost all the money. Would he still end up in the outer
darkness, weeping and gnashing his teeth? I somehow doubt it. The master in the
story is not looking for money, but for faithfulness. As Jesus tells the story,
the master does not reward success: he rewards taking risks and trying. After
all, he himself took a huge risk by giving them those talents to begin with.
And this, Jesus says, is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.
“Is
there not one thing in your life that is worth losing everything for?” Jesus
talks a lot about taking up our cross and following him, about losing our lives
in order to save them. The Gospel is all about taking risks for the One Great
Thing, the love of God. I don’t mean some abstract or sentimental feeling, but
the living power at the heart of all creation, the divine energy which is
coursing through us and giving us life at this very moment, the love which
gives birth to everything that is beautiful and good and wondrous and worth
living for, and yes, if need be, worth dying for.
And
here is the awesome paradox of this parable and of the whole Gospel: if we
invest ourselves for the love of God, even if we lose everything, we gain far
more than we have lost. Jesus risked everything, lost his life, and was raised
to even greater life. This is the pattern for all of us. Over the years of my
own priesthood, I have made countless mistakes. I could draw up a long list of
programs that failed, sermons that flopped, meetings that went nowhere, budgets
that didn’t balance, visions that were not fulfilled, opportunities that were
wasted. But through it all, I have found this to be true: when I take risks for
the Gospel, when I love and give myself away for the sake of love, wonderful
and unexpected things always happen. Always. Not because I’m good, but because
God is good.
And
that is true for all of us. When was the last time you risked anything for the
love of God? I don’t ask that to make anyone feel guilty: I ask it by way of
invitation, because it’s never too late. This week, what chances can you take
for God? How can you go out on a limb for the sake of love? That could take any
number of forms, from helping someone you don’t want to help to battling an
addiction to sharing your faith with someone to being kind to pesky relatives
over Thanksgiving dinner. What matters is that we take a chance for God’s sake,
and spend our talents — all of them. We might make mistakes and we might get
hurt, but we would still learn for ourselves the truth of this parable: the
more we risk, the greater our return. As Jesus says in Luke’s Gospel: Give, and it will be given to you. A good
measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your
lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back (Luke 6:38).
We can’t think ourselves into that: it's not a head game. We can only
experience it. And we can only experience it by taking risks and living it.
God
help us to do that.
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