Dear Friends
This week’s reading Matthew 25:14-30 traditional interpretation is fairly obvious: take what you’ve been given and do something with or else it’s outer darkness for you. But I’d again like to ask a few other questions. Actually, just one in particular: why are we so sure the landlord is as awful as the third servant makes out?
I mean, we have no explicit description of him as good or bad prior to the third servant’s speech. More than that, the first two servants do not seem afraid. They take the money they have been given and go out and trade that is, they go out and risk their wealth in the marketplace. Perhaps that was driven by desperation, but there’s no indication of that.
They seem to return their profit to their master with delight and he, in turn, praises them lavishly, rewards them with even greater responsibility, and invites them to enter into his joy.
We might also consider the nature of the master’s charge. He gives the servants talents to invest. We often gloss over that word, but a talent represented about 15 years of income for servants such as these. That is, whether you had received five, two, or a single talent, you would have just been entrusted with a huge amount of wealth. And while the first two servants seem to take that as a sign of their master’s confidence and affirmation and hence risk that wealth seeking to do well by his trust, it’s only the third servant who is paralyzed by fear. So the question I want to ask is why we take his description of the master as accurate and truthful and disregard all these other clues?
Now, I know, the main reason might be because the master seems to confirm the servant’s judgment with his response. But does he? Notice, first, that the master replies to the servant’s charge in the form of a question, “You knew, did you…?” That might be a critique as much as a confirmation, challenging the servant’s assessment. He might also, for that matter, have decided to play the role the third servant assigned him: “If you thought I was so awful, why didn’t you at least invest the money in a bank. Fine, then, I will be the person you’ve described: take his talent and throw him out.”
Might it be that this is less a warning about the threatening nature of God and more a caution that in too many of our relationships we tell self-fulfilling prophecies? That we are limited by the premature judgments we render about the character of others? And that this can be true even in our relationship with God?
So when we imagine God primarily as an enforcer of rules, we get hung up by the legalism of religion. When we visualize God as stern and prone to punishment, we come to believe that everything bad in our lives is punishment from God. When we see God as arbitrary and capricious, that’s what we experience, a fickle and unsympathetic God who meets our expectations. At the same time, when we see God as loving, we find it easier to love ourselves and others. When we see God as gracious, we lead more grace-filled lives. When we recognize God as forgiving, we live in the joy of receiving and giving forgiveness. What you see in life is way too often just what you get.
So maybe I’ll close by asking a second question: what kind of God do you see?
Solomzi