Pentecost 25 – 2026
Matthew 25:14-30
Marian Free
In the name of God, Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver. Amen.
A question that I often ask myself is: When and how did we turn a God of love into a God of condemnation, a God who accepts us unconditionally into a God who constantly criticises us for not coming up to standard, a God who freely gives us everything into a God who refuses to give us everything unless we conform to a narrow set of parameters? It’s a question I ask because so often, we take God’s gifts and turn them into demands. For reasons I only partially understand, we simply cannot believe that God gives us something for nothing. As a consequence, we steadfastly refuse to believe that God doesn’t have standards that we have to achieve or a score card against which we are measured. So often, when we read our scripture, we turn the positives into negatives. We fail to see that all of scripture is God’s love letter to humanity, and instead read and hear it as God’s judgement on our failure to live up to God’s expectations.
This is particularly obvious in these three weeks leading up to Advent. In Year A, the year of Matthew, our lectionary confronts us with three very challenging parables – the wise and foolish young women, the landowner and the talents, and the sheep and the goats. All three parables are often interpreted as being about earning brownie points, building up enough credit so that we can gain entry into eternity – making sure we have enough oil (being good enough), increasing the talents we have been given (increasing the ways in which we serve God), and making sure that we belong with the sheep (doing enough to help others – the sick, the poor, the homeless). The parables seem to be saying: Be ready, do enough good deeds, be good and care for others or else!!!
We can use these parables to prove the point that God is an exacting, judgmental God who is more ready to cast us into hell than to welcome us into heaven, that God is a God who is constantly expecting us to fail so that God can belittle, demean or exclude us. Behave, be good, obey the rules or God will not love and accept you, worse still, if you do not have enough oil, increase your talents, and feed the hungry, God abandon you for all time.
Certainly, these parables challenge us to be prepared for Jesus’ return, to be ready to joyfully greet him. The question is does readiness mean living in constant fear, always feeling that we are not trying hard enough, or does being ready simply living faithfully in whatever time we have?
Last week we saw that readiness was about relationship, I believe that that theme is extended in today’s parable which suggests that readiness has to do with our trust in God and God’s trust in us.
Before I begin, let me remind you that this is a parable – a story that is intended to make a point. Its individual parts don’t have to make sense. If they did, we would have to try to make sense of why a landowner would entrust three of his slaves with his fortune. Also, we might make the mistake of believing that Jesus thinks that God reaps where God does not sow and gathers where God does not scatter!
So, we have a landowner – a very wealthy landowner who, on going away for an extended time gives (without strings) three of his slaves a vast amount of money. He gives no instructions as to what they are to do with the money, he just gives them each the amount he thinks they can manage. This amount is not inconsequential. Just one gold talent was worth something like $725,000. That means that ten talents were the equivalent of $7,25 million dollars today. $7.25 million given to one slave, half that to a second and one fifth to a third. It is a sum most of us could not imagine having.
Two of the slaves – the two who understand the enormity of the responsibility that has been bestowed on them and the trust in which they are held, respond in kind. They invest the money so that when the landowner returns, they will be able to demonstrate that they were willing to take risks because of his faith in them. These two understand the generosity of the landowner, and his trust in them. They have no fear of his reaction.
The third, the one who really doesn’t understand the landowner let alone understand that he could be trusted by the landowner, buries the money and returns only the sum that he received. Being fearful and insecure, he has projected onto the landowner his own fears. He is cautious and anxious. He is overwhelmed that the landowner has entrusted him with so much and is unwilling to believe that the landowner really has confidence in him. He seems to think that it is all some sort of trick.
Just as the parable about the ten young woman was about knowing and being known, so the parable of the talents is less about the increase of the talents and more about knowing and trusting the landowner, as the landowner knows and trusts the slaves.
The message I think is this: If we know and trust in God’s love for us, we blossom and grow, the gifts that we have flourish and develop, and our lives are expansive and rich. If on the other hand we live in fear of God, believing that we can never live up to God’s expectations, our lives become narrow and limited. We wither and decay and the gifts that we have stagnate and collect dust.
We believe in a God who loves us unconditionally, and who believes in us despite all our short-comings. In the knowledge of that love, we are free to be ourselves and to grow into the person whom God knows us to be.
Let us never turn God into a mean and exacting being, who expects more of us than we have to give and who demands of us that which we cannot possibly become, but let us understand that God is generous and expansive, entrusting us with gifts and trusting us to use what we have to become whom we are meant to be.
Tags: being expansive rather than living in fear, flourishing as opposed to withering, growing as oppossed to stagnating, judgment, parables, talents, unconditional love
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