Matthew 25. 14-30

This parable told by Jesus is often taken by Christian economists to prove that Jesus was a capitalist and therefore grant God’s favor upon free market systems. That such an interpretation has become normative for Christians is but a derivative of how the church has baptized the world and therefore searches for God in every corner of the earth. When the church/world distinction was lost around the time of Constantine the church steadily moved towards invisibility and faith receded to the recesses of our private hearts. This is why it has came to be that the kingdom of God is equated with the world rather than as a distinct group of people, known as Christ’s body or the church, who give the world the gift of witness as a foretaste of that reality. Since it is now widely assumed that God acts through history in general rather than in a particular community, Christians believe that it is their role to make sure that the story of God turns out right and thereby serve the secular order by attempting to ‘Christianizing’ it. It was theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr who anthropologized theology and took eschatology out of history. The danger is that Christians do not know the specifics of how the story of God turns out finally and are tempted to take control to realize the kingdom of God on earth. It is in this sense that eschatology is a much better term than teleology which implicitly implies that it is humanities obligation to realize and enact it rather than depending upon God’s agency. We place significance on human history now because we no longer conceive of any other sort of history that subjugates humanity due to the fact that the will of God became the will of man. The tension is not between nature and history, as it is commonly perceived, but between two different times and two different histories; the time and history of the world and the time and history of God. To live as an eschatological people rather than conforming to the status quo places a great deal of importance on imagining a more-encompassing story, which happens to be more at act of memory and remembrance for Christians rather than creativity and originality.

It is important that I preface the following, but brief, interpretation of the parable in discussion because without this background we proceed forward without acknowledging how our minds have been formed by the secular society we live in. In this parable the sums of money entrusted by the wealthy aristocrat is differentiated based upon proven competence of the three servants. The servants are therefore given another opportunity to prove themselves here. The third servant in the end is criticized for his poor handling of the money, not because of his inadequate business skills but because he didn’t even try. He took the safest path of least resistance due to his fear of failure. Ironically, since his master was a man who sought profit in his investments the servant had set himself up for failure from the beginning by hiding the money in the ground. Rather than being a parable about the unfairness of life where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it has much more to do with ‘investment’ effort. In conclusion, the third servant is eternally damned which illuminates the fact that this parable is chiefly about salvation.

Since this parable is about what “the kingdom of God is like…” the opportunity presented to the servants to make their master’s joy complete is an invitation to Jesus’ hearers to serve the kingdom of God. Living eschatologically involves a great deal of risk. Just as the servant had locked himself into failure by doing nothing with what he had been given, Christians are also faced with the inevitability of death whether we play it safe or not in life which frees us in a large capacity to serve Christ rather than being paralyzed by fear of failure. I take it that most middle-class western citizens only take ‘risks’ when they know that victory can be achieved. In other worlds, we only act if we can be sure of ourselves. The danger of replacing “getting things right” with “getting things ‘just’ right” is that we easily give into self-indulgent apathy, cynicism and despair. When we cannot derive immediate achievement and satisfaction in our activism we give up quickly. I believe that the worship and liturgy of the church is the necessary training ground for the people of God not to take history into their own hands and make everything turn out right. Rather than living by sight, we are a people who life by faith and hope since we cannot assume to know in totality how it all ends eschatologically. For this reason, I do not believe the church is incidental to salvation.