(Updated 11/18/08 at 11:18 AM)

Pentecost 27, November 16, 2008, 40 Days of Faith 7 Matthew 25: 14-30
The parable of the Talents is a wonderful illustration of faith. The slaves differing use of the talents entrusted are basically two different examples of faith. The first two slaves risked their talents by investing them, whereas the third slave took the cautious rout of hiding his talent. All of the slaves acted in faith, but two of them are commended while the third is not. This is the troubling part of this parable, that it is not mere faith alone, faith as some general psychic energy, but that it is faith in a person, and more precisely what you understand about that one in whom you believe. For the first two slaves, we have only their actions as clues to what they believed about their master, but with the third slave we have his words as well as his actions.
The third slave describes his master as “…a harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed.” I think that for the most part the other two slaves would have agreed with that slave’s assessment of the master. But I think they would have quibbled with him over the word, “harsh.” They might agree that at times the master could be blunt and short with them, especially when they didn’t catch on to what he expected of them. But they would have probably used words like “intense, hard-working, zealous.” His purpose was not simply to punish a slow-witted slave, but to show the slave how his mistakes or laziness effected the welfare of them all, including the master. In his blunt and direct speech the master was revealing his heart, the focus of his drive. While the third slave may have a description of the master which is 90% correct, it is the misperception of the other 10% which alters not only his picture of the master, but how he deals with his responsibilities.
I can see something of myself as a 10- 12 year old boy, growing up on a farm with a brother, four years older than myself. We had the same father and many similar tasks, which on a farm can be physically demanding or tedious to the point of distraction. But I remember how my brother went about those tasks with a different understanding than myself in those years. I did the work more out of a sense of duty, knowing that if I didn’t, my dad would be on my case. So duty translated into drudgery and resentment against my father, with the perception that he was simply a task-master. My brother on the other hand, saw the bigger picture, and understood my father in a way, that at that time I never could. He saw that walking the bean rows to weed them was all part of what it took to have a good crop, instead of seeing as I did, as simply mindless work for us slave laborers. My brother didn’t watch the clock like me, he worked the job until it was done, even if it meant working well past sunset.
Like my attitude which translated into a less than exemplary behavior, so the third slave, worked from his own perception of the master which was one of fear, which translated into a cautious and calculating behavior, which meant doing the minimum. There was no work of studying where he might invest the talent, there was no sleepless nights of wondering whether the crop he had planted would bear a harvest, there was no real possibility of a loss, since he minimized his risk. He was dutiful, and safe, but he was not faithful to the will of the master. He operated out of a baseline of scarcity, meaning that there was a limited amount of resources. To him the fact that the master could “reap a harvest where he did not sow” was a complete mystery. He could never understand that a group is stronger than the sum of its parts; meaning that a group of five people often accomplish more together, than those five people working individually. To him a talent was a very measureable amount, which could be calculated with some precision, instead of seeing it as a shifting measurement of the value of people’s work and dreams. But mostly this third slave never understood the master. All he could visualize was the master punishing him if he didn’t bring back the talent left in his care. He could never in his wildest dreams ever imagine that he was supposed to act like the master in using the talent. Even further from what he could imagine was the possibility that if he did use the talent by investing it in some way, say for instance planting a crop, and if the crop failed because of lack of rain or inset infestation, that when called before the master, and feeling that he utterly failed so expecting the worse, that the master might say something to the effect, “I’m glad you tried, I know what it is to try and to lose, I commend you for doing what I would have done.” The other slaves operated out of a baseline of abundance, meaning that as they studied the ways of the master, they too saw that he “reaped where he did not sow,” That in order to do that took a certain amount of risk. They experienced his risk but also his generosity in the very fact that he had divided up his assets among them and left them in charge without a long list of instructions. The master had faith in them which prompted them to have faith in him.
We remind ourselves that it is Jesus who is teaching us here. Jesus the great treasure of God, through whom God took the greatest risk of all, by investing him in a humanity that had time and again produced such a poor harvest as to make it seem ludicrous to invest any of his treasure, to say nothing of his greatest treasure. But that is exactly what God has done in Christ, and for a while there it looked like God had arrived at the losing end of the investment, when Jesus was hung on the cross and died. But God who reaps a harvest from the most unlikely places, raised him from the dead. That investment strategy of our Master prompts our behavior. How we live all depends on how we view God, measuring and holding us accountable or generous and gracious. Both are correct, but it is the heart of God we know in Christ, and that we believe, and so we live in it.