A gloomy, rainy Saturday. I’m sitting here watching the yard fill up with leaves, which are falling mostly from the neighbors’ trees, gosh darn it anyway. Why can’t leaves just fall straight down? I’ll take care of my leaves, you take care of yours, how about that? Huh? As if. They are community property, these leaves. Wherever they land, that’s who has responsibility for them. We’re in this together. We could have chosen a neighborhood without trees, or with little scraggly trees that drop a few leaves when they finally get tired of the attempt to be leafy. Could pick them up by hand almost. In those neighborhoods. But not here. No, here we live in the forest. In the jungle. With trees bigger than houses and leaves too many to count, and I live on a corner lot. A leaf magnet corner lot, it seems. A week ago we raked for part of a Saturday and bagged up about a billion leaves. And then I came home Sunday after church and it looked like we hadn’t done a thing! So now we’re waiting. Waiting for the rain to stop knocking the leaves off. Waiting for the trees to drop every last one. Waiting for a gust of wind, a tornado to come and gather them up with all the sharks and carry them out to sea, or to California or wherever it is that Sharknadoes end up. Yeah, God dropped all those leaves, let God pick them up! As if.
Yeah, not going to happen. I know. That’s what “as if” means. It means imagination is all well and good, but it just isn’t going to happen. We can pretend, we can fool ourselves, we can even hope, but those leaves are at least as patient as I am. They’ll wait. We can hope for a freak, lawn clearing wind, or a localized lightning phenomenon that incinerates each leave as it lies in the wet grass and thus doesn’t burn down the house. But it isn’t going to happen. As if.
Jesus told an as if story tucked away in the midst of a lot of other stories, and it has puzzled us to no end. It seems different than His usual story. And I wonder if we’ve missed it all these years. If we’ve been emphasizing the wrong things. Not seeing it as radical as it really is. As challenging as it really is. Domesticating the story into something more like worldly wisdom. Do your best with what you have and you’ll get rewarded. When in fact it was trying to say something much more edgy, much more risky. I wonder.
Matthew 25:14-30 "For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; 15 to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. 16 The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. 17 In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. 18 But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. 19 After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. 20 Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.' 21 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' 22 And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.' 23 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' 24 Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' 26 But his master replied, 'You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? 27 Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. 28 So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. 29 For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 30 As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
Yeah, that story. We know that story. The parable of the talents, we call it. And it is one of those interesting linguistic things that the Greek word for the unit of money used in the story has now become our word for abilities, or gifts. Talent. Talenta. It was a large sum of money. No, larger than that. Larger than you are thinking. It was an almost unthinkable sum of money. Hard to translate into modern amounts. Most commentators settle for years instead of amount. It is equivalent, they will calculate, to fifteen years of labor. If you worked at your job for fifteen years - and didn’t spend any of it - at the end you would have a talent. Fifteen years.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get / Another day older and deeper in debt / Saint Peter don't you call me / 'cause I can't go \ I owe my soul to the company store. My dad loved Tennessee Ernie Ford. I remember that song. Fifteen, sixteen, an impossible number when it comes to labor, when it comes to money. Yet, in the story, here are three slaves (slaves mind you) handed 15, 30 or 75 years worth of wages and told ... Well, what are they told? Nothing. Not a thing. Just handed it before the man skedaddled out of town. “Here you go boys, a literal ton of money. Gotta catch a train.” “Wait. What?”
Well, we good, industrious sorts look at what happened and the reactions of the man when he returns and say, well this is about working hard. This is about using what you’ve got. Don’t sit there like a lump. Get off your keister and produce. And that the blessed ones are the ones who make more. Who get more. Who have more. But it’s OK, because, wink wink, it’s not really about money. It’s about the abilities God has given each of you. And Paul comes along later and tells us that we are given gifts to be used. Not to make us better, but to build up the body of Christ. So, when we work hard, we honor Christ. So, get out there and use it.
And you know what? It works! It’s a great story about laboring in the fields of the Lord, a story against the sin of sloth, or the selfishness of the one talent slave who was only worried about his own skin, about the concept of stewardship and taking responsibility and being accountable and ultimately about the need to prepare our souls for entry into the Kingdom of God. That’s what this is all about after all. It works. And that’s what 99.9% of the commentaries say this is about.
And yet. I, for one, am uneasy about the portrayal of God, or Jesus, in this story. The Master, the man going on a journey, is depicted as a hard man reaping where he does not sow, gathering where he does not scatter seed. This sounds like a predatory business person who skirts the edge of ethical business practice to amass this incredible amount of wealth. And then hands it over, with no instruction, as a test of those he owns. He gave it to them, in our translation, according to their ability. But the Greek read that he gave it to them according to their power. To the power they could wield in the mercenary world, the connections they have, the palms they can grease. How in the world could they double that enormous amount of money without succumbing to shady business dealings? Even the instructions to the one talent slave were you should have put it in the bank. But to a first century Jew, collecting interest was illegal, the sin of usury.
What if, instead of the usual interpretation, Jesus wanted us to identify with the one talent man? What if He was saying He was the one talent slave? Weeping and gnashing of teeth was sometimes used to describe the effect of torture and execution. What if the blessing of the others was the blessing of a world that values wealth, and the joy of the master for them was to celebrate the spoils of getting one over on the poor who don’t know any better and are just fodder for usurious financial practices? What if one opened a payday loan business and made the poor poorer by charging incomprehensible interest? What if one foreclosed on mortgages that were out of the reach of most workers no matter how they tried, thus keeping both property and whatever money had been paid? What if the honorable route was to choose not to play that game, not to take advantage of your neighbor, to bury the possibilities of becoming rich so as not to hurt anyone, and having to pay the price for your choices?
This story doesn’t begin with “the kingdom of heaven is like.” It begins with “it was as if.” What is this story is not about the kingdom we long for, but the kingdom we’ve created, like a Frankenstein’s monster and now it is shaping our dreams and running our lives? I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong here, and I’m not the first to see it this way, let me hasten to point out. I didn’t come up with this interpretation. But it has been troubling me. So, I thought I’d trouble you too. And maybe we can go back to our old interpretation and just keep working hard for the kingdom. That would be easier. That would be simpler. That would help us fit into the world we know. Isn’t that better? As if.
Shalom,
Derek
No comments:
Post a Comment