St Margaret’s Uniting Church, Mooroolbark

Sermon – Sunday 19 November 2023

Texts: Judges 4:1-7 and Matthew 25:14-30

Rev’d Howard Wallace

The parable of the talents is one that is so easily misunderstood. Perhaps that is due in part to the use of the word ‘talent’. In our context that is understood relating to our natural abilities or skills. The parable thus carries a lesson of how we should use the natural abilities or skills God gives each of us to the best effect for God. But there are a few problems with understanding the parable just in those terms.

First, the word ‘talents’ in the parable is clearly referring to an amount of money. So is this about using our money for good and Godly purposes? A few weeks ago we heard of Jesus being challenged about paying taxes to Caesar. He asked to see a coin. The one given was a denarius, the equivalent of about a day’s living wage at the time. The Gospel of Luke has another version of today’s parable and there the servants are given 10 minas, a mina was worth about 100 denarii, so quite a sum. In our version in Matthew, the servants are given 5, 2 and 1 talent. Now a talent was worth about 6000 denarii. If you do your sums you quickly realise we are talking about huge sums of money here, in the millions by today’s standards. In other words the servants are seen as major financial players. We are not talking about talents like playing the piano, or preparing morning tea or maintaining the church building. We are not talking simply about using our specific individual types of skills. Something more is implied.

A second problem I have with the parable has to do, not with the size of the tasks given but of how the master is portrayed, and also how the servants are viewed. If we are talking about the use of gifts given by God then what sort of picture do we get of God – a ruthless, self-centred, wealthy tycoon. God is some sort of Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Gina Reinhardt, grasping at wealth beyond measure wherever it can be had. And the servants are no better, wheeling and dealing wherever there is a denarius to be gained. And with regards to the third servant who hides his talent, where is there any compassion or understanding for his timidity? The people in the parable are not those you want to get to know. It is a patent reminder that Jesus’ parables are not allegories where every detail is to be interpreted literally as applying to something or someone else. Parables often make a single point and God can be represented by some unsavoury characters at times; not that we are to conclude that God is unsavoury, nor are we called to emulate the precise behaviour of some of the characters in the parables. So, given these problems, what are we to make of this parable?

The first thing to say is that, with the size of the money left to the servants, we are talking about something much bigger, more significant, more basic than our individual skills and abilities. Not that we should not use those for the benefit of others or for the advance of God’s kingdom. But that is another matter. The huge amount of money given out is an image of what is powerful or potent in the kingdom of God or for the kingdom. Is it a way of speaking about the gift of the Holy Spirit, or about the life of God within us? The parable has much more to do with how we allow the life of God to flow through us, individually and corporately, than it has to do with how we employ our various individual gifts. It wants to say that that life of God within us is powerful as long as we are willing to let it do its thing.

Maybe the point of the parable is to be found in its end. In response to the fearful servant’s action of hiding the master’s money, the master says: ‘You knew, … that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter…’. Is there something in this parable about the fear of the unknown, the fear of risking what we have and losing it, or the feeling of abandonment, that keeps us frozen in our actions, not willing to be open to God’s generosity and openness? In Matthew’s time, the issue might have been that the Gospel message was expanding into the Gentile or non-Jewish world and it was difficult for some Jews or Jewish Christians to accept that the doors should be flung open so widely. They were unable to see that God’s Spirit could be moving in such a reckless way. They saw it as a threat to their way of looking at the world, their God, their way of life and themselves. In our own situation how do we respond to the fact that social forces are such that the form of the Christian faith we have known is under pressure and that some Uniting Church congregations and ones from other denominations may not survive in years to come. Of course, our denomination is asking the obvious questions about how and where can we change given these pressures, but we can only do so much and go so far given our circumstances. That is not to say God is trapped within our inabilities, for there are areas of the church in various parts of the world where it is thriving and the activity of God’s Spirit is keenly felt. Those churches may not look like the ones we have become familiar with but we cannot simply dig ourselves holes in our own nostalgia in which to hide the life we have been given. We may not always like the way worship is conducted in other places, or the theology that is espoused, or other things about the new expressions of the Christian faith and some of our criticisms can be valid, but can we categorically deny that the Spirit is abroad in such movements. Our very own experience with the Chin congregation is a sign of the Spirit’s movement. On a broader scale we might well ask ourselves as a nation whether we did not dig a hole and bury God’s gift of openness to difference and generosity toward the other when we voted no in the referendum a few weeks ago? How do we now embrace that God given gift of openness and generosity toward our First Peoples? That is the question that is left for us all to ponder.

The talents in the parable are really about God’s life and power within our own life; about not sitting on God’s life within us or digging a hole in which we seek to preserve what has been given to us, what we have known and cherished. Last week we heard of the 5 bridesmaids who kept their lamps trimmed and oiled so they were ready to respond when the bridegroom should come. Today’s parable says something similar, about letting the life that God has set within us work its way through us to others within a world of change, expected or unexpected. One New Testament scholar has said this about the parable. ‘It is a fascinating thing to have God compared to the entrepreneurial multimillionaire. “God’s mercy never ends” is a way of saying grace has capital, love is rich.’ Grace and love, things that when given can earn interest beyond expectation, not only for others but for ourselves too. The parable encourages us not to dig holes in which to preserve the love and grace of God we have known, but to begin to trust God and to allow God to move through us. In that our own lives can change and our communities may have a better chance of change that is consistent with God’s kingdom.