Enter Into the Joy
Good morning. Today’s gospel reading from Matthew 25 has been called “The Parable of the Talents”. It’s also been called one of the most misunderstood, even misused, parables of Jesus. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, but the passage has been interpreted in many different ways, sometimes polar opposites to each other. That’s not surprising, especially for parables that aren’t followed by Jesus’ explanation. And that’s the case for the Parable of the Talents. Which Jesus (or at least Matthew’s telling of it) should supposedly be clear enough that the listeners get the point without further explanation.
So, why are we confused? Part of that may come from the word ‘talent’ itself. Here, talent doesn’t mean one’s natural aptitude or skill – like a talent for math or art. Talent in the biblical context was a weight or unit of currency used by the Romans and Greeks. But even knowing this, the parable’s still not so easy to grasp, if you look at what goes on.
A man is going on a journey and calls three of his workers to come see him, well, actually they are servants or slaves. The boss entrusts each worker with some of his money, according to their ability to manage it. One gets 5 talents, the next 2 talents, and the last gets 1 talent. And off the boss goes for a long trip. When he gets back, of course, he wants to see his staff. The five-talent servant has doubled his share to 10 talents. Well done! Enter into my joy! The two-talent servant also doubled his to 4 talents. Again, well done! Enter into my joy!
But what’s going on with the poor one-talent servant? Well, he admits he just put the money in a hole in the ground to keep it safe from being stolen or lost. Why? Because, he says, I was afraid. I know you’re a ruthless businessman always looking for maximum gain and minimum loss. So, even though I didn’t gain anything for you, I didn’t lose anything either, right? I hope you agree.
No, the boss did not agree. After giving him an immediate tongue-lashing, he even takes away the one talent and gives it to the servant who already has 10. Because, says the boss, those who have proven trustworthy will be given even more; and those who haven’t proven trustworthy will get nothing. Not looking great for #3, is it? But it gets even worse. The now talentless servant is sent to outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
How do we make sense of this parable? Well, first, by remembering it’s a parable –a fictional story to teach a moral lesson. It isn’t ‘true’ per se but within it, lies a great truth. It never happened, but it happens all the time[1]. A parable then isn’t meant to be taken literally, though that doesn’t stop some people from doing it. The Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl liked to tell the story of a Lutheran pastor who was preaching on this passage. One old man in the congregation was particularly worried about the servant who gets thrown out to where there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth. What happens, he asks, if the servant is like me and doesn’t have any teeth? Not missing a beat, the pastor said, “Teeth will be provided.”
On a more serious note, some scholars see this parable as a disturbing message of economic inequality and exploitation. And the only way they can explain it is to turn the parable on its head. They make the 3rd servant the hero, the one who stands up to an oppressive system and pays the price. He could even represent Jesus. I admit this interpretation has its attractions. Certainly, fighting for justice is critical for Christians. But the more I studied the parable, the more unlikely this interpretation seemed.
As modern listeners, we need to understand the symbolism used here. As I said, a talent was a measure for money. In fact, one talent was probably equivalent to 15 to 20 years’ salary for a worker. In other words, big bucks! More wealth than you could ever expect to earn on your own. Which was Jesus’ very point – what the Master gave to each of these servants to use was some unheard-of sum, a ‘superabundance’, a treasure beyond their wildest imagination. So, Jesus’ listeners would pick up right away: this story is about more than money. This is about the reality of the Kingdom of God. This is about what a generous God has given us to put to good use while we have the chance.
Now, once we grasp that, we need to put our focus in the right place. If we only focus on what happens to the 3rd servant, the story only seems to be about judgment. There is a lesson about judgment here for sure, but we can only understand it in light of what happens to the first two servants. After getting outstanding performance reviews, what are the boss’s final words to them? “Enter into the joy of your master.”
Enter into the joy of your master! What does that mean? That when we die, we’ll go to heaven? That’s part of it, but it’s so much more. Entering into the joy of the Master starts now, in this life. It’s what’s been described as ‘spectacular, holy delight’. And it’s ours when we do what pleases the heart of God and bless the world through our actions. That in essence is divine joy. And it’s been intended for you and me since the very beginning of time, when God made us in His own image. As French philosopher Simone Weil said: “Creation was the moment God ceased to be everything so we humans could become something.”
Is this not then what the Parable of the Talents is about? God in Christ handing over power and freedom to us that we might become vessels of His divine pleasure and blessing. That we too can share in the kind of joy that was once uniquely God’s.[2] What a privilege! So, far from being a tale of fear and failure, or inequality and exploitation, this is a story of grace and opportunity. But only if we act on it – before it’s too late. The Master will come back. We will have to account for what we’ve done with what we have.
So now let’s look at that third servant. Part of us might still want to defend him – after all, he only got one talent while the others got five and two. The boss already seems to have marked him out as less capable than the others, so maybe he was an unwitting victim of low expectations and fierce competition. Actually, I confess I have a bit of a soft spot for the one-talent worker. Because that’s how I see myself if I’m honest about it.
Most of my career has been as a ‘missionary’ in Hong Kong. Now I know it’s only by the grace of God and some kind bosses that I got this chance. But when I compare myself to those that I consider five-talent and two-talent missionaries, I can’t help but feel inadequate. When I would go back to the US periodically for reporting to my mission boards, I would hear the marvelous things other missionaries were doing and the rightful praise they were given. I was embarrassed. And then there are other missionaries here in Hong Kong. I deeply admire them too. They are doing marvelous things in their ministry and rightly deserve our praise as well. So where does that leave little ol’ one-talent me in the Kingdom of God? And I still have teeth! Maybe I need to listen to some wisdom from an Indian fable. It’s about a magician and a mouse. You may have heard it before.
A mouse was in constant distress because of its fear of the cat. A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat. But then it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog. Then it began to fear the tiger. So the magician turned it into a tiger. Whereupon it was full of fear for the hunter. At this point, the magician gave up and turned it into a mouse again saying, “Nothing I do for you is going to be of any help because you have the heart of a mouse.”
Friends, whether you or I have the heart of a mouse or the heart of a tiger, whether God has entrusted us with one talent or two talents or five, you know what? It’s enough. It’s more than enough. Pastor Sam Wellumsom says: “God has made you who you are. And, yes, maybe God hasn’t physically given you as much as He has given others. But use what God has given you for the furthering of His kingdom. God has given you the precious blood of Christ poured out for you on the cross. God has given you His name to call upon Him in prayer. God has given you brothers and sisters in Christ who need to be strengthened and encouraged by your words and by your example.
Jesus is your gracious master who takes of His own property, that which is His, that which He earned, and gives it to His servants. He empties the treasuries of His palace and gives it to you [and me]. [That third servant was sadly mistaken. Our] God is not a hard man who reaps where He does not sow. He sows for others. He sows for you [and me] to reap.”[3]
Dearly beloved, the lesson then isn’t merely that we need to live our lives meaningfully and use our gifts well. Satish Joseph says the parable tells us we have the freedom and the ability to either accomplish God’s purpose or not. What is God’s purpose for your life? What is God’s purpose for KUC?
At the end of our lives, every one of us should want to hear ‘Well done, good and faithful servant … Enter into the joy of your master.’ However, there is yet another possibility—that God says to us, ‘You wicked and lazy servant.’ I pray it isn’t so! For God is a good, generous, and trusting God. But God has also placed our destiny in our hands. Eternal life is a gift. But it is also a choice.[4] Which destiny do you choose? Amen.
[1] Richard Sheffield, Preaching the Parables: Series IV, Cycle A: I love to tell the story, p 99
[2] John R. Claypool, “The Talents,” in Stories Jesus Still Tells, pp. 39-40
[3] Sam Wellumson, “Matthew 25:14-30 – How Is Your Master?”, https://pastorsamwise.com/2017/11/19/matthew-2514-30-how-is-your-master/
[4] Fr. Satish Joseph, “The Parable of Eternal Possibilities,” https://wherepeteris.com/the-parable-of-eternal-possibilities/
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creator, Redeemer, and Consoler, Amen.
Good morning, Kowloon Union. My flight arrived five hours ago. On this occasion of returning to a city that is at once so familiar and yet so profoundly changed, it is a gift to come here as my first stop. More than a decade ago, in my senior year in college, I visited Kowloon Union after hearing rumors of its wonderful inclusiveness. Coming here as a wide-eyed new Christian, secluded in a Southern Baptist circle, the beauty of this community was a shot of light. Now, more than a decade later, this moment feels like a homecoming. So, I want to use my time to report what I have learned all these years being away from home, to give an account of the hope that is still in me (1 Peter 3:15).
The Gospel we heard today, on hypocrisy, when not used in an anti-Semitic, supersessionist way, is a reminder that our prolonged membership in a religious tradition does not guarantee the correct perception of God. We can easily misrecognize God. The Christian Bible is filled with stories about such misrecognitions. Jesus can be walking on the water and be mistaken as a ghost. After the resurrection, you can be seeking him in tears, with a broken heart, and you won’t know that he stands right before you, until he calls you, by name.
The two appointed scriptural readings today are particularly helpful for clarifying the two ways in which I have misrecognized God. So, count what I am about to say as a confession in two steps.
We just heard the Psalmist cry: “Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” Without any theological resolution, without any vindicating turn of events, except an expression of trusting in God’s faithful care, the Psalmist declares: “I will go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the lyre.” This abrupt turn from lament to hope has long been a staple in Christian spiritual literature. The Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is known for the famous line “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote a lesser-known poem during a period of melancholia. The poem began by protesting: “Why do sinners’ ways prosper?” The protest resolves itself with a plea: “My God, O lord of life, send my roots rain.”[1]
In my early years of faith, I did not appreciate these messy cries of protest and lament. I preferred a God of neat systems and closed metaphysics. “The God of philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Issac.”[2]That was my first misrecognition, aligning my desire too closely with the ambitions of the academy. The hall of higher learning often maintains a hierarchy that favors contemplation over action, the theoretical over the practical, the universal over the particular, as if a monumental book of theology, a famed professor, can become “a key to all the mythologies,” unlocking all divine truths.[3]
Hiding behind this familiar academic pride is a less recognizable and yet more pervasive heresy among us, the heresy of denying the Incarnation, denying Christ’s full humanity, out of the fear of our own bodies.[4]
The Christian faith shatters these hierarchies, chastens our fear of bodies. The Incarnation units what is most unlikely to be united, violating our basic sense of what can or cannot be intimately united, uniting the extremes of two things: divinity and humanity.
Christians who believe in a God incarnate should not seek God in some pristine, ethereal realm beyond the material plane. This embodied life, in the here and now, is the only life we have, the only condition for nurturing our love for God. We need to attend to the body, to its needs, to see its signs as the source of knowledge. This is no sentimental glorification of the self. That’s simply how Jesus taught. Jesus’s teaching was not a spiritual instruction at a nice, safe, sanitized distance. He healed by putting his hands in the ears of a deaf man and spat and touched the tongue of the man with a speech impairment. Jesus asked us to remember him not by an idea, a line in book, a school of thought, but by eating and drinking, by this bread and this wine: “Do this in remembrance of me.” If we are so busy with climbing up the spiritual ladders, we might miss the one who has already come down to meet us.
Another way our body might help is the bare fact that they are the humble tools, sometimes the only tools, for us to approach the divine in dark nights of the soul. In these years of wandering alone in America, at times when pain became physically manifest, it was often the things discounted by the high doctrine that brought me consolation: holding a cross, touching a rosery, putting a picture of Jesus in the pocket, or bringing an icon to bed, petting it, feeling its closeness. That is more powerful than any grand formulations of theodicy.
The second way I’ve misrecognized God is the wish to locate God in certainty. For a long time, I took comfort in searching for God in the things I already knew. The Western theological academy can make God into a matter of mastery, possession, and control.[5] But God is not anyone’s tool, not anyone’s toy; God is by definition beyond this world, beyond our ability to grasp. God’s thoughts and ways are far above us, preceding us, exceeding everything there is. Jesus’s teaching is not about preserving whatever little we already have; his teaching sets us in motion to approach the One who is always doing a new thing.” In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says:
But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. 9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven. 10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
What a remarkable transvaluation of values! In just a few sentences, Jesus overturns some of the most fundamental human certainties: we are so sure that only the biological family commands our utmost care; we are so sure that we are self-contained individuals separated from the fate of our sisters and brothers; we are so sure that “making it” means we no longer need to serve; we are so sure that exaltation comes through self-assertion and overpowering. Jesus repudiates all these certainties of biology, isolated self, and the strict correspondence between power and rank.
We know too well that history is mostly made up of apparent losers, swimming against the stream of their times, never seemed to get anywhere. We need to be led to a future which our bare eyes can’t see: a future in which “what will finally come will establish once and for all what could never be predicted: that our efforts were not in vain, were not for nothing, that our efforts to bring in another world did not, as they appeared to, come to nothing, vanish without consequence.”[6] This is the reason why we have only the Messiah as our true instructor, who calls our repentance. The meaning of “repentance,” after all, means “turning,” turning around to see God as God truly is, not as God wished by us.
The whole of the Christian story is about unexpected surprises. None of us were there to expect that God would create and love a world that is finite, frail, and sure to die. None of us could expect an infinite God to incarnate to the humble material world, suffering an execution. And none of us could expect what is to come: “No one has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God.” (1 Corinthians 2:9). The whole of the Christian story—creation, incarnation, redemption—is about us being desired, being desired by God, being invited into the very divine life.
The Eucharist table is one such place to be surprised, to experience being desired by God. It is a place to still see a vision at a time when neoliberal capitalism promises only sameness, repetition, and boredom; it is a place to see a vision when our faith seems to have become tired, comfortable, and no longer startling us.
I remember such a vision when I was a seminarian. In the early 2010s, the issue of same-sex desire was fiercely debated in the Episcopal community. One Wednesday afternoon, a student, let’s call him Jerry, spoke some old toxic theology that was hard for all queer students to hear. I resented him. Hours later, at the evening service, we were placed together again in the same place, this time around the Eucharist table. Watching him approaching the table, keening, readying himself for the bread and wine, I suddenly saw him transfigured in the Vesper light. In previous class conversations, Jerry had intimated his experience with an atypical body, and had used his own long singlehood to argue for the viability of mandatory celibacy for queer persons. Jerry’s body is not considered conventionally beautiful. He must have been deemed undesirable by many who are very certain about what beauty is. He had difficulty walking. As I watched him straining towards the table, every movement a struggle, it occurred to me that he might know something about carrying an “unwanted body,” a lonely body that knew no touch of a lover, no “entering into the body’s grace” through a tender kiss or warm embrace.[7] He might have more in common with those of us whose bodies have been wrongfully considered sinful, tainted, and unwanted. It was an oddly beautiful vision: watching his “undesirable” body, capable of such misguided speech, being infused with a splendid light as he keened and partook the communion. The vision lasted only a few brief minutes: all of us, the confused, divided, mistreated, and hurting bodies all swept into One Body in Christ, into wounded, resurrected, and consecrated body. I wondered: Might not he join us the despised queer students in declaring to the world what Peter did in Acts: ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane?” (Acts 10:15)
As we prepare our hearts for communion, let us enter prayerfully into a realm where the most precious food is given to us as a sheer gift, rather than earned through competitive effort. We come here hungry, in want, because the world has innumerable ways to make our inferiority known to us, innumerable ways to tell us that we don’t belong. In this moment of appalling horrors in Gaza, we urgently long for the wounded bodies pulled out from rubbles, their lungs cleared, their water refreshed, and their aids to pass through. We need the Incarnate Jesus to contain our despair, to heal our wounds, to pick us up, and to carry us. Amen.
[1] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend.” Colloquized for sermon.
[2] Reversing Pascal’s Pensées here.
[3] Invoking Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
[4] I am saying that so many of us are ethical Docetists, if not full-blown Manicheans.
[5] Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging.
[6] Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, 165.
[7] Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace.”
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