Untalented

How the talents Jesus speaks of aren’t really gifts

a Homily for Proper 28A | Text: Matthew 23:34-39

And the master rewards this behavior (dare we say, stealing) of the first two slaves. They know what this man is like. Chances are, they take on this behavior. Think The Wolf of Wall Street and the culture built around stealing people’s money: not just the excess in itself, but the attractiveness of it. Think of how alluring it is to throw away your morals for the opportunity to double your free money.

Before We Talk About Talents

Before Jesus was talking about talents, he was in the Temple. Remember back three weeks: the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus and Jesus is turning the tables on them. And they come to a point in which they realize that they can’t actually get Jesus. Jesus then pours it on a little more.

The Lectionary skips over a text we read at a different time of the year: chapter 24. This is where Jesus speaks apocalyptically: describing the coming of the Son of Man and quoting the prophetic scripture of Daniel. And with it, he warns the disciples of what is to come.

He tries to get them to understand that the apocalypse isn’t long in the future, it is in days. Friday, actually. And they will have to learn how to endure hardship and persecution. He doesn’t speak of the hypothetical or intellectual happening so that they can reason it and understand it in their brains, he describes what they will experience. He talks about what the coming of the Kingdom will feel like. It’s arrival won’t feel like a warm blanket.

To illustrate the way they will experience it, Jesus describes it as preparing for a thief coming in the night. He then tells two parables: the bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom and then the parable of the talents.

Jesus has primed his listeners to hear about endurance and false punishment. Remember in the beatitudes, from the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Matthew:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

These two parables, including this one we just heard, are instructive of endurance, not salvation.

The Two Things We Miss

When reading Jesus’s parables, it is smart to look for the triggers: those places in the story that are there to remind the hearer of something. We aren’t always good with these triggers, because they tend to be things that Jewish peasants under the rule of Herod and Roman authority would know intimately.

This parable has two such triggers that should directly affect the way we read the story.

The first is the Master/Slave relationship

We don’t understand what it is like to be a slave or a tenant farmer in Jesus’s era, but none of Jesus’s parables featuring masters and slaves make the master look virtuous. They tend to make the master look sadistic and untrustworthy. They are fickle and reactionary. There is little equality and true mercy in these stories. They look nothing like GOD.

Remember, Jesus tells us to compare the Kingdom to these arrangements. This time, he says Then the kingdom will be like but he never says this is GOD and this is you.

The second is the economic relationship

This is the more obvious one if we read it with Jewish eyes.

Let me ask you: how do you double your money? What methods are required for a person with no personal assets, who is given a big pile of cash, and an uncertain timetable to take that money and double it?

The master tells the third slave what he thinks the slave ought to have done: take it to the bankers. Investing. Then he uses the real trigger word: interest. The master condemns the third slave because he didn’t take free money and invest it, doubling it through interest.

What is one thing that GOD’s people are not supposed to do? Charge interest.

So the master condemns the slave for not doing something he is not supposed to do. He does what GOD would have him do and is condemned for it.

This parable doesn’t invite us to prosper through GOD, but see that the Kingdom comes with growing pains: that the message Jesus preaches doesn’t reflect our system, nor does our system reflect Jesus’s message.

The Slave’s Morality

Unfortunately for us this week, next week is the barn burner. Next week we hear how this all works, so I won’t tease it out too much. Instead we will stick with how the hearers would be hearing this story. I’m sorry!

We remember that the frame Jesus has given us is that the coming of the Son of Man is about endurance. Is there a character in the story who endures? Of course: the third slave. He recognizes the master for what he is: an unethical and unscrupulous man. We remember that GOD is the great sower and responsible for all the seed in the field. But this master reaps where he doesn’t sow. In other words, he steals from others and takes advantage of them.

Imagine a farmer taking his tractor to his neighbor’s field while he’s out of town.

The third slave doesn’t go there. The third slave names the behavior. And the third slave is right to fear for his life, for the master. It is an ugly situation. But he isn’t corrupted by it. What is to happen to him, like what happens to the Temple and to Jesus, is that more powerful people try to corrupt: what Jesus in chapter 24 calls the desolating sacrilege: a corrupting abomination. But he stands up to it.

The Stewardship Pitch

Our neighbors, if they are following the lectionary are probably smarter than I am, and knowing that they are inviting the members to pledge and give of their many talents in stewardship, they probably are preaching about multiplying talents. That is totally the more productive sermon for today than the one you all are getting. I am so sorry. I’m sure Craig McKee is going Drew, what are you doing!

I do think this parable can help us with talking about talents and money and stewardship and pledging. But in a slightly different way.

When I asked rhetorically how does a person double her money, it is to highlight that the only way to get-rich-quick is to steal. Investing takes a lot of time and existing capital. Intentionally growing requires a lot resources invested without assurance that it will pay off. Or perhaps we benefit from another church’s closing or struggle.

I think the parable directs us to acknowledge that right now, in this culture, in this community, in this time, we are talking about surviving and enduring when things seem to be working against us.

It is about hearing what Jesus is teaching us about relationship with GOD and one another and calling this work holy, this life good, this moment an opportunity to love and praise GOD.

We do have a variety of talents and gifts and currencies that we are being called to share with one another and with GOD. That still is a good message to preach. But let us not do so with the pretense that we can double our pledges without increasing our own or growing the church without doing the work of inviting people to join us. Or that we can grow our relationship with GOD and one another without ever praying or getting together or listening or reading or doing the active work of allowing GOD to continue to form us. That our children will grow up in the church by only learning about it and without participating in our most important work.

Our commitment is to GOD and doing GOD’s great work here and throughout the world.

May we be filled with the grace and hope of Christ. May we be blessed with equal shares of courage and compassion. And may we stand up in the face of adversity and declare our devotion, not only to GOD, but to the better world that GOD has promised us, Christ reveals to us, and the Spirit provokes us to make happen in the here and now.

Drew Downs