The Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 is
one in a series where Jesus is teaching about the “coming of the Son of Man.”
There are many lessons in this teaching, but one I want to focus on is how the
“wicked, lazy servant” burying his talent relates to our relationship with
Christ in our daily lives. Do we invest ourselves in our relationship with
Christ in all things? Or do we bury ourselves in self-protection out of fear,
carry the burden of daily life alone and lose everything of value in the end?
Many individuals have divested or compartmentalized our day-to-day lives from our "spiritual and religious" lives such that we see "everyday life" as separate from "religious" life. The first two servants saw the gift of the Master as entrusted (this is the key word) to them, and they responded by investing totally in the gift. However, many believe, much like the wicked servant, that our everyday life is separate from God and completely up to us. We don’t recognize the gift of relationship with Christ for what it is, but instead, exclude the Master and bury the relationship under our religious responsibilities. Instead of a loving husband, we see a harsh taskmaster. Like Adam and Eve in Eden after the fall, we hide ourselves from God. Those who take this view bury our relationship with God (our “talent”) out of fear just like in the parable, because we believe God to be a “harsh taskmaster”, or a “hard man”, and we don't want to do it wrong and be punished. This fear tells us to protect our life experiences, so we don't "invest" our whole selves in our relationship with Jesus. We even feel sort of a "beyond possible" response to the thought that He would care about or be involved in our everyday lives, and that leaves the burden squarely on us. We want to do well, to choose good things, to get it right (like the Pharisees did in their attempt to follow the letter of the Law) but we cannot without the presence of God to guide and share with us in the experience through an active relationship (the Word of God written on our hearts). Our choices made apart from God are therefore fruitless (or the fruit is bad, like the Pharisees' fruit). Of course, a relationship buried does not and cannot grow. Thus, even what we have is taken away by the fear, and, of course, we create what we most fear: we have failed the Master. The paradox here, in fact, is that our own view of God precludes the type of relationship He desires to give us. We have missed the element of trust completely.
We turn everything from relationship to task because we are still looking for a standard to meet. “How do I stand before the Master?” “How do I measure up?” We want to know how we are doing. We use the Law as our measure for moral issues and our tasks (works) for everything else. Cody once observed, at every site where a building project is proceeding, there seems to be a compulsion to “dig a hole and make a mound.” When we watched the progress of the project together, we laughed about how one mound is used to fill in a hole and another hole is then dug to make another mound, in an endless series of pointless exercises that accomplish nothing. I relate this process to our accomplishing tasks for a harsh taskmaster. In essence, we are enslaved to “tasks”—shoveling dirt from one pile to the other. There is no value in the task, but at least we can measure our progress. “Look! I moved that whole pile from here to there!” We feel good about that as if that measurement buys us a sense of accomplishment, which feels like purpose. We then make that false sense of purpose a measure of our worth.
Whether it is the Law or tasks, it is still an attempt on our part to measure ourselves, to “measure up” so to speak, and to replace our lost identity in Christ (who we really are, and our real worth and value in His eyes) with the accomplishments of life on one side and the accomplishments of the Law on the other. Both exclude Jesus ultimately, don't they? But somehow we've convinced ourselves that we are OK as long as we have included Jesus in the area of religious stuff (albeit a distant, observing Jesus, checking us out to make sure we are getting it right). We believe we aren't even supposed to bring Him in on the mundane, everyday stuff. Yet, in this parable we are told the result is much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Ultimately, we cannot know fully about our relationship with Him except from Him. What He would desire to give us includes the true knowledge of Who He is, and how He sees us or who He says we are; in other words, an intimate connection or “oneness” with Him.
Many individuals have divested or compartmentalized our day-to-day lives from our "spiritual and religious" lives such that we see "everyday life" as separate from "religious" life. The first two servants saw the gift of the Master as entrusted (this is the key word) to them, and they responded by investing totally in the gift. However, many believe, much like the wicked servant, that our everyday life is separate from God and completely up to us. We don’t recognize the gift of relationship with Christ for what it is, but instead, exclude the Master and bury the relationship under our religious responsibilities. Instead of a loving husband, we see a harsh taskmaster. Like Adam and Eve in Eden after the fall, we hide ourselves from God. Those who take this view bury our relationship with God (our “talent”) out of fear just like in the parable, because we believe God to be a “harsh taskmaster”, or a “hard man”, and we don't want to do it wrong and be punished. This fear tells us to protect our life experiences, so we don't "invest" our whole selves in our relationship with Jesus. We even feel sort of a "beyond possible" response to the thought that He would care about or be involved in our everyday lives, and that leaves the burden squarely on us. We want to do well, to choose good things, to get it right (like the Pharisees did in their attempt to follow the letter of the Law) but we cannot without the presence of God to guide and share with us in the experience through an active relationship (the Word of God written on our hearts). Our choices made apart from God are therefore fruitless (or the fruit is bad, like the Pharisees' fruit). Of course, a relationship buried does not and cannot grow. Thus, even what we have is taken away by the fear, and, of course, we create what we most fear: we have failed the Master. The paradox here, in fact, is that our own view of God precludes the type of relationship He desires to give us. We have missed the element of trust completely.
We turn everything from relationship to task because we are still looking for a standard to meet. “How do I stand before the Master?” “How do I measure up?” We want to know how we are doing. We use the Law as our measure for moral issues and our tasks (works) for everything else. Cody once observed, at every site where a building project is proceeding, there seems to be a compulsion to “dig a hole and make a mound.” When we watched the progress of the project together, we laughed about how one mound is used to fill in a hole and another hole is then dug to make another mound, in an endless series of pointless exercises that accomplish nothing. I relate this process to our accomplishing tasks for a harsh taskmaster. In essence, we are enslaved to “tasks”—shoveling dirt from one pile to the other. There is no value in the task, but at least we can measure our progress. “Look! I moved that whole pile from here to there!” We feel good about that as if that measurement buys us a sense of accomplishment, which feels like purpose. We then make that false sense of purpose a measure of our worth.
Whether it is the Law or tasks, it is still an attempt on our part to measure ourselves, to “measure up” so to speak, and to replace our lost identity in Christ (who we really are, and our real worth and value in His eyes) with the accomplishments of life on one side and the accomplishments of the Law on the other. Both exclude Jesus ultimately, don't they? But somehow we've convinced ourselves that we are OK as long as we have included Jesus in the area of religious stuff (albeit a distant, observing Jesus, checking us out to make sure we are getting it right). We believe we aren't even supposed to bring Him in on the mundane, everyday stuff. Yet, in this parable we are told the result is much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Ultimately, we cannot know fully about our relationship with Him except from Him. What He would desire to give us includes the true knowledge of Who He is, and how He sees us or who He says we are; in other words, an intimate connection or “oneness” with Him.
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