Living Between Timidity and Arrogance
Matthew 25:14-30
by Jim Westmoreland
Our scripture reading this morning is from a familiar passage of scripture that is often called the parable of the Talents. Sometimes, we are very uncomfortable with this parable. Like all the parables the point is for us to find ourselves in the story. Are we the one who received five talents, or two talents or one talent?
Affirming who we are and what we have to offer to God and to others is a difficult struggle for us. We often evaluate others or ourselves as being either timid or arrogant, as having very little self-confidence or as thinking too highly of ourselves.
When I think of arrogance, there are a number of personalities that come to mind, but the one that comes first to my mind is "The Donald," the one with all the buildings named Trump something. From one of his websites called Trump University, he is described: "Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence while expanding his interests in real estate, gaming, sports, and entertainment. He is the archetypal businessman - a dealmaker and an ardent philanthropist."(1) Success is not a turnoff to us but an arrogant attitude that puts others down and looks at everything in terms of "what's in it for me" is a turnoff.
Often, we limit ourselves by our own timidity. There are many messages that play through our minds that say to us that we are not good enough. Our most courageous moments are the speeches we make to the bathroom mirror. A newspaper columnist, Bill Farmer, wrote a story about J. Upton Dickson. He described Dickson as a fun-loving fellow who said he was writing a book for the motivationally challenged entitled "Cower Power."
He also founded a group of submissive people. It was called DOORMATS. That stands for "Dependent Organization of Really Meek and Timid Souls - if there are no objections." Their motto was: "The meek shall inherit the earth - if that's okay with everybody." Their symbol was the yellow traffic light.
A first-grade teacher seated her students in a circle. She asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.
One by one, each child got up and announced, "I'd like to be a nurse like my mother," or "I want to be a banker like my father," or "I want to be a teacher like you, Miss Smith."
The last child to speak was the most shy and timid little boy in the class. He said, "When I get big, I'm going to be a lion tamer in the circus. I'm going to face those animals with my whip and chair and make them leap through hoops of fire and obey all of my commands."
Seeing the disbelieving looks on the faces of his classmates that he could ever act so boldly or bravely, he was quick to reassure them, "Well, of course, I'll have my mother with me."
What does it mean to wait faithfully for the master to return? The parable of the talents addresses this question and leaves us uncertain about how to wait for the return of Christ. Caution and conservatism, values that are usually thought of as positive and healthy, in this case result in the dismissal and condemnation of the servant who buries his single talent in the ground to preserve his master's property. If protection and conservation are not acceptable, what is it then that Jesus expects?
The gospel of Matthew is made up of five sections of Jesus' teachings. This one is in the section that includes Matthew 23-25, and it focuses on Jesus' eschatological teaching, the teaching about the end of time. Perhaps, a more personal way of saying this is, "Given all that we have been given by God, what will we do with it until our time on earth is finished?"
Matthew's images in the parable are dramatic and larger than life. A talent is a very large sum of money, equal to many years of wages for a day servant. Thus the slaves are entrusted with huge sums of money while the master is away. The master is known to be harsh, and he is feared (v. 24ff). He is gone for a long time (v. 19), a fact that both gives the servants time to act in the course of the story itself, and reinforces the action of the parable in the eschatological context -- Jesus will return, but it will not necessarily be immediate and predictable. Upon the master's return, the slaves who build his capital are "good" and "faithful" and they are to be trusted with many more things. In contrast, the servant who buried the lone talent is not only negligent, but "wicked" and "lazy" (v. 26) and "worthless" (v. 30), and he is to be thrown into a darkness that is more than earthly pain.
There is a certain edginess to this parable that doesn't allow us to read it and comfortably move on. There is an unsettling tension that we need to resolve. For one thing, the intent of the one-talent servant is clearly good; he did not squander the master's trust, but he wanted to conserve it and present it when the master returned. He felt it better to preserve his own safety and security by keeping the money safe rather than to risk everything by risking the loss of the money.
It was an accepted financial practice in the day of Jesus to safeguard precious things by burying them. They became hidden treasure, like that of pirates, kept safe until the day it is needed. The one talent servant did nothing unusual by burying the money. He showed only what can be regarded as a high degree of caution. Indeed we may think that he was too cautious, but, overall, we can't really fault him.
However, he is not only rebuked but also punished by the master for his lack of use and return on the money. The issue for the servant in this parable and for us is not security, but activity, not conservatism, but initiative.
These actions of the master in Matthew's version seem out of keeping and at odds with the general tenor of Jesus' message as seen in many of his other actions and stories. The mixture of generous reward and harsh punishment, coupled with the saying of verse 29 about taking from those who have nothing and giving to those who have much reinforces the strangeness of this passage. The saying in verse 29 seems hard and unfair on its face: "For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away."
Each of us has more than enough given to us by God! More than enough faith, more than enough love, more than enough forgiveness. We have been given everything. We have been given the precious gospel of God's grace and mercy, of his healing purpose, of his divine power, each according to what God knows we can do with it. God knows our abilities like the master knew his servants abilities, and God knows that even the least well endowed has been given an incredible amount.
Everyone has the opportunity to hear and to follow and to be faithful -- some will and some will not, either out of disbelief, laziness, fear or other purpose or emotion. In the context of waiting for the master's return described by Jesus, his teachings are inextricably linked to the meaning of faithfulness. There is no one who can do no thing for God! It is those who listen, pay attention, claim their gifts for service and ministry and then actively seek to live their lives between timidity and arrogance who will be rewarded in the coming kingdom.(2) Amen.
Century Christian Church, November 13, 2005 - Sermon by Jim Westmoreland
www.centurychristian.org
1. From Donald Trump's Apprentice blog, http://www.nbc.com/The_Apprentice_4/blog/
2. Homiletics, commentary for "The Long Tail," Nov-Dec, 2005, Volume 17 No 6, p. 27-29.