A Few More Thoughts on Talents, Fear, and the Kingdom of God
Thanks so much! I’ve very much enjoyed the ongoing discussion via the comments and thought I’d try to add to that conversation via another brief post.
So…a few things that your comments have occasioned in me:
Joy. One of the things that struck me upon reading this passage later and in light of some of our discussion was the repeated invitation, “Enter into the joy of your master.” It strikes me again that neither of the first two servants were afraid of the landowner like the third one was. They, in fact, were willing to go out and trade – that is, risk – the enormous wealth entrusted to them. (One talent represents about 15 years of wages for a laborer.) Indeed, they felt empowered by that trust. Does the God we imagine provoke fear or joy, paralysis or empowerment? “Enter into joy,” I think, may still be a powerful invitation.
Other “contradictory” passages. Several noted that there are a variety of pictures of God in the Bible, some quite fearsome (and one of those in the first reading!). Two thoughts. First, it’s not that I want to get rid of judgment. Judgment, it seems to me, is often the other side of justice. It’s hard to talk about justice, that is, without rendering judgment about what is currently unjust. But I don’t want to imagine that justice is God’s final or ultimate (or even first) word but rather that love is, and I don’t want us to fall prey to the idea that justice is necessarily retributive. We might wonder, in fact, how punishment or further violence ever really contributes to justice. Restorative justice, by contrast, is non-violent, creative, and more in line, I think, with the God we see in Jesus.
Second, if Zephaniah (or a similar passage some other week) is going to cause you trouble in your preaching, why read it? Seriously. So many of the lectionary passages, esp. OT passages, are chosen because of a weak, often semantic, connection to the Gospel. This week, for instance, there’s just no way to take the context of Zephaniah seriously unless the whole sermon is on Zephaniah. Further, the multiplicity of readings that is part of our established liturgy via the lectionary is often confusing to people Four passages with little to no context, linked tangentially if at all – it’s a recipe for confusion that makes it hard to focus people on the passage you want to develop. Yes, it’s good to have balancing passages of Scripture, but do we have to have four such passages every week?
Limits of God as the Landowner. Several also suggested other interpretations, which I found quite stimulating. One in particular that I’ve thought about on different occasions to preach this passage suggests that the landowner is corrupt and abusive, and that the third servant (who perhaps stands for Jesus) is the whistleblower calling this landowner to account. I find these interesting and engaging, though not in the end entirely persuasive. Actually, what I find most persuasive in these interpretation is the problematic nature of connecting God to this landowner. Which helped to remind me of the perils inherent in treating parables as analogies, where each character must line up with something else. That is, the servants may indeed represent different reactions to being entrusted with great possibility, but that doesn’t mean the landowner must also be God. Further, we might indeed see in Jesus’ coming cross – just a chapter later! – the possibility that Jesus was willing to be cast into the outer darkness in order to join us in our places of darkness and fear.
Lots of possibilities in for interpreting this parables, precisely because, I think, they weren’t written to be explained but felt. Not bad to remember when it comes to preaching them! 🙂
Thanks for the marvelous comments and conversations. I hope this can continue!
Post image: “Parable of the Talents” by John Morgan, Creative Commons via WikiGallary.
I am in the camp with those who see the limits of God as landowner, but not just because what it does to the character of God. First of all, the beginning of Ch 25 starts with the introduction “Then the kingdom of heaven will be compared to…” This is going back to the Greek and not the typical English translations. This is not the way that Jesus opens parables about what he thinks about the kingdom of heaven–just look at the Greek in Ch 22. Also, Ch 23, is a diatribe against the pharisees, and in that diatribe Jesus takes on the issues at play in both the parable of the bridesmaids and the parable of the talents–keeping others out, worshiping the gold instead of God. As mentioned there is the problem with the character of God, but also the stipulations in the next parable of the sheep and the goats–it is not success, wisdom, wealth, preparation, or anything like it that determines the sorting. It is what is done to the least of these–the “wicked slave” would fall into this category, and yet how is he treated? This is condemnation of the land owner and the 5 unsharing bridesmaids–aka the pharisees version of who gets in. If we read this as Christ’s parable of the kingdom to come, we are left with what to do with the implications of the statement in verse29, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but for those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Plus, you have the connection with, as you note, what happens to Christ in the very next chapter–crucifixion. However, think about what this also does with the story of the woman with the alabaster jar in the next chapter–Jesus is teaching that accumulating status of doing more stuff for the poor isn’t the point–it is about humanizing people and caring for them when they have been thrown into the darkness. This reading of the parable pulls together the context of all the stories around it in a way that seems much more consistent then the way we traditionally read it. At least, that is how I will be preaching it this morning. Thanks for your thoughts, I really do enjoy reading your blog on a regular basis!
I’m reading this on Monday, after wrestling with this parable through the past week. While preaching yesterday, I used a couple of examples from my own experience. First, the play Oedipus Rex, where the parents hear a prophecy and react out of fear. They send their young son away, thereby causing him to become a stranger and setting in motion the prophecy itself. The second came while I worked as a social worker in some of the more troubled areas of a small city. I walked through a shadowy area, heard voices whispering from the darkness. Then I heard another voice saying “because Christ lives, you can do this.” My point became one of choice. We can react out of fear or we can choose to walk through the fear to where God has already gone and waits for us to arrive. We talk about the efficacy of the cross and Jesus’ death. But do we forget to look at the opportunities and possibilities of an unknown future and say, “Because Christ lives, we can do this”? It’s not just a choice between life and death, but a very real choice for life that transcends the death-inducing realities around us. Thank you for your thoughts and writings. I look forward to them each week.
I agree. I thought to mention the issue with Old and New testament readings in the lectionary too, but I didn’t want to offend anyone. I find myself looking for that link and there isn’t always a link at all and it sometimes mixes two eras and lessens the impact that we are in the era of grace, which can be confusing. Personally I think it would be better just to read the passage the sermon will be on, then let the preacher set the text in it’s historical, geographical, and cultural context and take it from there. I don’t think that is boring I think that builds Biblical literacy. I heard a sermon done this way by my NT exegesis lecturer and it was brilliant. He let us know who wrote the text, who were the intended audience and why the text was written. Less emphasis on opening with a catchy anecdote, it was simpler, application was more like a rolling chat once the basics were covered. It was a sermon that helped you think deeply about what was going on immediately before and after the text so you could learn to interpret and apply it yourself. This method gives credit to the listeners intelligence, allows them access to scholarly insights and research, and to ponder and draw their own contrasts with then and now and it avoids misinterpretations. I am biased to this method, this is what I like, my learning style.