This Week: Proper 28A
Gospel: Matthew 25:14-30
Jesus crafts a final parable for his followers that is truly intoxicating. Like the last one, which seems to offer a good teaching about prudent preparation, we want to find something in this one. And many of us do.
Talents—and watching God grown them. That tracks.
The problem is literally everything else.
The Trouble with Caution
In this week’s reflection, I compare this parable with the trope of the cautionary tale. A story intended to teach us not to follow someone else’s bad example by seeing what happens to them.
The problem with cautionary tales is that not everybody picks up that message. Some people actually like what happens.
This happened with the release of Wall Street as Gordon Gecko became a cultural icon. Same with Scarface. Heck, that movie is still being merchandized and people where it proudly on T-shirts.
The more recent example, The Wolf of Wall Street managed to make doing bad things look cool.
The challenge with cautionary tales is that, for some, they are how-to manuals.
Greed is not Good.
While the viewers or readers can struggle with the point of a cautionary tale, we need to get clear about what actually looks heroic and what looks terrible.
In movies about people making lots of money and doing wild things, the viewer gets a vicarious surge of adrenaline. And sometime the actual lesson learned is “if I want to live like that, I just need to not get caught.”
Our parable is similar. The reward for thieving is more power and influence in the organization.
We get all kinds of clues about why the situation should make us pause. But what we might struggle with seeing, however, is the bravery of the third slave and casting him in the light of a hero. He is the one who confronts the slave owner and returns his money to him.
The parable is from the slave owner’s perspective.
But that doesn’t mean he’s a hero.
And to him, the honesty of the third slave is not only unwelcome, but utterly threatening.
A wise reader would dive into this bit of reversal because it genuinely flips our expectations and reveals the game.
A, A, B
A favorite technique in narrative teaching is to offer three examples in a sequence. Often like this:
One person does it; fails. A second does it; fails. A third does it differently; succeeds.
The lesson, of course is “be like the third one.”
Jesus throws us by offering the opposite: two who are rewarded and one who is punished. At first blush, it is “don’t be like the third one.”
And yet it seems like the convention. Except that the two who are rewarded: they’re rewarded for exploitingDi their neighbors; breaking God’s command not to. That’s what they are rewarded for!
The reversal, then, comes as a third stands up, not as a failure or a coward, but as the one who refuses to participate in this scheme of usury.
The slave owner punishes the one who is faithful.
An honest reader needs to attend to that. And acknowledge that he is the most heroic character in the parable.
Disrupting preaching
For many, this isn’t how they want to approach a text. Or preach about it. I don’t begrudge a reading that we invest in our talents and multiply them through God.
It is 100% easier than digging into this parable’s darkness.
I suspect, however, that it may be less difficult than we might imagine.
There are plenty of real examples of uncommon heroism and standing against the threats of the powerful. From Rosa Parks to the Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we are familiar with the challenge of doing the right thing.
Of standing up. Receiving punishment. And revealing truth to witnesses.
What is actually harder for us is helping people understand why the third slave was right.
This begins with explaining why Jesus’s hearers would understand the actions of the two slaves as usury. And the third as refusing to participate.
And I also suspect those hearers would be reminded of scribes and Pharisees, rewarded by the chief priest. Meanwhile, that third slave sounds an awful lot like Jesus.