KCL Chapel
Matthew 25:14-30
Autumn term Sermon Series
4th November 2015
THE VALUES OF THE KINGDOM
As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will
be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
+In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen.
Like most Deans of faculties, I spend much of my time in meetings discussing
returns on investments, how we can make the organisation (also known as a
university) more entrepreneurial. Universities are now businesses like any other
– but at least university managers (and perhaps especially those at a college that
boasts an Anglican foundation) can take solace in the reading we’ve just heard,
which we might describe as a prosperity gospel.
I call it a prosperity gospel because we have here a story about someone who
makes an 87.5% return on his investment: if we remember that a talent was the
equivalent of roughly twenty years of wages for an ordinary working person,
then in today’s money we could say that the master entrusts £2 million to three
slaves and gets £3.75 million in return. I call this a prosperity gospel because
the master praises the first two slaves, who make such an extraordinarily
healthy return by doing business and making money with their money – a
virtuous circle indeed – while the slave who does nothing with his share of the
money is evidently a lazy fool who gets thrown into ‘the outer darkness, where
there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’: Deans of under-performing
faculties, beware!
When I’m not worrying about my bottom line, I spend a fair bit of my time as
Dean encouraging people to make the most of the skills, the talents, the
expertise they have – and I enjoy congratulating people when I see their
creativity bearing fruit. Here, too, today’s reading has something interesting to
say to us. The English word ‘talent’ comes from the Greek talanton, which is
the unit of measurement at the heart of this parable. Through God’s grace we all
have different gifts, and it is incumbent on us to use those gifts boldly in the
service of the Kingdom of God, for God wants spiritual entrepreneurs, risktakers for the Gospel. And we all know what happens to someone who doesn’t
make the most of their talents: ‘Throw him into the outer darkness, where there
will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Whether it is about money or skills, then, this is a parable of judgement and
warning: the Lord will return; the Kingdom of God is coming – and Jesus tells
this story to explain what it will be like. The values of the Kingdom, it seems,
will be individual success and personal fulfilment, being the best we can be; the
Kingdom of God will be a kingdom of strivers, not skivers.
Which all sounds worryingly familiar and rather exhausting, frankly.
But is that really what this passage is about? How we read this parable should
affect how we live, and so it repays further reflection. Where are we in this
story? With which character do we most readily sympathise? And where is God
in all this?
To try to answer that last question first, I imagine most of us will interpret the
master in the parable – the kyrios – as an allegorical figure representing God.
We may think of other parables where the master or landowner or father figure
represents God: the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, or the parable of
the workers in the vineyard, which Liz Russell preached on last week, where the
landowner displays divine generosity by paying those who worked for just a
short time the same as those who worked all day.
But that’s not the kind of master we have in the parable of the talents. This is no
loving, forgiving, merciful master. On the contrary, he is harsh, exacting,
greedy, at least according to the third slave: ‘Master, I knew that you were a
harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not
scatter seed’ – a description that the master doesn’t actually challenge or
disagree with. But is God really in the business of making a profit, of making
the rich richer and the poor poorer? Is God really in the business of humiliating
people, of testing people and then condemning those who fall short, of casting
people into ‘the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of
teeth’? What kind of God is God?
Whatever our view of God, it’s hard not to sympathise with the third slave in
the parable: he seems so hard done by. I suspect the community for which the
author of Matthew was writing would have thought the third slave had actually
done the right thing, the sensible thing, which was to look after his master’s
money by burying it. Burying money wasn’t as odd as it might sound:
remember that parable Jane Speck preached about two weeks ago, where Jesus
compares the Kingdom of God to treasure buried in a field. In Jesus’ day burial
was the best means of safeguarding money which had been given to you on
trust; the idea of speculating with it – as the first two slaves do – could well
have struck Jesus’ contemporaries as rather irresponsible.
The other endearing thing about the third slave is his boldness. Though he says
he is afraid, he shows great courage in exposing the master for what he really is,
in speaking truth to power. This is a parable about a servant who boldly refuses
to participate in an exploitative, selfish, destructive system – and who does so at
great personal cost to himself.
Which all sounds strangely familiar.
What happens to the third servant anticipates the story told in the chapter of
Matthew that follows this parable. It is the story of Good Friday, the story of
another servant who speaks truth to power, and who is broken, rejected, cast
out, punished by those in power. Where is God in this parable? Perhaps in that
third slave. And that in turn would mean that there’s a quite unexpected
message in this parable for us and for the Church as a whole: the servant may
end up in the outer darkness, but that is precisely where we and the Church are
called to be, on the margins, in the midst of the tears and the suffering,
demonstrating day by day that the ‘economy’ of Jesus is one where the hungry
are fed, the stranger is welcomed, the naked are clothed, the sick are cared for,
and all people are welcomed to the feast. ‘My kingdom is not of this world’,
Jesus said (John 18:36): the kingdom values are not the world’s values; they’re
about giving, not having; they’re about compassion, not conflict; they’re about
the radical equality that comes from our all being the children of God, not the
differences and divisions caused by wealth, race or nationality.
So one way of making sense of the parable of the talents is to say that through it
Jesus shows us what the Kingdom of God will not be like: the master’s values
are the very opposite of the kingdom values that Jesus invites us to embrace.
This can be seen, then, as a radically ironic parable, an enigmatic parable that
surprises and unsettles us and sabotages our easy preconceptions by meaning
the opposite of what it says.
When I’m not being Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, I’m a Professor
of French Literature – and I work in particular on Voltaire, France’s greatest
satirist, who excels at subverting and destabilising established norms through
the use of irony, by saying the opposite of what he means. In the parable of the
talents, I see Jesus at his most Voltairean.
+In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen.
Prof Russell Goulbourne,
Professor of French Literature &
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities