Matthew 25:13-30
Listen to the self-description of the Master in this story. “You knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed?” And then think, does that sound like the God Jesus talks about? And consider the fact that a talent was a huge amount of money -- equal to 20 years worth of average wages in those days. It wasn’t a bank check, either; it was bags of silver and gold. The man who had one talent to invest could barely carry it around; the man with ten talents needed a horse and a trailer. In fact, the word “talent” in English means something entirely different from what it meant in the time of JEsus. So while it’s not a bad thing to preach about how we should use our talents wisely, it may not be what Jesus was actually talking about here.
And when we hear about the servants who go out to invest the money they’ve been given, they didn’t buy stocks and bonds. It was something like this; they would go to a farmer and offer a loan and expect to be paid in part of the crop; if the farmer couldn’t pay, he’d lose the farm. We’ve seen that happen in some of Jesus’ stories. Last Sunday you heard about the servant who was dealing with his master’s creditors in just such a way. They would also set you up in business, expecting part of the profit you made, usually a significant share. There were no other ways to multiply your money. IF the third servant had given the money to the bankers to invest, those bankers would make money the same way. It was a zero-[sum game. If someone got rich, someone had to get poor. You reap what you did not sew, you gather what you did not scatter. And the system worked,despite the occasional rebellion, like we heard about with the tenants in the vineyard, because rich people bribed the authorities, and had their own enforcers -- servants who were handy with clubs and knives. In fact first century Palestine was probably a lot like some parts of 20th century Chicago.
So in this context, you can see what’s going on. The Master has piles and piles of money. He picked out three servants that he would like to train to be good stewards. This is a test. Go out and do what I did, reap what you have not sown , gather where you have not scattered seed. Be like me, and I’ll make it worth your while. There’s a story in Luke like this where the reward is not more money, but getting to rule over villages -- more opportunity to exploit the poor.
And there is one man here, one individual who refuses to be part of this system. He simply buries the money and waits. Do you think he didn’t know what was going to happen? I’m pretty sure he did, and he was willing to take the consequences. He was willing to be cast out and become part of the people who were preyed upon, who were exploited. He was the third servant.
It’s a different way of looking at the parable, isn’t it? And it’s not original with me. There have been others who heard these words of Jesus differently than we usually hear them. And who is this third person? Maybe it’s Jesus, and maybe, by extension, it’s what he means for his church to be.
The central idea in Christianity is that God had pity on us and became one of us. God left his throne of glory and became an embryo and a fetus and a baby and so on; God did not put on a meat suit and pretend to die, God truly became a human being and truly died a horrible death. Jesus spent his ministry siding with the poor, the exploited, the people who had to beg for a living. He opted out of the system, and paid the consequences. Standing before Pilate he made it clear that he didn’t have to be there. Pilate seemed even to offer Jesus a way out, a way to save his life. Just like at the beginning of his ministry Satan offered him riches and power if only he would bow down to the ways of the world,
To opt out of an evil system seems to be another Christian thing that appealed to some saints. Saint Anthony of the desert and the other desert fathers left civilization partly because they found it distracting to their spiritual life. Saint Francis of Assisi chose to live a life of radical poverty in a society where the rich were really rich and the poor very poor. He opted out, even though he could have been one of the rich. But we don’t have to go too far back to find people who were like the third servant. Franz Jagerstatter was a farmer in Germany, married with three children. He was very devout, and used his rare spare time to read about his Catholic faith. When war broke out he refused to participate and was imprisoned, during which time he wrote several letters to his wife and children. In 1943 he was condemned to death and beheaded. He became one of the people that the Nazi government had wanted him to kill.
Today let’s think about this parable in a new way. Is the third servant the real hero of the story? If so, does that mean that there is an unjust system in which we participate that we should opt out of ?
