Reading: Matthew 25:14-30
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom
with a harsh ruler. The harsh ruler has a daughter, to whom he has given an
enchanted spyglass, through which she can see anything in the world, in an
instant. Any suitor who wants to marry the princess has three chances to evade
her sight. And if they don’t, they are killed…
And in the forest at the edge of the
kingdom, so the story goes, there lives a poor hunter, who journeys to the city
to accept the challenge, but insists he must be allowed to hide not three
times, but four. The first time, he is taken up into the clouds by a powerful
eagle. The second time, he is covered by the belly of an old goat. The third
time, he is swallowed by an enormous pike. But every time, the princess with
the spyglass eventually finds him. The fourth time, a fox helps him dig a
tunnel, right underneath the princess’s chambers, and he hides, unfound, just
beneath her feet. When he eventually reveals himself, the enchantment is
broken, the princess leaves the spyglass, the city and her cruel father behind,
and she and the hunter live in a small hut in the woods, happily ever after.
A fairy tale, old and new, passed on through the work of the English mythologist Martin Shaw. What does it mean? Well, myths and fairy tales don’t give up their mysteries as easy as that. There’s no simple right answer. But they do invite us to listen for the echoes, the resonances, the entanglements with our stories, with our places, our times; the invitations hidden in the story for us…
‘A people tyrannized by a magical
spyglass…’ The
challenge to disappear from the all-seeing eye. Where might that ring bells for
us? ‘We can barely put our phones on
the table, let alone disappear,’ Martin Shaw notes, And yet, ‘in all
this despair, there comes a response…’ We might have something to learn
here, ‘[n]ot from the eagle, not from the goat, not from the fish, but from
the fox. The single place the spyglass can’t see is [right] underneath you. It
can’t see what’s on your prayer mat. Dig down and deep and you, too, … will
disappear. [The] prayer mat is your root system, your ancestral underpinning…
If you don’t know the ground underneath you, you could be a sitting duck. But
if you do, you could offer informed resistance.’[1]
Learn from the fox. Get to know the
earth beneath your feet. Dig down into it. Go invisible. Resist the tyranny of
the all-seeing spyglass.
‘Where is this all going?’ you might
be forgiven for wondering. And what has any of it got to do with today’s gospel
reading?
Bear with me, if you can. Because there’s
a connection. A deep, underground connection. Deep in the subterranean,
mycelial networks that knit together the root systems of all the trees in the
forest. Let’s follow the trail together.
‘The Parable of the Talents’. A
parable, we’ve been taught since Sunday School, that’s about being a good
steward. Investing what we’ve been given – our ‘talents’, our passions, gifts
and skills – boldly and creatively for the sake of the Kingdom. Be like the
first and second slaves, the ‘good and trustworthy’ stewards of the Master’s
wealth. And not like the ‘wicked’, ‘lazy’ and ‘worthless’ third slave, who ‘buries’
his talent, and rightfully gets his comeuppance.
Of course, we don’t dwell for too
long on the comeuppance. We don’t want to frighten the children. We don’t want
to get too caught up in fear-mongering and guilt trips. We stick as much as we
can to the positive message, the ‘joy of the Master’ in the ingenuity of
stewards one and two. Be like them, we tell ourselves, and God will be well pleased
with us too.
But there is a problem with all of
this. At least three problems in fact.[2]
One problem is that Jesus’ parables
are never as straightforward as simple stories with an obvious ‘moral’. They’re
always more slippery than that, more elusive, mysterious. They’ve got something
of the fox-like cunning of myths and fairy stories, that won’t ‘explain’
easily, despite the best efforts of the best of our Sunday School teachers.
Another problem is that, when we pause
and think about it for more than a moment, the Master in the story doesn’t
sound a huge amount like God. A harsh man, who reaps where he doesn’t sow, and
gathers where he hasn’t scattered seed. Who takes, in other words, the produce
of the labour of others, and who reacts with anger and violence to those who
defy him. It’s not, I hope, the God we were taught about in Sunday School, and
it’s not, I hope and pray, the God we believe in today. And that is, perhaps,
because the Master in the story was never intended to be a figure for God.
The third problem with the parable, is
that despite what we learnt in Sunday School, and despite the name it’s
acquired in most of our Bibles, it isn’t about ‘talents’ (as we know them) at
all. It’s about money. Huge sums of money, in fact. One ‘talent’, in the
economy of Jesus’ day, was around 100 pounds-weight of solid gold, around 20
years wages for your average labourer. Two talents, let alone five ‘talents’,
then, are more than what most people could imagine earning in their entire lifetime.
So what is going on in this
story?
This is where it helps if we re-root
the story in its original context, and try to hear it through the ears of its
original hearers.
Because to Galilean peasant farmers, and
to the urban poor who were once peasant farmers but had their land dispossessed
and were cast out to find some kind of livelihood in the cities, the Master in
the story is a familiar figure: one of the elite class, an absentee landlord
whose drive for increasing his personal wealth ruthlessly seizes peasant land,
reduces those landless peasants to dependent labourers, and bleeds the earth
itself dry.
And not just the Master of the
parable, but the stewards too, would have been well-known to Jesus’ hearers.
Yes, slaves of the Master’s house, but senior staff in the household hierarchy,
key agents in managing the Master’s wealth and doing the Master’s dirty work.
How did they make a profit on the money under their management? Making loans to
peasant farmers at extortionate rates of interest, and taking their lands as
collateral when the debts were unpaid.
Jesus’ audience would know this
stuff, from bitter, personal experience of being on the receiving end. The Master’s
stewards would have been hated just as much as the Master himself.
All of which would make the third
steward not so much the fool of the story, but the hero!
By burying the Master’s talent in the
ground, he’s opting out: he’s refusing to be part of the exploitation racket
the Master is running. He’s returning the precious metal safely to the earth
from which it came, where it will do no more harm to the poor of the land.
In his response to the Master, he’s
speaking out: he’s articulating what everyone has always known but has been too
fearful to say out loud. He challenges the Master’s exploitative practices. He
blows the whistle on the Master’s ruthlessness.
But by opting out, and speaking out,
he is – as everyone knows he would be, and as whistle-blowers always are –
thrown out. And here’s where the story gets really dark – and really
interesting…
As biblical scholar Barbara Brown
Taylor reminds us, ‘How you hear a parable has a lot to do with where you are
hearing it from.’
‘As for this worthless slave,’ says
the Master, ‘throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth.’
As far as the Master is concerned,
this is the consequence of him kicking the disobedient steward out of his
household. The Master’s household is the Master’s universe. Ordered by him, centred
around him, run entirely for his benefit and his pleasure. Why would anything
outside his household, in the Master’s mind, be anything other than nothingness,
darkness and despair?
For many of Jesus’ hearers, who knew all
too well the soul-crushing oppression of poverty, exploitation and
dispossession, it’s a bit more complex. They may well recognise something of
the Master’s description in their daily lives: plenty of grief and struggle and
precariousness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, never far from the cliff-edge of
overwhelm and despair. But a resilience and a solidarity too, mutual care and
support and community, even – or especially – in the hardest of times. How
might they have reacted to the third steward’s expulsion? With a certain amount
of schadenfreude, perhaps – at one of the hated managers being brought down to
earth? Now he knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of this stuff! See
how he copes having to survive in a life like ours! He won’t last five minutes…!
But what of those who heard the
parable, who had more in common not with the Master, or with the exploited
peasants, but with the household steward himself? What of those who find themselves
‘stuck in the middle’: living in the Master’s house, but uneasy with the unjust,
exploitative systems in which they are complicit? What of those – and I’m
taking a bit of a punt here – who might find themselves sitting in positions
something like our own…?
The idea of ‘opting out’ and ‘speaking
out’ is scary. Blowing the whistle on the structures and systems and practices
and habits on which we depend is profoundly unsettling at best, at worst unimaginable.
But what if this is the challenge of the parable? What if this is it’s unnerving
invitation? What if it’s seeking to direct our attention downwards: to take the
shiny, weighty lump of gold and to let it go, to bury it safely back in the
earth from which it came, and in which it can do less harm to the exploited, dispossessed
and wretched of the earth? What if the parable is inviting us to speak out, to
challenge, to blow the whistle where we see the world as we know it is not as
it should be, where corruption and greed and oppression go unchallenged and
unchecked? What if the parable is inviting us to notice the structures of the
Master’s house within us, shaping our very identities and status, our behaviours
and compulsions, our wants and needs? What if the parable wants to bring us
down to earth ourselves, throw us onto the compost heap with all the others
discarded by the world’s oppressive systems, decompose our rigid walls of security
and defence, and bring us face to face with what one recent theologian has
named ‘the dark night of the soil’…
I have a hunch. I can’t say for sure,
because I’ve only caught glimpses of it. But it might just be that that dark place
is also the beginnings of liberation. It might just be that, as our eyes adjust
in the darkness, that we might discover that we’re not on our own, but are in
the company of a multitude of people who look a bit like Jesus. It might just be,
that slipping from the visibility of the all-seeing spyglass, we find ourselves
seen and known and loved, maybe even for the first time. It might just be that
as outcasts from the Master’s House, we find ourselves invited into a new kind
of community. As those who thought we’d lost everything, we find ourselves
welcomed around a different kind of table. As those who felt the world had
ended, we find ourselves being taken by the hand of a little child, and led
gently into the kin-dom of God.
‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer
Liberation Front’ (Wendell
Berry)
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.
Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith
in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -
put your ear close,
and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.
Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts…
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark a false trail,
the way you didn't go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
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