Mark 13:24-37
First Sunday of Advent: November 27, 2011
Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving, downtown Cedar Falls, had a huge festival to celebrate the start of the Christmas season – it was called, “Christmas palooza,” or some such thing. We took Lydia down – and it was magical…at least in her eyes. There were lights and music, Santa arrived by helicopter and then led a parade down to the river where the big tree was lit and fireworks burst into the air over the river.
We got to go from Thanksgiving to Christmas in 24 hours. It was great!
Then we come to church this morning and what happens: No Santa, no fireworks. We sing no Christmas carols. Worse, we come and have to sit through Mark’s little passage about the apocalypse, because some kind of apocalyptic text always kicks off the season of Advent. We come and hear about suffering. We have to listen to a prediction of the end of the world, when the sun will darken, and presumably Jesus comes again to take those who are ready, and leave those of us who didn’t do or say the right things behind to live in the hell the apocalypse brings.
Not necessarily what we want to hear when the rest of the world is fully immersed in the Christmas season. Or ever, really. But our church – along with many others – tries to practice Advent every year. People understandably might ask, “Why do you have to ruin the Christmas season by insisting we focus on such negative things?” All over the world, people in churches that observe Advent are wondering why we can’t sing Christmas carols, why we have to listen to such dreary things, why we have to be so different from the world around us. Are we masochists? Are we just holding on to an ancient, outdated tradition that doesn’t make sense anymore? Isn’t our faith about joy, good news, and Jesus coming as a baby in the manger?
In fact Advent is so hard to practice, many churches skip it altogether, and even those of us who do acknowledge the season often skip the apocalyptic texts that focus on darkness. Advent means “coming” and we tell ourselves that’s the coming of Jesus as a baby, ignoring it also points to the coming of a new world order when Christ comes again.
We justify this by relegating the apocalyptic texts to the bin of bad theology or chalking them up to sci fi, made-up stories of people who didn’t understand how the world really works. We happily explain these texts away because they are predictions that never came true. There’s no reason this apocalyptic vision needs to intrude on our Christmas joy.
Meanwhile… we have apocalypse all around us. Not literally, of course. But then again, neither was the author of the gospel of Mark being literal. Nor was he predicting the future. Dismissing this text as either too far-fetched or too archaic in theology is possible only when we read these texts literally. And I can tell you, the scripture writers would be as upset with us reading this literally as a parent would be if we took them literally when they say to their child, “I could just eat you up!”
Mark did not think Jesus was actually going to hop on a cloud and descend into our midst. He didn’t think the sun would all of a sudden become black. He didn’t think stars were going to start falling like rain from the sky. If he did, we should think he was silly. But he didn’t believe those things were literally going to happen. He was talking about serious things that we would do well to pay attention to. And we do a disservice to our author, as well as miss the importance of Advent, when we make the mistake of reading these texts literally and writing them off.
This is poetry – full of exaggeration, metaphor, and symbolism. And the author’s not just writing poetry to show off his creative literary skills. The scripture writers often wrote in poetry because sometimes poetry is all that will suffice in getting your message across. It’s far more effective to talk about the sun darkening and the earth shaking than to say, “hey folks – it’s really getting bad out there, and we need to do something.”
Which is pretty much what Mark was trying to say; and he was saying it to a very particular group of people – people living their own apocalypse. It was bad out there. Around 70 AD, the Jews rebelled against the Roman kingdom. And Rome had enough. They made an example out of these folks; they came into Jerusalem to wipe out the Jews and destroy their sacred house of worship – the place the people believed God lived. The Romans demanded loyalty to the Emperor, not this god the Jews called Yahweh. They were forcing Jews to renounce their faith, or be killed. And in the end, even those who lived lost the physical center of their religion.
For the Jews, it was as if their world had come to an end. The sun ceased to shine on them, their lives were shattered, and all those other great metaphors we use when the rug has been pulled out from underneath us. None of this happened literally – the sun still rose each morning, and they didn’t break into a million pieces – but they needed words that could describe the depth of what they felt..the depth of what had happened.
Poetry has the power to describe reality in a way literal prose does not. So when we read Mark, the poetry helps us know what it feels like for people who live in constant suffering. We are supposed to emotionally connect to what it’s like for people when they feel like their lives are over. Emotional connection is essential if we are to be awakened from our numb lives that often ignore the suffering of those around us because it’s so hard to look at – and poetry is in the business of emotional connection.
But poetry doesn’t stop with describing current reality. It can also describe our yearnings and proclaim an almost irrational hope in the midst of our times of apocalypse – and again, in a way literal prose cannot. We see this throughout our scriptures. This morning we hear the yearning in Isaiah. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!!”. It is lament. Again, they don’t actually think a rip is going to appear in the sky and God is going to squeeze through and jump onto the ground next to us. The notion of wanting God to tear open the heavens indicates how distant they feel from God – how much they long for a dramatic turn around – how dramatic it would feel if God were to become present with them. Poetic lament is always powerful – and it’s always full of hyperbole. But this passage from Isaiah is more than lament: the yearning for God to come – to tear open the heavens and be in our midst – implies a hope, a belief in a God who can act in our world.
Poetry in scripture offers hope. It breaks through our feeble attempts to offer the same old responses over and over again, and taps our imagination and stirs our hearts by reminding us that God is at work. You are the potter, Isaiah says about God. When we fall into your hands, you work with us, and shape us into tools of redemption.
Even Mark, in his dark poetry is offering hope. Mark draws on the imagery of the Hebrew bible in order to encourage his community to hold fast to Jesus Christ – the crucified and risen Son of Humanity. It is a message of heroic faith. It gives people who were probably hopeless a way forward without their nation and without their center of worship. By all appearances Jesus was rejected by his own people, abandoned by his own disciples, and defeated on the cross by Rome’s imperial power. Mark’s message proclaims that the crucified one is the one who will gather the people together in the absence of the now destroyed temple. That is the message that Mark invites his community to believe, even in their present crisis of faith.
We’d like to go from Thanksgiving to Christmas in one day. But even though I hate to be seen as a kill joy, I feel like it’s my job to point out the cost of skipping over Advent. We miss the hope – maybe not the happiness or hoopla – but the hope the world needs – the hope that can rise out of apocalypse and lament. If we skip Advent, when Dec. 25th rolls around, we miss the radical message of Christmas…the world is not all happy-go-lucky gather around the manger, sweet baby Jesus. If we skip Advent we have nothing more to say to our world than “enjoy Christmas, feel good, even though the world around you is burning down.” In other words, we concede that Christmas has no good news for those who suffer today.
We do have something more to say to our world…something more to offer. We have HOPE…Advent hope. We have essential things to speak into the world. This is our work during the Christmas season, and it’s more important than shopping, more important than the Christmas parties and family meals, more important than making sure it is a magical time for our kids. If we pause to hear the cries of humanity today – the poems that describe the suffering people feel all over the world and in our back yard, and if we join in the hymns of lament, we can tap into authentic hope and share that with those who are suffering.
The world needs hope. Hope grounded in reality. Hope that can speak to a suffering world. Hope that gives you something to hang on to even in a crises; something not bound by our temporal world, but capable of turning that world upside down. And hope often comes in poetry – poetry can hold the tension of lament and trust. Poetry can break through cycles bound by logical prose. And our poetry is written and spoken with our lives which have been shaped by the poetry of scripture.
The apocalyptic texts should be read every year, if only to help us pause and remember reality that we would rather ignore. The advent texts give us space in which to remember why we need God to be born among us again. They require us to name the things from which we and the earth are waiting redemption. Pastor Will Willamon puts it this way:
“We dare not rush to greet the Redeemer prematurely until we pause here, in darkened church, to admit that we do need redemption. That nothing within can save us. No thing can save us. No president, no bomb, no new car, no bottle, no white Christmas can save. So “No” to all false consolation, we say. No! to the empty, contrived merriment of a terminal world. No thank you, we shall wait here, in yearning and silence, in darkness and penitence for the One that can save.”
Mark, with his poetry about the reality of his world, invites us to write poetry about the reality of our world. We need to capture the pain in this world with the hyperbole and metaphor it deserves in order to awaken people and move them emotionally toward compassion.
In our culture, we often don’t get the power of Christmas, because we generally skip advent. Jesus was born into an apocalypse, not a mall. Jesus came to people living in the dark shadow of Roman oppression, not people sitting around a tree in pjs opening gifts. If our Christmas stories ignore these realities, we are not speaking the truth, and Christmas is only a secular celebration, no matter how many baby Jesus’ we see and how many Christmas carols we sing.
Jesus saves not because he’s sweet – but because he offers hope of a whole new world that breaks the chains of oppression and upsets the systems that destroy. When he comes, whenever we manifest God in our lives, it is the end of the world as we know it…and thank God. Thank God for the radical possibilities in the midst of our modern day apocalypses. Thank God for poetry – that can imagine those possibilities and move people to live into them and make the real in our world today. Amen.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Rest of the Story
Matthew 25:14 – 30
November 13, 2011
Fair warning: This sermon will not fall within the mainstream of interpretations of this passage (I know you are shocked that I would ever fall outside the mainstream). There are some common assumptions about this passage and what it means that I want to challenge, but I do so with great humility. I had some help from a couple of colleagues and some good historians, so I’m not completely alone here, but when I depart from such a large body of opinion without many companions, I figure you should know – and I should do so only with great caution.
Most people read this passage as an allegory where Jesus is the man who goes on the trip and then returns, because Jesus “left” when he died and they expected him to return at the second coming. The servants are the disciples – two of whom did what they were supposed to in Jesus’ absence and so are rewarded on judgment day, and one who didn’t, and so he is punished.
The talents are the gifts God has given us, and the moral is we should use these gifts to multiply God’s mission here on earth, and if we hide or hoard what God has given us, well, let’s just say God won’t bring candy and flowers. In fact, many, many preachers use this as a stewardship sermon, encouraging people to give as much as they can to the church, lest God’s work in the world be thwarted by our stinginess, and we be judged accordingly.
But, in the past week, I’ve had a growing dis-ease with that reading. My dis-ease centers on picturing Jesus as the rich man who goes on a trip. When we understand some things about households in Jesus’ day, the picture we get of this man is dramatically different from what we know of God in Jesus. And it’s not just that the rich man makes a judgment – throwing someone into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. To be sure, that makes me uneasy…and it doesn’t fit with what I know of God.
But, reading this allegorically, Jesus is imagined as a head of household in the ancient world, and that seems very odd to me…especially when you think about what kind of household. A “talent” was a specific amount of money. Scholars estimate it was worth somewhere around a million dollars in today’s terms. This means Jesus is compared to a wealthy millionaire in a world where millionaires were only millionaires if they exploited people below them.
When the Jewish people of Jesus’ time referred to “households”, they didn’t mean a peasant family of mom, dad and their three children. A “household” was the basic economic unit of society upon which the power of the city and the state was built. The leaders of a household may have been related by blood, but the purpose of a household centered on the control, management and earning of considerable money. No poor family would be perceived as a “household”; only the most wealthy and powerful would be.
Based on our understanding of households in Jesus’ day, we can fill in the passage a little bit. The head of the household goes away, and has to hand over management of the business while he’s gone. He summons three servants – which are better understood as managers than as house cleaners or butlers. Remember the household is a business, not just people living together in a home. These servants are a part of the economic system, deeply embedded in the dealings of the rich man. They are handling and making millions of dollars.
Jesus says the first two servants “invested” the master’s money and doubled his assets. The people listening to Jesus tell this story would have looked knowingly at each other; they understood well how that doubling occurred. It could occur only in one way – at the peasants’ expense. One scholar explains:
“The elites used their wealth to make loans to peasant farmers so that the farmers could plant crops. Interest rates were high; estimates range [from] 60 percent [to] perhaps as high as 200 percent for loans on crops. The purpose of making such loans… was to accept land as collateral so that the elites could foreclose on their loans in years when the crops could not cover the incurred debt.”
In other words, these two slaves likely doubled the master’s wealth not only by charging exorbitant interest on loans, but by foreclosing on farms and thus radically increasing the land owned by the rich man. They had done well. And they were rewarded well. But, the rich man and the servants are not sympathetic characters in the eyes of the masses – the 99% who were victims of the system.
Even if we want to argue the money is supposed to be metaphorical, we have to be mindful that this story would have evoked bitterness in the hearts of 1st century listeners toward the rich man and his two servants. They would not have been inclined to place Jesus in the roll of someone who, as the third servant puts it, “reaps where he doesn’t sow and gathers where he did not scatter,” or to put it simply, someone who exploits people’s labor and resources for his own gain.
My point is this might not be an allegory showing us what God’s realm will look like when Jesus comes again. Instead, it might be a description of the very reality in which they lived. Jesus might be reminding his listeners of the problem, not offering a solution.
A few years ago I was interviewed by the Presbyterian News Service for an article about our country’s use of torture. I said to the reporter, “Some people argue that we shouldn’t torture because torture is not effective, but we shouldn’t torture even if it is effective because it is always, unambiguously immoral – effective or not.” The article quoted me this way: “Rev. Kirsten Klepfer, Presbyterian pastor in Grinnell, Iowa, explains that we should never torture because torture is ineffective.” I was livid.
It’s true, they used my words, but it was obviously a misquote in the end because they took them completely out of context – specifically, leaving off the rest of a sentence. The rest of the sentence changed the meaning of the first part completely. Instead of it being my point, it sets up a contrast to my point. Likewise, I wonder if when we make this passage an allegory, we use Matthew’s words, but ultimately misquote him because we leave off the rest of the sentence – or in this case, the rest of the story.
This passage – the “parable” of the talents, as it is commonly called, is simply the description of how things are: like when I said many people say we shouldn’t torture because it’s ineffective. It’s the rest of the story that makes the difference. When we read the rest of the story, we see not only this first part in a new light and draw different conclusions, it becomes the contrast to what Jesus imagines as the alternative we should seek and live.
The rest of the story – the next parable in Matthew – has Jesus telling people that whatever we do to the least among us we do to him. He calls people out for not feeding him when he was hungry, welcoming him when he was a stranger, clothing him when he was naked. “When,” they asked, “did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked?” “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did it to one of the least among you, you did it to me.” This casts a new light back on our passage as it becomes the alternative to the devastating, oppressing economic system of the day described in the story of the talents. Care for the poor, the hungry, the naked becomes the imperative – not economic success on the backs of those very people.
When we read this passage as a description of the reality of the day, we see the third servant in a whole new light. He’s the hero of this story. And he’s the hero because he had seen the evil both of what he was expected to do and of the enterprise in which he had been involved; he was converted; he was willing to stand with the exploited by confronting the rich man – by speaking truth to power.
And what did this whistle-blower receive for going over to the other side? The rich man
declares, “Take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless servant, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
What will be the result of exposure of the systems by those who become convinced of the evil that they are doing? The result will be that they will crush the protestor – even when he has been one of them. They will take away the wealth or power invested in him or her and distribute it to those who already have the most power. And they will take this now-worthless (to the system) person “and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
I don’t think Jesus is endorsing or embracing this economic system. That just doesn’t feel right. He is simply saying that this is the way the world is. The more the powerful have, the more they will acquire. And they will acquire more by taking it away from the powerless so that even the little that the poor may have will be taken away from them. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And anyone who threatens this system, who tries to speak truth to power, who tries to stand up and do the right thing, will be silenced.
Why does this all matter? Why do I go to such great lengths to figure out if this is an allegory or not? Well, here’s what I think: The traditional interpretation – based on allegory – too easily becomes individualistic – we think the parable is a message about what I should do with my life – with the gifts God has given me – lest I miss being a part of the realm of God when the judgment day comes. If instead it is a reminder for the people of the systemic realities of the day, the point being made is about systemic realities, not just individual ones. It’s a much more radical, and probably political, message. It’s a direct challenge to this system – an almost angry one. And Jesus’ strategy is to first bring to people’s awareness the problem – not let them forget what the least among them face every day – and then to offer an alternative.
We face systemic realities today. They are not the same as in Jesus’ day – and we can argue about whether things are better or worse. But, people all over the world – including here in downtown Grinnell – are camping out in parks to remind us of the pain people suffer at the hands of our economic systems today. The Occupy movement has been criticized for not having a clear message, when in reality I don’t think anyone misunderstands their main point: the system is broken, it’s hurtful, it needs to change. Today, the seven largest banks hold assets equal to 66% of GDP – a staggering concentration of economic power in a democracy. Twenty years ago that figure was only 18%.
The people who are bringing such things front and center might just be our parable of the talents today. As theologian Gary Dorrian puts it: “Occupy Wall Street set off the first protest movement that responds with anything like the moral outrage that is appropriate to the situation.” And in various ways, people are trying to silence them: either by minimizing the movement, discrediting them, or, even by cracking down violently.
The church can join with those who are describing reality – that is part of our job. But we have more to do. We have to tell – in fact live – the rest of the story. Describing reality is not enough. Speaking truth to power is not enough – though it is an important, and dangerous, start. The way the world changes is when we start to live outside the systems that oppress; when we start to act in ways contrary to market forces and individual self interest. It’s when we start to see those at the bottom of the economic ladder as Christ himself, and treat them accordingly.
We are being reminded that the wealth disparity in our world is an urgent, moral matter – and that we must have a solution. Reaching one is likely to require political courage – the kind we see in the 3rd servant. It requires those of us who are the “haves” to give up a system from which we mostly benefit in order to not just care for the “least among us,” but to build a whole new system that will serve all, not just a few. A whole new system: something like the realm of God Jesus and the gospel writers go to such lengths to describe for us. We must become the rest of the story. Amen.
November 13, 2011
Fair warning: This sermon will not fall within the mainstream of interpretations of this passage (I know you are shocked that I would ever fall outside the mainstream). There are some common assumptions about this passage and what it means that I want to challenge, but I do so with great humility. I had some help from a couple of colleagues and some good historians, so I’m not completely alone here, but when I depart from such a large body of opinion without many companions, I figure you should know – and I should do so only with great caution.
Most people read this passage as an allegory where Jesus is the man who goes on the trip and then returns, because Jesus “left” when he died and they expected him to return at the second coming. The servants are the disciples – two of whom did what they were supposed to in Jesus’ absence and so are rewarded on judgment day, and one who didn’t, and so he is punished.
The talents are the gifts God has given us, and the moral is we should use these gifts to multiply God’s mission here on earth, and if we hide or hoard what God has given us, well, let’s just say God won’t bring candy and flowers. In fact, many, many preachers use this as a stewardship sermon, encouraging people to give as much as they can to the church, lest God’s work in the world be thwarted by our stinginess, and we be judged accordingly.
But, in the past week, I’ve had a growing dis-ease with that reading. My dis-ease centers on picturing Jesus as the rich man who goes on a trip. When we understand some things about households in Jesus’ day, the picture we get of this man is dramatically different from what we know of God in Jesus. And it’s not just that the rich man makes a judgment – throwing someone into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. To be sure, that makes me uneasy…and it doesn’t fit with what I know of God.
But, reading this allegorically, Jesus is imagined as a head of household in the ancient world, and that seems very odd to me…especially when you think about what kind of household. A “talent” was a specific amount of money. Scholars estimate it was worth somewhere around a million dollars in today’s terms. This means Jesus is compared to a wealthy millionaire in a world where millionaires were only millionaires if they exploited people below them.
When the Jewish people of Jesus’ time referred to “households”, they didn’t mean a peasant family of mom, dad and their three children. A “household” was the basic economic unit of society upon which the power of the city and the state was built. The leaders of a household may have been related by blood, but the purpose of a household centered on the control, management and earning of considerable money. No poor family would be perceived as a “household”; only the most wealthy and powerful would be.
Based on our understanding of households in Jesus’ day, we can fill in the passage a little bit. The head of the household goes away, and has to hand over management of the business while he’s gone. He summons three servants – which are better understood as managers than as house cleaners or butlers. Remember the household is a business, not just people living together in a home. These servants are a part of the economic system, deeply embedded in the dealings of the rich man. They are handling and making millions of dollars.
Jesus says the first two servants “invested” the master’s money and doubled his assets. The people listening to Jesus tell this story would have looked knowingly at each other; they understood well how that doubling occurred. It could occur only in one way – at the peasants’ expense. One scholar explains:
“The elites used their wealth to make loans to peasant farmers so that the farmers could plant crops. Interest rates were high; estimates range [from] 60 percent [to] perhaps as high as 200 percent for loans on crops. The purpose of making such loans… was to accept land as collateral so that the elites could foreclose on their loans in years when the crops could not cover the incurred debt.”
In other words, these two slaves likely doubled the master’s wealth not only by charging exorbitant interest on loans, but by foreclosing on farms and thus radically increasing the land owned by the rich man. They had done well. And they were rewarded well. But, the rich man and the servants are not sympathetic characters in the eyes of the masses – the 99% who were victims of the system.
Even if we want to argue the money is supposed to be metaphorical, we have to be mindful that this story would have evoked bitterness in the hearts of 1st century listeners toward the rich man and his two servants. They would not have been inclined to place Jesus in the roll of someone who, as the third servant puts it, “reaps where he doesn’t sow and gathers where he did not scatter,” or to put it simply, someone who exploits people’s labor and resources for his own gain.
My point is this might not be an allegory showing us what God’s realm will look like when Jesus comes again. Instead, it might be a description of the very reality in which they lived. Jesus might be reminding his listeners of the problem, not offering a solution.
A few years ago I was interviewed by the Presbyterian News Service for an article about our country’s use of torture. I said to the reporter, “Some people argue that we shouldn’t torture because torture is not effective, but we shouldn’t torture even if it is effective because it is always, unambiguously immoral – effective or not.” The article quoted me this way: “Rev. Kirsten Klepfer, Presbyterian pastor in Grinnell, Iowa, explains that we should never torture because torture is ineffective.” I was livid.
It’s true, they used my words, but it was obviously a misquote in the end because they took them completely out of context – specifically, leaving off the rest of a sentence. The rest of the sentence changed the meaning of the first part completely. Instead of it being my point, it sets up a contrast to my point. Likewise, I wonder if when we make this passage an allegory, we use Matthew’s words, but ultimately misquote him because we leave off the rest of the sentence – or in this case, the rest of the story.
This passage – the “parable” of the talents, as it is commonly called, is simply the description of how things are: like when I said many people say we shouldn’t torture because it’s ineffective. It’s the rest of the story that makes the difference. When we read the rest of the story, we see not only this first part in a new light and draw different conclusions, it becomes the contrast to what Jesus imagines as the alternative we should seek and live.
The rest of the story – the next parable in Matthew – has Jesus telling people that whatever we do to the least among us we do to him. He calls people out for not feeding him when he was hungry, welcoming him when he was a stranger, clothing him when he was naked. “When,” they asked, “did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked?” “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did it to one of the least among you, you did it to me.” This casts a new light back on our passage as it becomes the alternative to the devastating, oppressing economic system of the day described in the story of the talents. Care for the poor, the hungry, the naked becomes the imperative – not economic success on the backs of those very people.
When we read this passage as a description of the reality of the day, we see the third servant in a whole new light. He’s the hero of this story. And he’s the hero because he had seen the evil both of what he was expected to do and of the enterprise in which he had been involved; he was converted; he was willing to stand with the exploited by confronting the rich man – by speaking truth to power.
And what did this whistle-blower receive for going over to the other side? The rich man
declares, “Take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless servant, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
What will be the result of exposure of the systems by those who become convinced of the evil that they are doing? The result will be that they will crush the protestor – even when he has been one of them. They will take away the wealth or power invested in him or her and distribute it to those who already have the most power. And they will take this now-worthless (to the system) person “and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
I don’t think Jesus is endorsing or embracing this economic system. That just doesn’t feel right. He is simply saying that this is the way the world is. The more the powerful have, the more they will acquire. And they will acquire more by taking it away from the powerless so that even the little that the poor may have will be taken away from them. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And anyone who threatens this system, who tries to speak truth to power, who tries to stand up and do the right thing, will be silenced.
Why does this all matter? Why do I go to such great lengths to figure out if this is an allegory or not? Well, here’s what I think: The traditional interpretation – based on allegory – too easily becomes individualistic – we think the parable is a message about what I should do with my life – with the gifts God has given me – lest I miss being a part of the realm of God when the judgment day comes. If instead it is a reminder for the people of the systemic realities of the day, the point being made is about systemic realities, not just individual ones. It’s a much more radical, and probably political, message. It’s a direct challenge to this system – an almost angry one. And Jesus’ strategy is to first bring to people’s awareness the problem – not let them forget what the least among them face every day – and then to offer an alternative.
We face systemic realities today. They are not the same as in Jesus’ day – and we can argue about whether things are better or worse. But, people all over the world – including here in downtown Grinnell – are camping out in parks to remind us of the pain people suffer at the hands of our economic systems today. The Occupy movement has been criticized for not having a clear message, when in reality I don’t think anyone misunderstands their main point: the system is broken, it’s hurtful, it needs to change. Today, the seven largest banks hold assets equal to 66% of GDP – a staggering concentration of economic power in a democracy. Twenty years ago that figure was only 18%.
The people who are bringing such things front and center might just be our parable of the talents today. As theologian Gary Dorrian puts it: “Occupy Wall Street set off the first protest movement that responds with anything like the moral outrage that is appropriate to the situation.” And in various ways, people are trying to silence them: either by minimizing the movement, discrediting them, or, even by cracking down violently.
The church can join with those who are describing reality – that is part of our job. But we have more to do. We have to tell – in fact live – the rest of the story. Describing reality is not enough. Speaking truth to power is not enough – though it is an important, and dangerous, start. The way the world changes is when we start to live outside the systems that oppress; when we start to act in ways contrary to market forces and individual self interest. It’s when we start to see those at the bottom of the economic ladder as Christ himself, and treat them accordingly.
We are being reminded that the wealth disparity in our world is an urgent, moral matter – and that we must have a solution. Reaching one is likely to require political courage – the kind we see in the 3rd servant. It requires those of us who are the “haves” to give up a system from which we mostly benefit in order to not just care for the “least among us,” but to build a whole new system that will serve all, not just a few. A whole new system: something like the realm of God Jesus and the gospel writers go to such lengths to describe for us. We must become the rest of the story. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)