Abstract
Uncomfortable Words
It’s cheeky of Jesus to give us this parable about energetic trading on the day after our parish fête, when so many of you plainly passed the test! But before we enter too easily into the joy of our master, perhaps we should look again at what this most challenging of parables might be telling us.
It seems to me that the third servant, the one who buries the talent and gets into trouble, is the careful one, the prudent one—the one who shies away from the cut-and-thrust commerce of his master to pursue a steadier, more respectable option. Not for him the master’s harsh financial world of high risk and high return; not for him the thrills and spills of the market, let alone the roulette wheel. ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ is his altogether commendable rule for living, and how many of us were brought up to think just this way? And not just us. As I said when last I preached on these readings, three years ago, the third servant was actually the hero according to an older Christian interpretation of this parable. He was the one who stood up to the uncaring landowner whose profit-oriented business practices were universally despised by the rural poor of the day—those scandalised by big business and sharp operators and huge profits, who opted instead for the quiet life, the familiar, the traditional, expecting no more from life than their fathers had, and their fathers before them.
But, like it or not, the third servant really does appear to be the villain of the piece. And the sharp, uncompromising business leader so feared by the third servant—not only feared but despised, too, I think—well, he appears to be entirely justified in his demands. Jesus regularly shocks us like this with his parables, calling us out of our comfort zone and confronting us with awkward truths that will change our faith if we’re open to them. Such parables are like landmines, determined to upset our pleasant stroll in the garden of benign religion.
And Jesus is making this point as clearly as possible in today’s Gospel. Don’t think of God as some indulgent uncle who’ll do whatever we ask, who’ll stroke and affirm us and never challenge us. And as for us, we’re not to be like those targets of Zephaniah’s righteous anger, in our Old Testament reading today, ‘who rest complacently on their dregs…who say in their hearts, “The Lord will not do good, nor will he do harm”’—those, that is, whose first priority is their own peace of mind; whose highest goal is business as usual and the calm it brings. Think of God, rather, as a hungry tycoon eager to seize the day, urgent about the business of building up his kingdom. Once again, Jesus afflicts the comfortable, with an intentionally confronting and disturbing image of an urgent God who has no interest in preserving our comfort zone and our established religious habits. There is a Christian mission after all! There is a world of entrenched injustice and of spiritual hunger that cries out to heaven, and where is the Christian, where is the Church? Too often the good news of our urgent God is buried in the ground by individual Christian disciples and by Churches.
Now, perhaps the demanding master in our gospel is too close to what you have to face at work, or else he recalls bad memories. I know he does for me. I’ve worked in the past for harsh people who seem to only have an eye for the bottom line—back when I was trying to run a theological college as I believed it should be run with little support in an atmosphere of constant threat. I’ve experienced the fear and anger that many of you’ve experienced in a take-no-prisoners business environment, or else in an unforgiving culture of arrogant managerialism, where the pressure’s on to do things you don’t approve of or can’t see the point of—just like the third servant in today’s Gospel who feared his harsh master and who, in burying his talent, essentially threw up his hands (except that his fate was worse than being passed over, or being made redundant, which are the usual results when we encounter this sort of situation at work). Of course, all this is confronting and unpleasant, but that’s Jesus’ intention: to evoke for us in no uncertain terms that the Kingdom of God will make demands on us that disrupt us and unbalance us, but which we must not resist. This is a warning for all of us as individual Christians who have been given the faith but have done nothing with it—whose life of faith and morals is no more developed than it ever was. And this is a warning to Christian Churches: to not rest on our laurels, keeping everything just as we like it, but to be prepared to roll up our sleeves and work with the talent we’ve been given—to work with our outreach, with our money, with our buildings, with our lay people who yearn for a ministry opportunity, with our liturgy and music. Whether clergy or laity, the challenge is for all of us, and for every Christian parish, diocese and denomination.
A final word. Let’s not forget that challenge and comfort are always inseparable in Christian proclamation. Listen to Paul today in 1 Thessalonians. He shares the message of judgement and urgency that mark all our readings today, as we approach the end of the Christian year in the lead-up to Advent. But Paul offers comfort in the way he commends this challenge to the Church. He assures us that this challenge is not too hard for us: ‘But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober’. Here is Paul, the pastoral leader, at work once again, pressing the challenge of the Gospel but doing so in a way that helps a tough message to find a willing audience. Hence it’s entirely fitting today that the tough—and, yes, genuinely uncomfortable—challenge of Jesus in our Gospel comes to us embedded in the Eucharistic context. It comes to us not as a naked confrontation, then, but as a challenging invitation clothed in the promise of grace and forgiveness.
The challenge is that we beware of being in love with our religious habits and comforts, like the third servant, and that we not underestimate just how no-nonsense our God is about the mission of Christians and Churches—that burying the talent is never an option. But the harsh and urgent God of the parable, and of Zephaniah’s fierce prophecy, is also the pastoral God of St Paul—also the Eucharistic God, who welcomes and feeds us today, so we can face the challenges ahead.