Merely Human
 |
Anton Schmid
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Matthew 25:14-30
14“For
it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his
property to them; 15to one he gave five talents, to another two, to
another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. 16The
one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them,
and made five more talents. 17In the same way, the one who had the
two talents made two more talents. 18But the one who had received
the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s
money. 19After a long time the master of those slaves came and
settled accounts with them. 20Then 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.’ 21His
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.’ 22And 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.’ 23His 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.’ 24Then
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; 25so I was afraid, and I went and
hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ 26But
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? 27Then you
ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have
received what was my own with interest. 28So take the talent from
him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. 29For 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. 30As for
this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
The meaning of this parable has probably been
established so firmly in your mind that any one of you could preach a sermon on
it. We all know this parable
well…so well in fact, that it’s hard to think of anything new to say. Particularly about the third servant
–the one who buries the talent in the ground and makes the master really,
really mad. Most of you have an
opinion about the third servant – he’s wicked, he’s lazy, he’s a scaredy cat.
The most charitable thing you might say is that he understands nothing about
the miracle of compound interest.
It’s almost too easy to beat up on this guy. Like shooting homiletical fish in an
exegetical barrel. Preachers
through the years have been pretty consistent in their critique of the cautious
servant. A commentator summed up
some of the criticisms of the third servant, thus saving me the trouble of
hunting through the Google to find them:
CH Dodd in 1935 said this is “the story of a man whom
overcautious and cowardice led into a break of trust.
TW Manson in 1945 says: “The punishment for neglected
opportunity is deprivation of opportunity.”
Dan Via in 1967: “The third servant’s refusal to risk
led to repressed guilt, resulting in the loss of opportunity for meaningful
existence.”
Yikes.
One more.
John Donahue in 1988 said that the servants “fatal flaw” was that “Out
of fear of failure, (the third servant) refused to even try to succeed.”
There you have it. “…the moral center of gravity is located in the master’s
judgment of the third servant.” A pretty firm consensus that the third
servant got what was coming to him.
Outer darkness and gnashing of teeth sounds about right, right? Actually, as I read these comments, I
swore I could Donald Trump’s voice telling one of his hapless apprentices: “You’re fired!”
So really, why do we even need to talk at all about
this parable?
Well, since we’re all here, we may want to notice
some other things. I’m willing to
bet that a couple of you remember from your Sunday school lessons that the
amount of money changing hands in this parable is pretty astonishing. Scholars estimate that one talent in
ancient times represented about 15 or 20 years worth of manual labor. So the five talents given to the first
servant represented 75 or 100 years worth of work – probably much more than
double the average working lifetime of the people hearing Jesus tell this
story. So right there, Jesus’
listeners were probably blown away at the amount of money the master entrusts
to the servants? Five talents? That’s nuts! Two talents?
Still outrageous. One
talent? Well, one talent was probably a little closer to a dollar figure that
the average Joe could wrap his mind around, but still – even one talent was a
great big chunk of change.
So we’re not talking about just a lot of money here,
but amounts somewhere in the mega millions stratosphere. Now Jesus may be exaggerating to make a
point, but it is clear that he means to say that the master is handing over
some serious cash.
The only people who had that kind of money in ancient
times were the wealthy elite – 1st century Donald Trumps. And the wealthy elite got their money
in just the way you’d expect – they engaged in trade, got goods to market, ran
import-export businesses, and lent money to people at interest. And lending to poor people, especially
farmers, was an extremely profitable line of business. Farmers often needed help making ends
meet when there was a drought or some other major catastrophe.
These loan agreements worked out pretty much as you’d
imagine. Poor farmers would get
the best interest rate they could, put up land as collateral on the loan, and
hope for the best. By the time
most of them got around to noticing the insanity of the interest rate charged,
it was too late. They had already
made their deal with the 1st century version of a pay day
lender. The lender would foreclose
and the farmer would lose ownership of the land. But unlike today’s bank foreclosures, the farmer could
usually stay on the land, as long as they were willing to keep working for
their master.
So that’s probably the kind of scenario we’re dealing
with in this parable. The three
servants are three formerly independent farmers who were dependent upon their
very rich master who now owned their land. The three may have even risen through the ranks to become
employees of the master’s financial empire, managing various parts of the
master’s business. As they rose
through the ranks, the servants of the master could probably even engage in a
little dishonest graft and pocket some extra cash on the side. As long as they
kept an eye on their master’s interests and delivered what he expected, the
system hummed along. In fact, the
better the master did, the better his servants did. So it wasn’t surprising that the master invites the first
two servants who have doubled his money to enter into his joy:
“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.”
Being put in charge of more and more things on the
master’s behalf meant more and more opportunities for the indentured servant to
derive greater wealth for himself.
Those who were higher up were entrusted with more, but it was all good
for the master who knew that they had financial incentive to keep an eye on
each other. Those who came back to
the master with a greater return were the winners, and it didn’t really matter
how they doubled his money. All
that mattered to the master was profit.
These former farmers weren’t dummies. They adapted to a system that wasn’t of
their making or their choosing.
And the ones who did well, like the first two servants -- earned more
opportunities to make their master even more fabulously wealthy.
A preacher tells the story about serving in a
homeless shelter and hearing about a man who had been on the receiving end of a
great deal of good Christian advice about how to get back on his feet. After being coached on handling his
addiction, applying for jobs, managing his finances and qualifying for
low-income housing, he finally looked at his social worker and said, “Why do
you want to fix me up and feed me back into the same machine that grind me up
in the first place?”
And thinking about that made me wonder – where did we
get the idea that the master who is going on a journey is a stand-in for God?
How is it that God in this story is a “harsh man, reaping where he did not sow,
gathering where he did not scatter seed?”
How is it that God is the man in the story who got where he was by
charging 50% interest on a loan that no desperate farmer, no matter how hard he
tried, could ever, ever pay back?
Can the master in this story be the same God who
brought the people into a land flowing with milk and honey, drinking from
cisterns they did not dig, reaping a harvest they did not plant? Is this the same God who tells
the harvesters to be really lousy at their job and leave enough behind in the
field so that those who have nothing to sow can reap anyway? Is this the same God of a different
parable who pays everyone exactly the same wage, no matter what time they
showed up for work? Is the master
in this story the same God who in yet another parable appears as a crazy sower who
throws seed wastefully all over the place?
Do we really see God as a master who would say to a
starving farmer and his family, “those who have nothing, even what they have
will be taken away?”
Maybe the master in this parable isn’t God after
all. Maybe Jesus tells us about
the master in this parable to help us draw a distinction between an earthly
master who invests to turn a profit, to the God we know in Jesus Christ who
gives away everything including his own life, simply because God loves God’s
people. Maybe this parable is told
by Jesus to help us see God as something other than stern and punishing, as
bad as the worst boss any of us has ever had.
Jesus tells this parable just days before he will
give his life away on the cross, not as a substitute or to be punished in our
place, but to show us just how far God will go to release us from fear. The kind of fear that drives us to bury
our lives long before we’ve actually stopped breathing. Jesus spends his entire life giving
himself away – feeding the hungry, healing the sick, offering forgiveness and
welcoming everyone who recognizes their need for God’s embrace. And the only thing Jesus receives in
return is to be crucified. And
just in case we miss that message of love, God raises Jesus on the third day to
demonstrate that death and fear are no longer have to be our masters. We have been freed to live holy and
joyful lives.
Maybe the closest thing we have to a divine figure in
this parable is the third servant who refuses to participate in the
process. The servant who sees the
system and the master for what it is – a system in which masters harvest what
they do not sow, and servants who do not play along are cast into outer
darkness. Maybe being cast into the outer darkness seemed a small price to pay
in order to escape from a rigged and sick system. Maybe the third servant just didn’t have the stomach for it
anymore. Maybe his heart was too
soft to play the hard-hearted game of the master anymore. In any case, by digging a hole and
burying the talent in the ground, he has at least taken the ill-gotten cash out
of circulation – at least for a while.
You have to wonder what the people who heard Jesus
tell this parable had to say about the master and the servants. You have to wonder what they thought about the third
servant. Maybe they said he was a
fool or a coward, just as so many readers and preachers have said throughout
the years. Or maybe, just maybe –
the people who heard Jesus thought that the third servant said exactly what they
had always wanted to say to the masters in their lives – enough. Maybe they wondered what would happen
if they had the courage to reject the master.
This week in the New York Times, columnist Roger
Cohen wrote a column about Anton Schmid, a sergeant in Hitler’s army who was so
moved by the suffering he observed in the Jewish ghettos in Lithuania that he
managed to save 250 Jews before he was arrested by the Germans. In one of his last letters to his wife
before he was executed for treason, Schmid wrote about his horror at the sight
of mass murder and of “children being beaten.” He wrote to his wife, “You know how it is with my soft
heart. I count not think and had
to help them.” In his last letter
before his death, Schmid wrote, “I merely behaved as a human being.”
Cohen writes of Schmid, “’Merely’ had become the
wrong adverb; ‘exceptionally’ would be better. Schmid’s resistance was almost unknown. It can be singular just to be human. It can be very lonely. It can cost you your human life.”
So perhaps it is the third servant who may have
been the one who risked the most in stepping out of an inhuman system to reveal
the truth about the master. I do
not know what Jesus intended us to take from this parable, although I do know
one thing for sure. If Jesus wanted us to grasp his truth immediately and avoid
the headaches these parables always give us, he might have given us a
straightforward book of rules instead of these tricky and twisting
stories. But it seems to me that the third servant is being held up as the only
fully, exceptionally human being in this whole sorry story.
So what does this mean for us? Maybe what it means is that we have
also been given talents to manage, and we also have a choice in how we are to
use those gifts God has given. In
fact, in the next several weeks, we’ll have questions to ask ourselves as we
make those choices.
We’ll have the opportunity to buy gifts from major
retailers or pay a few bucks more by buying gifts from small local shops owned
by our neighbors, not by shareholders.
During the Advent Conspiracy, we’ll have the
opportunity to buy poinsettias for Meals on Wheels clients or a pair of goats
for an African village or a mule for a farmer in the Caribbean.
We’ll have the opportunity to make a yearly pledge to
this church which, by the looks of it, doesn’t look like such a hot investment,
does it? It’s no secret that we’re
small. It’s no secret that we’re
not exactly sure where God is calling us.
It’s no secret that this church you love today may be either be even
smaller or gone altogether in a matter of years.
On the other hand, it could be that God may be up to
something remarkable among us and that our tiny church may be on the brink of
transformation that will lead to new life for our community. Your pledge today may be an investment
that will pay dividends that none of us will ever see.
Who knows?
In God’s economy, our metrics for measuring what makes a good investment
are much different that the measure used by the master in this story or the
Donald Trumps of our own time. In
God’s economy, shepherds leave 99 sheep to go chasing after one. In God’s economy, the first will be
last and the weakest among us are the strong. In God’s economy, one widow’s coin rattling around in the
plate matters more than Bill Gate’s whole bank account.
It’s crazy.
It makes no sense. It’s an
investment strategy that won’t lead to a bigger house or even an easier
life. But it’s God’s economy of
grace, pure and simple. It’s an
economy of new life for all things.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
