Matthew 25:14-30 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
10 for 10 Stewardship Emphasis Week 2 Sunday, September 22, 2019 “What Really Matters Is Knowing the Master”
What talents do you have? What are your skills and talents? There might be a variety of reasons to ask and to try to answer those questions. A question like that might come up in a job interview or job application. How do your particular talents fit the job that you are applying for? Or maybe you want to think about that as you determine what job you may wish to pursue. A young person planning out a career might do that. It could even be a valuable question for finding hobbies or leisure activities. We generally understand the idea of skills and talents, but what many may not realize is that the word talent comes into our language because of the parable in our sermon text today. The original meaning of the word talent is a weight or measurement of money, of gold or silver. In fact, at least one translation that I looked at uses the phrase “bag of gold” in place of the word “talent” in Matthew 25. And it was a significant sum of money. The best description I have found of how much money was in a talent is to think that a talent is 6,000 denarii, and a denarius is what you would have been paid for one day of physical labor, like working in a vineyard or field. It’s the money that a laborer could make by working non-stop for 19 years. Of course, the word means something very different to us today, because Jesus uses that large sum of money in this parable to teach us a lesson about God’s gifts to us, gifts that certainly include our skills and our abilities. We find Jesus at the end of Matthew’s Gospel speaking to his disciples about the end times, the last days. Just after warning them to be always prepared, since they don’t know when Jesus would come back and when the last day would come, Jesus tells them the parable that is before us. There is a rich man, and he leaves 5, 2, and 1 talent with three of his servants for them to manage, and then he leaves on a journey. The journey takes a long time, and two of the servants make good use of that time. They earn additional wealth for the master. The third servant does not. He made nothing. When the master finally returned, he rewarded the two and punished the third. That’s the story of Jesus’ parable, but what does it mean? The master in the parable corresponds to Jesus himself. He was completing his earthly ministry and would no longer be with his disciples in the same way he had been. It was just like he was leaving on a long journey. But he didn’t leave people empty-handed. He graciously supplied them with gifts, with talents, with abilities and skills. And he expects his followers to put those talents to use. He wants us to serve him with the skills and talents he provides us. And those skills and talents are not the same for everyone. In the parable this is represented by each of the servants getting a different number of talents entrusted to them. In this life, it is not just the amount of talent that God may distribute differently to different people, but the specific talents and the sorts of blessings that he gives vary greatly from person to person. What he wants, and what he expects, is that all who are blessed by him will make good use of what he gives. As sinful people, we constantly battle against the temptation to live like the third servant, the wicked servant. He decided to do things his own way. He decided not to serve the master or to follow his expectations. He determined that his own feelings were more important. And, yes, it is so easy for us to react the same way. We might recognize our talents as ways that we can get rich or gain power and influence. We might try to use them to provide ourselves with pleasure or to serve our own cravings. What we forget is that our Lord and master would have us use all our gifts to serve others. That is how we serve him. And the reason we would do that is because he has already served us. In fact, the way that we have become servants of our master Jesus is that he died for us, and rose again, and called us to be his own through faith. The parable of the talents doesn’t tell the whole story of a Christian life and our relationship to Jesus, it speaks about one aspect. Jesus told other parables and taught much that taken together teach us about what it means to be in God’s kingdom. It is a rich blessing of God’s grace that we are his servants at all, not to mention that he also lavishes additional blessings on us.