A Talent for Dying

Propers: The Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 33), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything? What would you do if you were simply gifted vast resources, ample time, and total freedom of action—with the caveat that someday your benefactor would likely return to see what you’d made of yourself? Would you continue to live as you do? Would you set out on bold new adventures? Or would you be paralyzed, overwhelmed by foolishness and fear? Could your gift become your curse?

In our parable this morning, a wealthy man is off to a foreign country. This was something of a narrative trope in Jesus’ day: a lot of stories began with a wealthy man setting out for parts unknown. In this case, he entrusts his resources to his slaves, which is no small beer. A talent is a ridiculous chunk of cash, about 20 years’ wages for a common laborer. If you were lucky, you could expect to earn and spend a talent in your lifetime. The first slave gets five of these, five talents, a brobdingnagian sum; a second gets two; a third gets one. But don’t feel sorry for him, because even one talent is still your ticket to a very early retirement.

The first slave invests the five talents entrusted to him and ends up doubling his money. We’ve got Jeff Bezos over here. The second slave similarly invests, similarly risks, and turns his two talents to four. Money begets money, it would seem. But the third guy, he’s terrified. Here he’s been entrusted with a hunk of gold that weighs as much as a man. So he buries it, sticks it in the ground, such that no-one can find it.

This pattern—first two guys do one thing, while a third does something else—is another narrative trope, found in folklore throughout the world, and in several other parables. That, combined with classic semitic hyperbole—absurd treasures entrusted to people who don’t count as fully human on the Roman social spectrum—is basically Jesus standing in front of us with a flashing neon sign that reads: “This is a story. Don’t be too literal. Fairy tale rules apply.” Recall that the Brothers Grimm get pretty grim.

Once the master comes back home, he is of course quite pleased. He had eight talents when he left; he finds 15 upon his return. And he literally didn’t have to do a thing. Other people made his money for him, much like billionaires today. To the first two he says, “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.”

But the third one comes sniveling. “I knew that you were a harsh man,” he says, “reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter, so I was afraid and hid your talent in the ground. Here, take back what is yours.” Oh, and the master doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like being told that he’s gathering what he did not earn, despite it quite clearly being true. And he definitely doesn’t like that he didn’t get more money out of this fellow, as though anyone could possibly need more.

So he takes back the talent and boots the slave into the outer darkness, and we’re left with one of the most baffling and unsettling morals in Scripture: “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.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

What are we to take from this tale? Well, first of all, keep in mind that this is a story. Jesus teaches in parables in order to make His point. He often shocks, delights, and offends His hearers so that we do hear, so that His teachings can worm their way into our minds. We mustn’t over-allegorize. We’ve spent so many centuries imagining salvation as a matter of legal justification that we reflexively read everything as though it were about damnation and what we need to do to avoid it. We’re all little lawyers in a Lutheran-Catholic mold.

But that’s not it at all. This isn’t about final judgment, at least not in a clearly cut way. God is not the master in this parable. He cannot be. The master is greedy, harsh, and cruel. He seeks usury against biblical Law. He takes what is not his, then demands more from his slaves. If that’s our picture of God, then our spiritual journey has a very long way to go indeed. God cannot be evil. If He could, then He wouldn’t be God. Which is not to say that there aren’t evil portrayals of God in the Scriptures! Yet we know the fullness of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. And Christ is no Master like this.

“To those who have, more will be given. From those who have little, even that will be taken.” Sociologists term this phenomenon the Matthew Effect, despite the fact that it shows up in Luke’s and Mark’s Gospels as well. And by and large, it rings true, doesn’t it? The rich get richer while the poor get poorer, as we well know from the last 50 years. The same applies to fame, education, career advancement: a positive feedback loop, whereby success begets success, from glory unto glory. Such is the way of the world.

But what of another world? Within the life of the Spirit, God is never far from us, closer indeed than our jugular. Yet our awareness is what’s lacking, what makes Him feel so far away. To be aware of the goodness of God, aware of the wonder of life, aware of the infinite gifts we are given in every moment of existence—even within this fallen, broken world, this shadow of what’s to come—such is the life of the Spirit, the breath of God within us.

No matter how deeply one dives into God, there will always be more to discover. Religious life, spiritual life, is like a spiral, ever circling back upon things that we thought that we knew, only to find a fresher richness, a greater depth, a broader peace. The more you lose your sense of self, the more then you find who you are. “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” It’s the same idea. Give yourself away, for God, for Christ, for love of neighbor, and you will gain infinitely more. Everything you lose will be restored a thousandfold.

There is a sense in which we get out of our religion whatever we put into it. I don’t mean that we have to earn our salvation. Forget about heaven and hell, or at least put them on the back burner for the moment. For Jesus, salvation is not just the end of time. Salvation is liberation, healing, forgiveness, wholeness, oneness with God and with one another. And that starts right now: given to us fully in Jesus Christ, in Word and in Sacrament. Salvation is already and not yet. “I am saved; I am being saved; and I will be saved.”

Liberation is a process. Absolution and healing and wholeness are a process. They come to us as an eternal reality unfolding here in time—which is the whole point of everything that we do, as Christians, as a congregation, as the Church. We confess and are forgiven, every day, every week. We come to the Font and the Table, every day, every week. We hear and read the Word of God, every day, every week. The more that we demand of God, the more that He will give.

And I don’t mean cash or cars or MacArthur Genius Grants. I mean real treasures, real talents: generosity, serenity, peace, passion, justice, mercy, faith, hope, and love. I mean a life devoid of fear, and a faith that cannot hide. I mean resurrection now! And that doesn’t just happen, at least not for most of us. It takes decades of reading, praying, studying, questioning, giving up, coming back, wrestling with God. It takes the timeless cycles of the Divine Liturgy, the Daily Office, the Holy Rosary, what-have-you.

Because this is what Christianity is: It is death and resurrection every day. We die to ourselves each night, to rise in Christ again each morning. He is the treasure we have buried in the field. He is the talent of infinite return. He is the gift we could never hope to earn. And whenever we return to Him, we are given nothing less than eternity here and now, the life of the Lord in our breath and our blood.

God, I wish more people knew that, churchgoers and atheists alike. People can be raised in a congregation, surrounded by a nominally Christian culture for their entire lives, yet never know the resurrection, the life of Christ within us, in agony and ecstasy and silence. There is so much in religion that so many cannot see, because we fail to live with boldness, resurrected and thus free. We bury our talents in the ground. We bury the life of Christ within a life we barely live! That’s our outer darkness.

But thanks be to God—burying Jesus has never stopped Him. It can scarcely slow Him down.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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