Sunday's children

NOVEMBER 19TH, 2023

Sunday, 19 Nov 2023

1 Thessalonians 5.1-11

Matthew 25.14-30

Jesus is coming! Pass it on!

No, really, it’s true! I saw it a while back on a bumper sticker. ‘Jesus is coming! Look busy!’

Did you know, next Sunday is the end of the Church year? Advent, the four Sundays before Christmas, begins the new liturgical year but the lectionary draws our attention both at the end of the old year and at the beginning of Advent - to the end of all things, judgement and the coming of Christ. It’s certainly a way to heighten the suspense, and it’s the theme for both our readings this morning.

The first letter to the church in Thessalonika is undisputedly the earliest document in the New Testament, written by St Paul perhaps as early as 52 or 53 AD - way earlier than the Gospels, which means that it is the first word that comes to us of the risen Christ. It might be Paul’s first go at putting the good news into writing at the beginning of his missionary career, but he is already a mature and skilful writer. He encourages the Thessalonians, who like him are expecting’ Jesus imminent return - Paul is writing urgently, reminding them they do need to keep earning a living and getting on with things in the meantime but in this earliest letter the sense is that it will be any day now and we will - quite literally - be snatched up into the sky to meet our Lord. In his later letters the expectation is wound back a little and Paul develops his mature theology of living in Christ - but as Christians we still long for the day when the things of this world are brought to account by the coming of Christ. And as the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann points out, our expectation of this coming must always make us dissatisfied with the way things currently are.

Paul starts almost humorously in today’s passage: "You hardly need me to tell you anything about that". Ironically, maybe, because the one thing we do know for certain about when our Lord will come back is that we don’t know! He’ll come like a thief in the night. And here of course Paul is echoing what Jesus says in Matthew 24. And then he says - stay awake! Again, it’s an echo of Matthew 24 where Jesus cautions his disciples to stay awake. It’s an important theme, especially for disciples who will all fall asleep in the very next chapter when Jesus asks them to keep watch with him in Gethsemene.

This business of staying awake is especially important for Christians who understand that we have woken from sin into new life. In fact, it’s at the heart of what it means for us to be active disciples rather than just armchair Christians - it’s a reminder that at every moment we need to be reawakened - out of self-centredness or timidity or over-comfortableness. We do settle back - for example as modern Christians living in the midst of security and relative privilege - and fall asleep again. The metaphor of waking up suggests a jolt of awareness, a reminder. ‘Do you not realise?’ St Paul asks us: ‘You are children of the light!’.

In fact, here’s another synonym for the church to add to the list Simon gave us last week. We are children of the light - literally, Sunday’s children! - in Greek, phoshuios - we are the women and men who have woken from darkness to light, from death to life - the Sun being an age-old symbol of the resurrection. And as resurrection people we live face forwards towards Christ our light. We are waiting to meet Jesus again but we are already - right now - participants in the resurrection life of Christ. It’s what Paul means in his later letters when he tells us we are living ‘in Christ’. It’s a big claim, isn’t it? But as children of the light, as inheritors of resurrection life, how are we expected to live?

Let’s take a look at Jesus’ tricky parable in Matthew 25. Jesus is telling us about the end of all things, and judgement. The very next story in Matthew’s gospel will be about the sheep and the goats and Jesus says we will be judged for how compassionate we are - for what we have done for the last and the least. But, what about today’s story?

It’s like this, Jesus tells us. An oligarch who’s rolling in it goes away for a Carribean cruise in his super yacht and tells his three hench-people to make him richer while he’s gone. Now a quick explanation about talents. The Greek word, talanton, means money. A heap of money - in fact one talanton is 15 years pay for an average employee. It doesn’t mean the ability to play the flute or juggle or do cryptic crosswords or make a top-notch vanilla slice - in fact there is some evidence that the English word ‘talent’ came into being because of how the parable was routinely interpreted by medieval preachers. So, let’s say one hench-person gets about $5 million, another slightly less clever money market henchperson gets, say, $2 million and the apprentice financial henchperson gets just $1 million. Go, knock yourselves out, make me even richer.

So, the over-the-top unreality of the scenario might tip us off that the main focus here is not literally on our stewardship - either of money or skill - but it is certainly on accountability. Neither, I suspect, should we get too distracted by the questionable morality of what the henchpeople are instructed to do. Capitalism in its extreme forms has always produced more losers than winners, and even more so in the ancient world where the moneyed classes couldn’t just go out and find some new technological innovation or new industrial process to exploit - the only real way to double your money in a pre-industrial economy where up to 98% of the population lived in grinding, hand-to-mouth poverty was to crack the whip harder, oppress the workers even more cruelly, charge higher rents, and withhold your corn or oil or wine from the market to sell it during times of famine. It was a high risk, high return sort of strategy. To be really clear, I don't think Jesus is telling us God approves of you more if you are rich and successful, in fact the consistent message of the gospel is that God is on the side of the marginalised and the poor - and we should be, as well. So, there’s something morally suspect about the premise of this parable, but I don’t think that’s the real point. Jesus likes to shock us awake, for sure. But what I’d like to focus on is the oligarch’s expectations, and how the hench-people respond.

So the first two - and actually, there is no real difference between them, even though the more skilled henchperson gets more seed capital - both of them succeed brilliantly, doubling their stash. They know the boss wants results, and they have cut corners, taken huge risks and reaped huge rewards. The same way the oligarch got rich in the first place. And he commends and promotes them both - not because they have earned him more money - notice, he gives that to them to keep - but because they have had a go, and they have done what their master expected and wanted - as he says, they have been trustworthy. They behaved like the oligarch, and they knew him well enough to trust that he would reward a high-risk strategy.

The third henchperson is the interesting one. In fact, let’s not even call this one a henchperson, effectively this one has resigned from henching. And this slave makes a more interesting speech. From the slave’s perspective, the oligarch is harsh, with unrealistic, over-the-top expectations. This slave is afraid of the boss and is not expecting any reward, perhaps just hoping to mitigate the punishment by having kept the seed capital safe. The boss calls this slave lazy and wicked - I think, though, the third slave isn’t so much lazy as fearful. He doesn’t squander the wealth he has been entrusted with, and he doesn’t lose any of it - but he plays it safe, and I think this is the entire problem. He doesn’t take any risks, and he doesn’t trust his boss.

So what does this story mean? What does it say about faithful Christian living as we wait in expectation of our own ultimate accountability? Or to sharpen the question a little - what have you and I been entrusted with while our master has gone away? What have we been entrusted with that is wildly, extravagantly valuable, and how exactly are we meant to be splashing it around?

Well, when we ask the question like that the answer fairly pops out at us, doesn’t it? We are phoshuios, children of the light, we have citizenship of the already-but-not-yet kingdom of God, and we have the unspeakable gift of the Holy Spirit. We are Sunday’s children, resurrection people. Like the parable, the kingdom of heaven begins in an act of stunning generosity - in fact, like creation itself, resurrection is a moment of sheer, unspeakable gift. And as recipients of this over-the-top gift we should be spending it, investing it, splashing it around. Not hiding it, burying it, playing it safe.

Is your faith over-comfortable, sometimes? Or too timid? A personal comfort zone, affirming you without challenging or prodding you awake? Because I think the sharp warning in both 1st Thessalonians and the Gospel reading is that the outcome of playing it safe - of not taking the risk of caring deeply or loving passionately, not giving yourself away in loving service of others, the outcome for Christians of living defensively, over-cautiously - is that you end up staying asleep, living in the darkness. And missing out on the best part. Because Christian discipleship is not just about right belief, not just about praying for what we need - not just about having our own personal eternal-life insurance scheme - but about living the good news we proclaim, imitating Jesus’ own ultra-high-risk strategy of loving indiscriminately, giving of ourselves wastefully in caring and healing and serving and working for justice and peace. Yes, and also in playing the flute, or the piano or cello, in mending and cleaning and balancing the finances and telling stories and growing vegetables. Whatever your talent, take the risk.

And the really good news about the lottery-sized treasure we have been entrusted with? Is that the more we splash it around, the more we give it away, the more people we tell about it and the wilder the claims we make, the more we invest it in high-risk Ponzi schemes - the more it grows and the more outrageously we and all people will be blessed.

Pass it on!