Talents

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 19, 2023 by Revd Sally Hitchiner

Reading for address: Matthew 25: 14-30

There are two conventional ways to read today’s Gospel Reading.

I encountered this parable first in a school assembly. It was used by Mrs Rigby to underline the school ambition. ‘Girls, you have one of the best educations in the city. Girls like you can now do anything you want. The world is your oyster. It would be a crime to waste your talent.’

The second I encountered it in my first term as an undergraduate in an Economics tutorial. ‘Sally you’ll like this, you’re religious’, the professor said. ‘The Matthean Principle coined by Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman in the 1960s states Those who are given much at the start of life manage to make more but those who only have a little find that even what they have is taken from them.’ The distribution of resources at the start of the world is unfair and the powerful have set up society to be bias to them so they will continue this injustice. In this parable ‘God’ is describing and even supporting this social hierarchy.

While there may be truth in both of those ideas in general, it won’t surprise you to hear that I think both of these readings miss the heart of Jesus’ story.

To understand it we have to get our heads around four things.

Firstly we have to understand the genre. It’s a parable. Parables were the common way of conveying deeper meanings in the first century. They’re stories intended to teach but the genre was more comparable to the subtleties of the Punch and Judy show genre than a directly comparable allegory. You can’t take it too literally. The trick with parables is to understand the emphasis of the story then work back from there to see which characters and actions are significant.

Secondly a Talent was an awful lot of money. One talent was 36kg silver (5 stone 7 pounds in old money) – imagine lifting a rather portly Labrador. One talent of silver was worth 6,000 Denarii – with one Denarii being a day’s wage for a manual labourer. So, 6,000 Denarii in a society where people worked 6 days a week were roughly 20 years of wages. Around £1 million. A slave in those times could amass personal wealth and be quite rich but this is off the scale.

We hear the parable differently if we say ‘A master gave one of his slaves £5 million to play with while he was away. He gave a second slave £3 million to see what he could do with it. Then he gave a third slave £1 million to have a go at big business. You can do anything you want, just do something good with it.’

Thirdly when we hear the word ‘slave’ we are outraged. And rightly so; no human being should be owned by another. But enter, for a moment into their mindset where this was in the air they breathed. If these people were slaves, they were not responsible for the business. They are invited to play with the Master’s business and the Master would be responsible for fixing it if they tried and failed. It was a no-lose offer. The only way they could get it wrong was by refusing to attempt the reasonable and very generous request.

Fourthly the first two conventional readings don’t need Jesus. They don’t fit within the overall scheme of the Gospels which is to say – it’s never really about you. It’s about Jesus and his invitation to join his story rather offer us tips for our story.

So what does the talent, this large sum of money represent in this story.

Matthew’s Gospel is one of the most carefully structured books in the bible. It starts with an introduction of Jesus’ birth starting the theme that Jesus is the true King David, true teacher Moses and the embodiment of the Hebrew phrase Immanuel – God with us. Matthew then outlines five sections – each with illustrations followed by a block of teaching. Jesus announcing his kingdom, bringing it into people’s lives. Matthew has outlined the various responses to Jesus (with parables at the end to illustrate) and now, before the ultimate section of the cross and resurrection we have how Jesus’ character clashes with the religious authorities of his day. In each of these sections the spotlight is on Jesus. Matthew is trying to help his Jewish friends to place their trust in him as the Messiah.

I’d like to suggest that as well as being the Master in this story, Jesus is also the Talent. Or to be more specific, contact with Jesus is the valuable thing that is entrusted in this story.

So what do the slaves represent?

It could be the disciples themselves. Three years of living in community with Jesus. What would you give for a career break like that? Imagine you have the chance to spend a 3-year secondment working alongside the best person in the world at your craft. It would be odd if you returned and continued as before.

It could be a comment to the religious teachers who have also now had Jesus directly available to them but also spend all day every day studying God’s law. They have a double access and yet the majority were mean and oppressive. I always say never trust a skinny chef or a grumpy vicar.

Or it could be that they are all of us on different days – the church. Matthew’s Gospel was compiled a few decades after these events, we think by an expert in the religious law who was close to the disciple Matthew. By then the disciples were dying out and there was a hierarchy between those who had spent time with Jesus in person, those, like the author, who had spent time with the people who had spent time with Jesus, and those who came after and were hearing it all just from letters. They didn’t have the chance to meet Jesus face to face. But they did have the Holy Spirit to make Christ known to them, as we do. They also have the church including the sacraments and the scriptures so we can encounter Jesus together. That’s still a million bucks.

Parables rarely let you pin down their meaning to one thing but let’s linger on that last one for a moment. It’s a challenge for us too.

Perhaps you feel there are others who have an easier time with faith than you do. Folk who aren’t plagued with the challenges or difficulties you have. Perhaps it feels like some folk have been given five times what you have in following Jesus. The point of this parable is that all the slaves were given riches beyond their wildest dreams… far more than they needed.

Even the most basic gifts that Jesus left to the church are life changing.

When Jesus breaks bread at the Last Supper, Matthew is describing how the Eucharist will continue to feed the Church with himself. When Jesus on the Mount of Olives tells his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, Matthew is describing how baptism will make the Church. When Jesus portrays how to be reconciled with one’s brother or sister, Matthew is describing how admonition, repentance and forgiveness will constitute the Church. What Paul and Matthew are both fundamentally talking about is the Holy Spirit. These can change your life if you let them.

This parable shows that to Jesus, these gifts are no small thing. You can hear the frustration to the Master when the slave doesn’t take the gift out of the box. You can imagine the sadness of Jesus on his return saying:

‘I gave you the gift of Eucharist. You used it mostly as a weapon to exclude people?’

‘I said I’d forgive every sin and provided priests to hear confession if you need that but you thought your one was too hard for me, so you lived your whole life haunted by it?’

‘You never realized that baptism was the moment when all your foolishness and pride, all you evil and malice, could be washed away and you could be incorporated into the way God is redeeming the world?’

‘You never realized that reading Scripture invites you into a constant discovery of God’s character and a revelation of the way God has already redeemed the world?’

‘You never realized that in prayer you could open your whole heart to God and find that he opens up his whole heart to you?’

‘I gave you the best gifts I had to offer to sustain and bring you joy while I was away and you left them unwrapped and hid them under your bed?!’

There’s a free bar… don’t just ask for tap water!

Parables aren’t intended to be literal – Nothing we see in Jesus indicates that God will throw people into the outer darkness for ingratitude. Even the most conservative believers would struggle to put the tone of this master directly on to the loving and living Jesus.

The truth about this parable is that it is not primarily about us.

The real distinction between the good slaves and the wicked one is not how they used their talents. The great distinction is how they see their master.

The good slaves take their master’s generosity at face value. They trust him and jump at his invitation to have a go at big business. But the bad slave justifies their actions by telling a story about the master. ‘Master, 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’.

You can feel the atmosphere change… the other slaves are looking at each other in disbelief. This is the master whose generosity extended to giving three of his slaves eye watering amounts of money to help them enjoy his absence and instead of being thanked, he’s being accused of being harsh? Demanding?

You can see why this slave is not entering the joy that the others experience. After spending that long with the generous Master, he is still so focussed on himself that he makes the master fit his actions.

I have gone through the parable in detail because I have met so many people for whom this has become the most significant story in the whole Bible. Perhaps fuelled by school assemblies or undergraduate social theory, we arrange God around ourselves. Make God’s character fit whether we feel we are succeeding or failing at life. If that’s you today, and most of us are all there on some days, can I entice you to shift your focus to someone else?

Jesus is not a cunning manipulator, who gives us mysterious talents and then lies in wait to see whether we fail to use them properly. Jesus is a boundlessly generous friend who goes away and gives us far more than we want or need to imitate him in his absence. If we assume he is a generous friend, we will experience the miracle and abundance of life in the Spirit. We will not miss the wonder of what he has left for us here and in everyday life. If we take him for a cunning manipulator, we shall experience life as miserable scarcity.

There’s no worry in a God this generous. One day God will welcome all people to the Wedding Banquet we see here even if some take longer to see how kind he is. Some of the joy of this wedding banquet can be entered now by those who are open to the evidence that God is generous and committed to partnership with us.

We are invited to play with the privilege we have in being close to Christ. See if it works to start imagining Jesus’s Spirit is with you on Monday morning in your workplace. Try out trusting again or for the first time. Try out volunteering to help with something in church. Try letting people here get to know you… the real you. Tell God what you really worry about. Don’t leave these precious gifts of church and connection to Jesus unwrapped, gathering dust under your bed.

And as we open ourselves to trust this good and generous God we find that our experience of the presence of God is multiplied.

Perhaps you’re someone who is very close to God. Your prayer life is strong, you find you think of Jesus often in your everyday life. Don’t stop with your five talents. Step out in faith and see if you discover five more. Perhaps you have a less easy experience of faith, that’s ok too. Explore and live out what you have and you’ll discover that multiplies too. Even just a tiny experience of Christ is worth a million pounds and if you keep coming to church, even if that’s all you do with it, something is bound to happen that will multiply it.

You’d have to work quite hard to stop an experience of Christ multiplying. You’d have to actively get a shovel and bury it. Because the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ is still the creator spirit that made planets and stars and molecules and atoms. And God is not done creating and recreating. And you’re God’s favourite subject.

God can’t help being generous. God will continue to give boundlessly to you with invitations to be with Jesus in good times and bad.

The question is, do you want to join in?