Psalm 90 Zephaniah 1:7,12-18 1 Thessalonians 5:1-10 Matthew 25:14-15,19-29
The Parable of the Talents
Today is the next to the last Sunday in the liturgical calendar for the season we call Trinity. This season begins on Whitsunday or Trinity Sunday, and runs through Advent, which is two Sunday away now. This long season in our liturgical year is emblematic of the long season between the time Jesus departed the earth after his first advent and the time when he shall return to the earth in the second advent. And I find it fascinating that toward the end of the Trinity season, the lectionaries focus on a single theme: The return of the Lord Jesus in judgment.
Next Sunday, the last Sunday in the Trinity season, the lections again will be on judgment. And, judgment is a theme in all the readings appointed for today. The plaintive Song of Moses, Psalm 90 which we sang a while ago, ends with this prayer: Establish the work of our hands, yes, establish the work of our hands. The passage from Zephaniah, is a fearful one, which warns those who seem to think the Lord isn’t interested in Judgment.
12 “ And it shall come to pass at that time that I will search Jerusalem with lamps, And punish the men who are settled in complacency, Who say in their heart, ‘ The LORD will not do good, Nor will He do evil.’ 13 Therefore their goods shall become booty, and their houses a desolation; They shall build houses, but not inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards, but not drink their wine.
In this case, God goes out of His was NOT to establisht he work of their hands. In fact, he ensures that the work of their hands is futile, because they supposed God didn’t’ care about things like wisdom, or righteousness, or judgment.
And, in the gospel appointed for today, what do we find? The return of the Lord in judgment. This parable of the talents appears in a section of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus has been answering his disciples’ question about His Second Coming. In the previous chapter, in Matthew 24:3, the disciples ask Jesus “…When will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”
Jesus warns them to be on guard so that no one will deceive them and he insists that once He leaves, He will return again. In Matthew 24:44 he urges them to be prepared for Jesus’ return to the earth, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when He is least expected.
Then, in chapter 25, Jesus compares His return to the eastern custom of a bridegroom arriving in the middle of the night. He warns his disciples in 25:13: “Therefore, keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.” And, then comes the parable of the talents.
The first words of this parable are these ““Again, it will be like a man going on a journey…” The word “again” shows us that Jesus is once more providing a parable to explain future events. The man going on a “journey” is Jesus.
Jesus tells this parable to his disciples before he goes on his long journey. I do not think it is a stretch to understand this long journey to have begun with Jesus ascension into heaven, to take his seat at the right hand of His Father in heaven. And, it is not rocket science to understand that Jesus return is that great event spoken of all over the New Testament: the Second Advent, when Jesus returns. It is mentioned in the Apostles Creed: he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. So also the Nicene Creed which we will recite in a short while: he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
And here we sit today, between the Advents, and this parable is for you and for me, for it tells us what we are to be about until the return of our Lord. We are his slaves, his servants, his stewards, and the parable tells us what we are supposed to be doing, how we’re supposed to do it, and what we may expect when Jesus returns.
First of all, we learn that Jesus’ servants have been provisioned with resources. He has put into their hands things which are not theirs. The parable mentions talents, which is a sum of money. It has influenced the English language and has come to mean a capability, not necessarily monetary. And, perhaps that is not unreasonable, though the parable is told in purely monetary terms.
Second, Jesus servants are provisioned according to what they are able to handle. One servant gets five talents, another two, another one. And Jesus says each got what he got according to his ability. Our responsibility is tied to our capability.
Next, as Jesus lays out the parable, it is clear that he expects each servant to invest what his Lord has provided him. This is no mystery, of course. The servants are to take what their Lord has provided them and they are to invest it. The parble says that the first servant went out and traded with it. He used it, he transformed it into more than it was. We are not told what he did with it – whether it was loaning it out, as if he were a banker, or funding his own business, or the business of someone else, or purchasing goods at wholesale and marking them up and reselling them. The point of the parable is that he traded with the funds his lord had given him and he doubled his money.
So also with the second servant. He earned less, but he started with less. Interstingly, he, too, doubled the money his lord had given him.
And, the third servant buried his money in the ground. Now before you judge this servant you should know that burying something in the ground was a very common thing to do in those days. It was actually the safest way to preserve and conserve one’s money, though it was also completely unprofitable. Even today, it’s possibly safer to bury something – supposing it can be buried easily – than to put it in a vault. I can recall a time about 30 years ago when economic conditions with banks in America were pretty shakey. Some members of my own family, I learned later, had secured some of their savings in the form of standard-issue gold coins – they had no numismatic value, but they were gold, nevertheless. They didn’t put them in a bank safe-deposit box, because there had been some bank failures in their lifetimes and they knew that if the bank they put these coins into went belly up, they might have trouble getting the coins out of the building. So they buried them. At least, they weren’t going to lose them!
And, that’s what the third servant was thinking. He took his one talent and made sure that it wasn’t going to get lost. And, that was it.
Then the Lord comes back and settles accounts with each servant. He is pleased with the first two. He commends them. He rewards them – “Enter into the joy of your Lord.” And, he promotes them. “You have been faithful in little, I will make you ruler over much.”
But things go rather differently with the third servant. The lord is not pleased at all. He doesn’t commend this servant, he rebukes him. He doesn’t reward him, he criticizes him, telling him what he should, at a minimum, have done. And, he most definitely does not promote this servant. Instead, he demotes him by taking away the talent he had earlier commited to him.
I don’t think making application of the parable to ourselves is very difficult, so I am not going to dwell on what should be obvious to all of us. Instead, I offer you a few pointers, so that when we examine ourselves in light of this parable, we will do so profitably.
First of all, I’d remind all of us, myself included, that we are responsible for what we have, not for what we do not have. And, since most of us here are the kinds of folks who are not among the wealthy, may I further suggest that what little we have – supposing we esteeem it to be little – is still enough for Jesus to evaluate us on what we produce with it.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with a Christian whom I had known in seminary days. He attends a very wealthy church, full of very wealthy people. And, he related to me a testimony he heard in that congregation from a multi-millionaire who was explaining to his fellow Christians something about the difficulty he had with tithing. It seems this man worried about giving away ten percent of his income. But, my old friend was flabbergasted when the fellow dropped into his testimony that his income the previous year was $36 million!
My friends, if you earn $36 million and worry about giving ten percent of that away …. let’s see, that would leave you with income of $32, 400,000. And this fellow is worried by that??? At the very least this fellow is a poster child for this idea: it’s not what you have that poses the problem, it’s how you relate to it.
The second thing I would point out to you is how your view of God affects your service to him. We aren’t told exactly what the first two servants think about God, but it’s not very difficult to deduce some things by what they did and what they said. They go right out and trade with what they’re given, and so we could suppose they understood that this is what their lord would have done. They’re copying him. Indeed, they expect him to be pleased. Each of them says, “Look! See what I’ve done!” They look forward to the settling of accounts, because they know their lord will be pleased. They aspire to what they actually get from him – praise, reward, and promotion.
But, the third servant – it’s almost as if he were complaining about his own status as a steward. “I know you are a hard man.” Oh really? How so? “Because you reap where you have not sown, and gather where you have not scattered seed.” Well, DOH. That’s what it means for him to be the lord and we to be his servants. He gives us seed, and WE sow it; and when he gathers, he does so because it’s his seed which WE have scattered. “And I was afraid.” What was he afraid of?
You know, I do not think he was afraid. Jesus would understand, I think, about someone who was fearful. When the lord in the parable rebuked this servant, he did not say, “O, thou cowardly servant!” Nor did he say, as he did when his disciples were fearful, “O thou of little faith.!” No, he said this “O wicked and lazy servant.” Lazy, because he didn’t want to take what his lord had given him and do something with it. Wicked, because he excused his own laziness by slandering his lord.
Pastor Bill Brian offered these contrasts between the fruitful servants, and the unfruitful one:
The first two were determined to make a profit; the third was determined to not take a loss.
The first two were willing to work hard and take risks; the third took no risks. The first two wanted to advance the master’s domain; the third had no interest in what mattered to the master. The first two viewed the money as an opportunity; the third guy saw it as a problem. The first two invested; the other one wasted.
What do we do with what our Lord has commited to our care? Do we invest it? Do we multiply it? Do we go out and trade with it? These may be challenging questions to answer if we think of our “talents” in terms of the modern sense of that term. So, instead, begin your evaluation with the original sense of the term talents: money. What do we do with that?
May I suggest that the minimal thing we do with money is what the Lord in the parable said to do with it. The very least one can do with it is to give it to someone else who will do with it what we will not do with it. That’s not a bad thing to do; it’s a minimal thing to do. And certainly it is better to do this than what the wicked and lazy servant did.
This is what we do when we give money to support missionaries on the field, or make contributions to support the work of a parachurch ministry, or a local congregation. It’s not a bad thing to do; it is, rather, the least that we can do.
Meanwhile, let us keep always at the forefront of our minds the return of the Lord. As the apostle John said in 1 John 2:28: “And now, dear children, continue in Him, so that when He appears we may be confident and unashamed before Him at His coming.” Remember what the Apostle Paul taught us in Romans 14:23: “So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God.” And take courage as we seek to serve the Lord with whatever it is he has committed to our stewardship, to remember the words of Paul in the Epistle appointed for today:
2 For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. 3 For when they say, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. … 8 But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
