A Sermon on a Merciless Man

A Sermon on Matthew 25.14-30

Preached on November 19, 2017 at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church 

This morning we find ourselves in the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew with what sounds on it’s face like a difficult parable. The one who has been telling us story after story about how blessed are the merciful, that we should offer not just our coat, but also our shirt, this morning this same Jesus tells a story of a man with no mercy, a man who reaps where he does not sow, who takes everything from those who have nothing. What are we to make of such a dissonant parable? 

The part of my biblical spirituality that finds hope and inspiration in Jacob, the limping conniver, seeks to redeem the initial thrust of this parable by hearing it as a part of Jesus call back in Matthew chapter 10 to be as “wise as serpents and gentle as doves” (with a lack of emphasis on the gentleness). 

Before we get too far down that road, let’s go back. Over the past five chapters the story has pushed Jesus closer and closer to Jerusalem and the cross. Along the way he has told parable after parable, story after story. I want to lift up two of these parables in the hope they might help us make sense of the one we hear this morning. 

The first is the parable of the tenants in the vineyard. A landowner hires tenants to work the vineyard he has built. Later, he sends his servants to collect his share of the harvest, but when they arrive the tenants kill the servants. So, the landowner sends his son, but his son meets the same fate. In return the landowner sends men to put those tenants to “a miserable death.”

The second is the parable of the wedding banquet. A king throws a wedding banquet and after being turned down by the well-to-do, he invites everyone off the street. Things take a turn for the worst when the king spots a guest who is not wearing the appropriate attire. Evidently, the doors were thrown open for everyone, but there was still a dress code. This robe-less one is thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Again, the ending is a bit…harsh. 

What connects these parables is actually something we can not see, at least not in English. The biblical translators, regardless of which English version you’re reading, leave out a very small, but critical detail. 

Literally, each of the parables should begin like this…There was a landowner, a man, who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. And The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king, a man, who threw a wedding banquet. A man. You see, in the original Greek it gets restated that the landowner and the king were men. 

Now, I don’t know a lot about monarchies, I have watched and enjoyed Netflix’s The Queen, but my assumption is that most kings are men. And I may not be a scholar of the societal norms of the ancient near east, but trust me that it was a safe assumption that a landowner was a man. There is no need to say either of these things and yet the text goes out of its way to do so.

Perhaps it is an attempt to emphasize that these stories are primarily stories about the way the world of humans works. Often we assume that Jesus is the most powerful character in parables, a vineyard owner or a king, but what if those are the roles that we fill. What if these are parables about the way human power is wielded? What if Jesus is the murdered son, is the guest thrown out into the street, is the one from whom everything is taken?

Finally, we’re back to this morning’s parable. It begins simply, “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them;” It does not say that “the kingdom of God may be compared to…” On its face it begins as a story about a man.

This man lacks much in the way of godliness. He is an admitted thief. He tells his servant that he reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he does not scatter seed. He takes what is not rightfully his. 

The parable is also problematic for a Jewish audience because the servant is chastised for not simply putting his talent in the bank and collecting the interest. Perhaps he didn’t do that because charging interest was against the Hebrew law. 

The Hebraic economic understanding of the world at the time was that there were limited goods, that the economy could not grow. So, charging interest or “growing” your ten talents by ten talents could only be accomplished by taking that ten talents out of someone else’s pocket and giving back nothing in return. You were, essentially, stealing from someone else. It would have been considered shameful. In fact, burying that one talent was, likely, the most honorable thing you could have done. 

The servant does what they’re supposed to do, and yet, they’re punished. Those with more receive more. Those with nothing, even what they have is taken away from them. I know this story. We know it. We know it as victims of the unmerciful and we know it as those who refuse to show mercy. This is a story, first, about the world we know.

…

At it’s best the university is abour rooting students into a new story about the world. It’s about helping them more fully understand their place in the universe, that they might more faithfully serve it. This is the work that we do with students together on a theological level. 

This past Tuesday night our students engaged in an activity we now do every couple of years. We give them big pieces of blank paper, markers, colored pencils, and twenty to thirty minutes. We invite them to dump their minds onto the piece of paper. Write down everything that matters to you, the things that make you feel accomplished and successful and fulfilled. On that piece of paper write down everything that pops into your head, no matter how random. Let your mind wander. It’s like meditation, but without the focus (I’m definitely better at this than meditation). Afterwards we start to connect the things that are connected. We look for themes that emerged. The goal is to create an alternative map of the things that truly matter to us. To create an alternative way of understanding who we are. 

Like the rest of us, they’ve been given a map, a story about who they are and what matters to them. Grades, jobs, anything else you can put on a resumè. Our work with students is to help them understand that the stories we have been given are not true simply because they have been given to us. Rather there is another one telling a story about us. There is another one who is calling a new story into being.

What we have have learned in our work with students is that a critical first step is to recognize that we are already living into a particular story, whether we are the ones telling it or someone else. 

The thing with stories is that they are incredibly helpful. We need them to make sense of the chaos around us, but they are not necessarily true. I’ve heard it said of those with alcoholism, but I experience in depression and anxiety. I often need to tell two different stories about myself. On one hand, I am a person with depression. I do not expect that it will leave me. It is simply who I am. On the other, there are times when I need to be reminded that it does not define me, that it is not who I am. In those stories, depression and anxiety are a third party. I’ll have to introduce you sometime to my friend, Freddie the Frontal Lobe. Neither of these stories is completely true, but what matters is that they work, they each help me to make healthy decisions.

What we need to do first is to acknowledge that we are telling a story, more than telling it we are living into it. Otherwise, we’ll be captive to that story forever, for better or worse. When we recognize that it’s just a story and that there might be more stories, there might be another story that is more life-giving, we are freed. We experience new life, a new future, a new realization of the capacity of Jesus to hold all of our stories.  

Perhaps this is the work Jesus is doing for us this morning. He’s revealing to us the story we are already telling about ourselves. He’s holding the mirror in front of our faces that we might see the world we have created for what it is. It is startling. It is unsettling. Each of those first two parables end with those in power conspiring to entrap Jesus after they hear the story he tells. It will continue. In a few chapters Jesus, the one who has nothing, even what he has will be taken from him on the cross. 

The good news is that this story, humanity’s story, is not the final parable. Its not the last word in the gospel of Matthew, in the story of the life of Jesus, nor is it God’s final word for us. The good news is that despite the difficulty and the mercilessness of this world, it will not stand. 

I don’t want to step on the toes of next week’s preacher, but next week Jesus tells of a world that is completely unlike the one we hear today. In it there is a king who lives among those who have nothing and rules in favor of those who show mercy. That is Jesus final parable. From there he’ll be betrayed, arrested, and executed all that his story of mercy might last, that it might hold us all. 

As for this parable I can not find in the merciless man anything of the one who will be stripped of everything. If Jesus is to be found in this parable he is the one made vulnerable, who suffers that even the shameful around him might live. If Jesus is to be found in this world, in the world we have made for ourselves, he is the one made vulnerable, who suffers that even the shameful around him, might live. May it be so. Amen.