The Call to Faithfulness
Luke 19:11-27
In Luke 19, it is late winter and Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem for His last Passover and the last week of His earthly life. He has just arrived in Jericho, the lowest city on the face of the earth which is 1000 feet below sea level. That makes Jericho delightfully warm in the winter and a great escape from the cold weather and snow of Jerusalem. Consider it the Palm Springs of its day. Before the birth of Jesus, Herod the Great enlarged and beautified Jericho making it the site of his winter capital. As a result, Jericho quickly became a highly desired location for the winter villas of the Jerusalem elite and Temple leadership wanting to curry favor with Herod . Many of the priests of the Temple were thought to live in and around Jericho as well.
Every time we read Scripture, we need to ask what happened before. There are four things which that lend to our understanding of our Scripture today. First, is the raising of Lazarus. Our Scripture begins with “the people thought that the kingdom of God was going to appear at once.” A month prior to the telling of today’s parable, Jesus brought Lazarus back to life in Bethany which was consider to be an unmistakable sign of the long promised Messiah. Word obviously began to spread among the people in the area and certainly among the pilgrims headed to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, hence the crowds at Jesus’ entry to the city on Palm Sunday. So, many in Jesus’ entourage believe he is going to Jerusalem to overthrow the Temple leaders and the Roman 10th Legion, inaugurating His earthly reign to establish peace, prosperity and social justice, the three messianic expectations of the Jews for their Messiah. And they believed this was certain and immediate. That changes what you do and how you do it. It’s that sense of certainty and immediacy that Jesus could return at any moment which the church has lost today and which impacts our parable today.
The second event is just prior to Jesus’ arrival in Jericho when He restored sight to a blind man, a symbolic act suggesting that we are going to need new eyes to understand who Jesus is, what He is about to do, and therefore what He is expecting us to be about. Third is the encounter with Zaccheus just prior to our parable. Our Scripture today starts with “While the people were listening to these things.” That connects this parable with the previous scene: the welcoming of a despicable Judean Chief tax collector into the Kingdom of God. Being a tax collector in Israel meant that you were a scorned person who possessed considerable wealth, very few friends and no hope of inclusion. Of those in the despised tax collecting fraternity, Zaccheus would have been viewed as one of the worst. As a Chief Tax Collector, he was responsible for enticing, recruiting and training other Jewish young men to become tax collectors. That made Zaccheus a traitor to his faith and country by working for Rome, which the Jews considered to be the kingdom of evil. Fortunately for Zaccheus, as well as you and me, Jesus always sees what a person can become in Him, not what he or she is before His call. And so Jesus rescues another lost sheep when he calls Zaccheus down from a sycamore-fig tree and dines with him and his unclean friends. Welcome to the Kingdom of God! We find in Jesus, God’s relentless pursuit of us with His grace and the lengths to which he would go as He makes Himself unclean to rescue the outcast.
Knowing the end of his life is near, Jesus needs to remake His disciples’ understanding of what their responsibilities are as they await His return. And so Jesus tells them a story that had a familiar ring. A man of noble birth went to a distant country to receive for himself a kingdom and then return. This would have quickly conjured up flashbacks of Herod the Great and his sons. When Herod died in 4 BC, Herod’s son Archelaus went to Rome to persuade the Roman Senate to place him on his father’s throne. Archelaus was contested in this quest by his half-brother Antipas, His aunt Salome, and others in Herod’s extended family. While the family was engaged in their political lobbying efforts with Emperor Augustus, a group of Jews arrived in Rome and petitioned Augustus to dissolve Herod’s kingdom. Everyone in the first-century Near East would be acutely aware of the uncertainty that comes with a change of leadership and those vying for power. Will your nobleman prevail against the others vying for the throne who wanted to rule over the same territory? Because of these uncertainties, the natural tendency of any slave or servant awaiting his master’s return would be to cautiously avoid any exposure to your nobleman’s adversaries. Care needed to be taken in the marketplace so as not to be too closely identified with your nobleman. If he lost his quest to be king, you could very well lose your home and security as well. New kings can be very vindictive against their rivals and all who supported them.
In our parable today, this nobleman summoned 10 of his slaves, gave them minas, which were the equivalent of three months pay, and said to them, “Do business with these until I come back.” This command is better translated as “transact” with these (minas) until I return. The implication of this assignment is that the nobleman’s slaves are to venture into the marketplace and do business with that he entrusted to each of them. In doing so, it will be no secret in the community who these slaves are representing. Then, Jesus poses an adversarial environment as a backdrop for their new assignment by saying, his subjects hated him and sent a delegation to saying, ‘We don’t want this man to be our king.’
There are four things we learn from this parable. First, we are called to name our allegiance and to live boldly as followers of Jesus. It would be easy to profess our allegiance once the nobleman returns and has become King. Jesus is saying, I’m asking you to assert your allegiance now before I return. Kenneth Bailey tells the story of teaching some short courses at the Lutheran Church of Latvia. While there, he observed the interviewing of prospective students and inquired of the interviews what questions they asked. They said, “The most important question is ‘When were you baptized?’ And he asked why is that so important? They answered, ‘If they were baptized during the period of Soviet rule, they risked their lives and compromised their futures by being baptized. But if they were baptized after liberation from the Soviets, we have many further questions to ask about why they want to become a pastor.” And then he writes, “the master challenges his servants to live boldly and publicly as his servants, using his resources and unafraid of his enemies, confident in the future as His future.” Hugh Hewitt in his book “The Embarassed Believer” contends that most Christian are embarrassed believers. They do not talk about their faith or church. They don’t have Bibles on the corner of their desks. They never engage others in spiritual conversations. And the result has been the dramatic increase of pornography and violence over the last five decades. The values of the world today pale in comparison to the values of mid last century. He writes, “From Paul’s imprisonment and martyrdom to this year’s murders of Christians around the globe, there is an ennobling and inspiring thread of courage uniting saint after saint. It is an inheritance of every believer. And it is to this that we are called.” Paul writes, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes...” Romans 1:16 And Jesus said, “ If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” Too many of us are embarrassed, silent, secret agents for God. Yet we are called to be bold witnesses of Jesus Christ. He closes with these words, “Christians in America trying to save the lost, comfort the suffering, cure the ill, clothe the naked and bring joy to the despairing will not make a significant and lasting impact unless they do so openly and without apology as Christians. The witness must accompany the work or the work will not endure and the world is hungry for our witness.’ Bold witness!
Second, Jesus seeks faithfulness. When he returned after receiving the kingdom, he summoned these slaves to whom he had given the money for an accounting and commends the two slaves that brought him ten and five minas respectively. The master’s affirmation is for their faithfulness, not the profitability of their transacting. The nobleman is commending them for being willing to be identified with him in the public arena and for being bold and courageous in their transactions for him in an uncertain and possibly hostile environment. With this parable, Jesus provides His disciples with a significant part of their Post-Pentecost job description. He expects them to be transacting for Him with the gifts He has generously made available to them; e.g., His Word, His Spirit, spiritual gifts, abilities and opportunities He has endowed (lent) to them. He expects His disciples to be bold, courageous, steadfast and persistent as they willingly identify with Him, even in the face of adversarial pushback. And not just with people like us but with the outcasts of this world as well. Their future accountability will be rooted in how faithfully they discharged these transactional responsibilities. How profitable these interactions are turn out NOT to be the (primary) focus but rather one’s faithfulness. And so I think that raises the question for us to ponder: how faithful have you been in the Master’s business and using to the resources lent to you to accomplish His purposes?
Third, it all belongs to God. Note the emphasis on “your mina.” These servants are not slaves but stewards. The slaves are clear that these minas are not theirs but rather a temporary gift from the nobleman. It’s realizing all we have belongs to the Master. Randy Alcorn tells of starting a church in 1977 which grew dramatically so that by 1990 it was a large church. He was making a good salary and making royalties off several books he had written. Then through a series of events, he felt God calling him to take a stand on a social issue. He joined several non-violent protests and was arrested several times. Then he and the 20 others with whom he was protesting had a court judgment against them which included garnishing 25% of his wages. Instead of his wages supporting the organization he was protesting, he made the decision to resign. The only way to avoid garnishment was to take a minimum wage job and to have his wife go back to work to help support the family. Fortunately, they had just paid off their house and he had divested himself of all royalties from his books. Then another court judgment came against him, this time $8.4 million, the largest ever against a peaceful protest. He writes, “By all appearances, and certainly by the world’s standard, our lives had taken a devastating turn. Right? Wrong! It was one of the best things that ever happened to us. ‘What others intended for evil, God intended for good.” Gen. 50:20 We began Eternal Perspective Ministries. (My wife) Nancy worked at a secretary’s salary, supplementing my minimum wage salary. All of the assets (and bank accounts), including the house were in her name….I owned nothing at all. I have access to plenty but I still don’t own anything. (And) I began to understand what God means when he says, “Everything under heaven belongs to me.” Job 40:11…But learning about ownership was only half the lesson. If God was the owner, I was the manager. More than ever before, I needed to adopt a steward’s mentality toward the assets he had entrusted, not given, to me.”
Fourth, your view of God determines how you live. But not all of the slaves transacted faithfully in the public arena. Then another slave came and said, “Sir, here is your mina I put away for safekeeping in a piece of cloth; for I was afraid of you because you are a severe man. You withdraw what you did not deposit and reap what you did not sow.” It’s clear that this slave had a different perception of this generous, nobleman than did the others who were faithful and thus it led to his doing nothing with that which was entrusted to him. It matters what your view of God is. It is life-shaping and life-changing whether your view of God is accurately or is distorted and flawed. Your view of God always shapes the nature and character of your faithfulness.
Kent Crocket in his book ‘Making Today Count for Eternity ‘writes, “Everything we do for God is based upon our concept of God.” This principle is true for all cultures and individuals on earth. How one lives is motivated by a person's conceptions or misconceptions of his god. This is critical because a poor perception of what God is truly like can potentially be the source of serious misdirection in an individual's life. In 2006, Gallop conducted a poll to determine people’s perception of God. What they found is while 91.8% of Americans claim to believe in God, most are woefully ignorant of what the Bible says about who God is. They found four main misperceptions of God: "the Authoritarian God," "the Benevolent God," "the Critical God," and "the Distant God." While all four views possess a kernel of truth, they reveal a very limited understanding of God.
Jesus came to reveal who God really is and not only the depths of his love but the length to which He would go to call you back home into relationship with him. That would become abundantly clear as Jesus willingly went to the cross to take the punishment for our sins. There’s the story of a boy who was continually in trouble at school. His father could not understand why. He provided for him in every way with a good home, raised him in church, he spent time with him fishing and going to his ballgames, and he showered him with his unconditional love, but the boy wouldn’t behave. One day his son was upstairs playing around with his baseball, which he’d been told repeatedly not to do, he ended up breaking one of his bedroom windows. The father headed upstairs and took off his belt. The boy knew what was coming so he voluntarily bent over and kneeled next to his bed but the father said, “Son, here, take this belt.” Then his father took off his shirt and kneeled down on the bed and said “Son, I want you to give me seven lashes with this belt across my back.” His son started to cry and said that he couldn’t do it. His father kept insisting until the son finally relented and started hitting his father across the back with the belt but it wasn’t hard enough. He said, “Harder son, harder!” When the boy finally lashed the belt across his father’s back seven times with greater force, the father asked him: “Son, do you know why I had you do this?” The son said “No.” He said, “When Jesus went to the cross for us, He took the worst punishment that has ever been inflicted upon any man. He was pummeled, He was beaten, and His beard was plucked out, even though he was innocent.” And then he asked, “Why did he do this?” The boy, still whimpering, hesitated and finally said, “I don’t know.” He took the punishment that He didn’t deserve to save those who didn’t deserve being saved. That is how much the Father and Jesus loved us.” (John 3:16). The boy was visibly shaken by this lesson and from that day forward, he never seemed to get into the same amount of trouble again…not perfect but changed. The message of God’s love displayed on the cross by Christ forever changed this young man and it has forever changed us because now through the cross we can see who He really is and live our lives in response to it. May we be ever faithful as we await Jesus’ return. Amen
