On the parable of the talents (Mt 25)

“The possessions of the negligent belong of right to those who will endure toil and danger.” (Demosthenes)

Increase is the fruit of labor, and labor is the fruit of loyalty, and loyalty is the fruit of belief in the kindness of God.

Whoever works will have increase, for work, though it involves risk, by nature eventually produces increase. The faithful servant is not he who has the best fortune in his investments, but who has faithfully worked at them. And in the long run, the investments will always fair the best which have been labored over the most.

If one loves and trusts God, one will labor for him. He will loyally employ the treasures and powers he has been entrusted, for to love is to show love by action. Consider three men: the overseer who is set in charge of a town, the son who is put in charge of a flock, and the tenant who is given a house and grounds. Each is loyal and faithful if he does what is needful—to keep order in the town and see to its maintenance and development, to keep the flocks and let them calf, to maintain the house and grounds. If each lets what is under his charge just “be”, and the master comes to find the town full of unrest, having a negligent overseer, or the flock picked by wolves and diminished, having a negligent shepherd, or the house rotting and overgrown, having a negligent landlord, then who will the lazy servant fool when he makes obeisance? Even if the town is quiet, and the flock of the same number of sheep, and the house unweathered, the servant will be guilty of neglecting the natural potential with which he was entrusted. “What have you done these many years?” the master will ask, and the servant will have no answer but that he pandered about in his own whiles, acting as if he had not been entrusted with anything of value, and that his master’s business was none of his. It is the natural lot of man to labor, to draw the kinetic out of the potential. The man knew, as he betrays by his burbling excuses, that to neglect the potential, to merely sit, was disloyal. Rightly will the master say, “You should have at least put the money in the bank,” or “You should have at least appointed someone else the deputy” so that through natural maintenance, natural increase could have afforded. He has wasted his master’s resources by not caring for them, and by doing so has spoken beyond all his excuses that he does not care for his master either.

What caused this seed of disloyalty and defiant negligence? It had something to do with how the wicked servant saw his master. This is evident from what he says when the master returns: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, and I was afraid and hid your money in the ground.” What does he mean? Jamieson, Fausett, and Brown write, “’The sense is obvious: ‘I knew thou wast one whom it was impossible to serve, one whom nothing would please: exacting what was impracticable, and dissatisfied with what was attainable.’” Gill says that the servant sees his master as “either a covetous man, that is desirous of that which does not belong to him; or an hard master that requires work to be done, and gives neither tools nor matter to work with; like the Egyptian task masters, who demanded the full tale of bricks, but gave no straw.” Benson paraphrases, “And I was afraid — To risk thy money in trade, lest by some accident or other it should be lost, or miscarry under my management, and thou shouldst show me no mercy. Or rather, Lest, if I had improved my talent, I should have had more to answer for.” He is afraid of failure since he sees the master as harsh, and he is resentful of success since he sees his master as selfish and exacting, likely to unfairly repossess any fruits of his labor. As Ellicott says, this belief about his master poisons his ability to faithfully serve him. “[The servant] had never seen in his master either generous love or justice in rewarding,” but saw him as “arbitrary, vindictive, pitiless…and that thought, as it kills love, so it paralyses the energy which depends on love.”

Jesus tells his story on the premise that faith without works is dead; loyalty without investment is not. This is not an ultimatum, a threat, or a command to go work for God; it is simply a fact of life, which we all know if we search our hearts. It is hard not to get caught up in the “faith, or works?” debate, but we all know deep down that they are a unified whole. It is tempting to read this story, or contemplate this fact, and jump to the thought, “I had better go hustle or I’ll be like the wicked servant.” But faithfulness doesn’t start with the act of obedience. It ends up there, yes, but it starts in the heart. The servants’ beliefs cause their fates: the wicked servant’s belief that the master was harsh and unjust made him unwilling to risk his talents, resulting in disloyal sloth, whereas the faithful servants’ belief in the fair and forgiving character of the master frees them to risk the money in trade, resulting in returns, the fruit of labor and evidence of faithfulness.

Before I ask myself, “What am I doing for God?” I ought to ask myself, “How do I feel toward God? How do I believe he feels toward me? Do I trust him? Do I love him like David’s men loved him, loyal to the last?” Out of the confidence that our master is not harsh, but generous in love and faithful in rewarding, and out of a longing for his return, then we feel the surging of potential, the great wide-open life before us, full of beauty, full of people, of adventure to be lived and sacrifice to be made. We feel the deep abiding joy of God that is always beckoning us out of ourselves into the world and others, and we cannot help but go and trade.

Wheat and weeds

Jesus tells us the story of the wheat and the tares. A farmer sows wheat into a field, but his enemy comes by night and sows weeds (tares) too. When the plants sprout, the farmer’s servants say, “Master, didn’t you sow wheat? There are tares too.” The farmer says, “It must have been my enemy!” The servants ask if he wants them to root up the tares, but he replies, “No, because you’d uproot some of the wheat too. Leave it all until harvest time, then you can harvest the tares and the wheat separately.”

We are all seeds in the process of becoming full-grown souls. Many philosophers say that the point of hardship is the forging of virtue, that life’s hard journey is about proving, and even creating, our love for God and man. Becoming people ready for the glories of heaven is a process that takes until our last breath. God is our potter, and the point of our justification before him is more the beginning than the end. He shapes us relentlessly into saints. But the opposite is also true: the man who has rejected God spends his life fortifying against the truth, constructing self-defenses and self-justifications. With each act of the selfish or lustful heart, the heart becomes darker still.

But the things that proceed from the mouth come from the heart, and those defile a man. – Matthew 15:18

It is a vicious cycle. When we are done on earth, our deeds and decisions will have crafted to perfection that character that once lay only nascent in our hearts, whether good or evil. Then our true colors will show in the court of the great judge.

Even a child makes himself known by his acts, by whether his conduct is pure and upright. – Proverbs 20:11

We will have become who we are becoming. Our identity will be consumate. When our souls are full-grown, God will judge us and divide good from evil.

Wheat and weeds have no ability to change, to veer off from their inevitable maturation. But the glorious and fearful gift of being human is that, ever since Adam and Eve, we have had the choice to believe what we want, whether God’s word or lies, and consequently to become who we want to be. So, who am I becoming? Who do I want to be? Let me act today toward becoming a full-grown son of the kingdom of God.

The lion’s pit (a parable)

In an old kingdom there once was a man who was convicted of murdering a woman. The man was a wealthy man, and requested that bail be set, but, because of the seriousness of the crime, the king ruled that there should be neither payment nor parole, and ruled that the convict was to suffer capital punishment by being cast into the den of a hungry lion.

The man’s best friend, who was as close to him as a brother, stood up in the back of the court and cried out, “Please, O King, let me be thrown into the pit instead of him!”

But the king refused, saying, “This man must bear his own penalty, according to his own deeds. It is not fitting to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free.”

The friend replied, “At least let me be thrown into the pit also.” The king dismissed the proposition, but when the friend would not stop crying out and begging to be thrown in, he relented and said, “If you wish to die needlessly, so be it.”

So the man and his friend were thrown into the pit, and the lion awoke and approached hungrily. But the man’s friend stood in front of him, and as the lion lunged to attack him, thrust a sharp shard of rock up into the lion’s throat. The friend fell, torn to pieces by the angry throes of the lion, but then, moments later, the lion died also.

Many witnesses saw this, and, being moved by the sacrifice of the friend, and seeing that the lion was dead and could no longer kill the man, they called for the man be set free from the pit. But the prosecutor disagreed, saying, “The blood is still on his hands, he must still die.” The king replied, “You agreed to the sentence. His penalty was to be thrown to the lion, and thrown to the lion he was. Let him remain until morning, and then his sentence is passed.”

This is why I believe in Christianity: We all are destined for the pit, for the wages of sin is death. He who has hated his brother has murdered him, and he who has looked on a woman with lust has committed adultery (Matthew 5). Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins (Leviticus 17:11), and the payment shall be life for a life (Deuteronomy 19:21). But Jesus, who is fully God and fully man, has rescued us from death. He became man to enter into the pit with us, because only a man could meet death. He was and had to have been God, because only God could defeat death.

[Told at the Fawakih Program 2010, edited 2016]