Lectionary Readings
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be
written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and
inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope
of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who
live and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
That Collect is one of the many gems of the Prayer Book. Written for the first Prayer Book in 1549, it both represents and forms how Anglicans have approached Scripture for centuries. As Anglicans, Scripture is at the very heart of who we are and how we pray. The vast majority of the prayers of our tradition are either quotations of or allusions to Holy Scripture. And our worship, whether it be Morning or Evening Prayer or the Sunday Eucharist is saturated with Scripture – as we typically read a passage from the Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, and a Psalm every Sunday. While our tradition values and emphasizes tradition and reason, it is Scripture that serves as the foundation of our worship and theology, and this Collect beautifully encapsulates and expresses this.
Now,
you might be wondering if all of this talk about the Collect is my feeble attempt
at skipping over this morning’s Gospel text from Matthew. This is one of the most
misunderstood and troubling of all the parables of Jesus. Sure, there are parts
of the Church that have no trouble whatsoever with the master saying “You
wicked and lazy slave… For to all those who have, more will be given… but from
those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this
worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping
and gnashing of teeth;” but ours is not a Church that embraces that sort of rhetoric.
And,
to be honest about it, this is not the only passage of Scripture that is
troubling and difficult. Too often Christians ignore and dismiss the reality
that sometimes we struggle with Scripture. I’m so grateful to be in a tradition
that values that struggle instead of promoting blind obedience. The question before
us then is this: how do we read the challenging parts of Scripture?
As
we consider what is often called the Parable of the Talents from Matthew 25, as
good Anglicans, let’s turn the Prayer Book to be our guide. Using the various
aspects of this week’s Collect, we’ll work our way through this short story by
Jesus.
The
Collect opens by saying that all Scripture is written for our learning, meaning
that Scripture was not, primarily, written as a historical account, but rather
is written so that we will more fully know the truth of God’s grace, love, and
mercy. And so if Scripture is written to show us something about God, we cannot
dismiss or disregard parts of Scripture that we do not like or that challenge
us, because to do so is to reject a part of God. As it relates to this passage,
Matthew 25 is widely regarded as an apocalyptic chapter – a chapter that tells
us something important about the direction and destination of Creation. So we
would lose a lesson about the shape of our Christian hope without this passage.
The
prayer also notes that Scripture was caused to be written by our blessed Lord.
In other words, Scripture is not accidental writings, rather the Bible is an
inspired text. God the Holy Spirit guided those who recorded, copied, and
translated Scripture, and that very same Spirit is with us when we read and interpret
Scripture. Yes, through and through, the writing and reading of Scripture is a
human process. Given that humans are limited in various ways, there will always
be limits to what can be expressed through human language and thought. But this
is okay, because the correct interpretation is not the goal, rather nearness to
Jesus is.
It’s important that we
remember that Jesus, not the Bible, is the truth around which we base our
lives. Jesus is the Incarnate Word of God, not the words of Scripture. We do
not worship or follow the Bible, rather we worship and follow Jesus. The Bible
is the primary way that we come to know who God is, particularly in the life,
death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus, and so it remains important for
that reason. But the Bible is not an end unto itself. The purpose of the Bible’s
inspiration is to teach us the truths that were enfleshed in Jesus. And so, as
we read Scripture, we pray for guidance and pay attention to the reality that
the same Spirit who is behind the words on the page is the same Spirit who
helps us to grow closer to Jesus through Scripture. Come, Holy Spirit, our
souls inspire, and help us to encounter Jesus in this text.
Next, the Collect has a
litany of verbs – hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. The first
petition is that we are able to hear the Scriptures. As a guide for us, this
means that we are to truly hear what is being said in Scripture, and we cannot
do this alone. To truly hear what a passage says we need to listen in beloved
community. Because of my personality, mood, situation, and experience, I will
not hear this passage in the same way that you do; and vice versa. This is why
in my sermon preparation, I always read from the Jewish Annotated Bible, the
First Nations translation, the South Asian Bible Commentary, the Women’s Bible
Commentary, and an African-American Bible commentary. Those are voices that I
do not have access to in my own being, but I know I need those voices if I am
to truly hear a passage of Scripture.
When it comes to this particular
passage, I was able to better hear it when I read the corresponding chapter in The
Gospel in Solentiname, which is a collection of oral commentary on the gospels
from a group of Nicaraguan peasants in the 1970s. They do not read this as a
parable about hard work and shrewd business practices, but rather they read it
as a story about economic exploitation and speculative risk-taking. Their life
situation is closer to the parable than my own. Obviously, in Jesus’ time, there
was pretty much one way for people to given a large sum of money and turn it
into an even larger sum – usury. That is, charging interest on loans; a practice
forbidden by Scripture. But there was no stock market to invest. No, to take
five talents and turn them into ten would require loaning out money at very
high-interest rates. Those Nicaraguan interpreters help us to hear this passage
not from the perspective of one of those receiving talents, but as one of those
who are the victims of such economic growth. To truly hear Scripture, we need
to listen to others.
The Collect then says
that we read Scripture, which, obviously, we’ve already done. The admonition is
to keep reading. Read the same passage in different translations, read it every
day for a while. Let your mind wander as you read and fill in some of the gaps.
You might imagine the passage of Scripture as a play and you are the screenwriter.
Fill in those gaps that Scripture does not make clear. In Womanist theology, which
is theology done from the intersection of being both black and female, they
speak of using our “sanctified imaginations.” Let the Holy Spirit help you in wondering
what these three slaves look like. What was the tone of voice that the master
used with them? How was it that the one slave knew that the master was a harsh
man? A part of the way to interpret Scripture, particularly difficult passages,
is to read and read again. As we become more familiar with a passage, just as is
true with another person, the more we are able to receive from it.
We are to then mark the
Scriptures. Yes, you have permission and encouragement to write in your Bible.
By mark the Scriptures, we mean that we’re supposed to make notes, to draw
lines of connection, to jot down ideas, to write down ideas for how we might
apply the lessons of Scripture to our lives. This is something I do with every
sermon I prepare. I get out my trusty yellow legal pad and I start to write
down ideas and gleanings from various articles and commentaries – and it has to
be on a yellow legal pad because I’m quirky like that.
As you work through a
tricky passage of Scripture, or even one that is comforting that you want to go
deeper into, you might mark down some connections. In the example of this
passage, you might jot down some thoughts in response to the reflection questions
included in the bulletin. You might think about the question of what is the
most valuable asset you have, and how is God asking you to be a steward of this
gift?
Our guiding prayer then
says that we are to learn about the Scriptures. Here, we turn to the work and ministry
of scholars. We can listen to sermons or read commentaries. There are an overwhelming
number of resources out there, so the difficulty is in finding good and trustworthy
places to go deeper in our exploration of Scripture. In general, what I
recommend to people who want to go deeper is to start with a good study Bible
such as the New Oxford Annotated Bible. If you want to go a bit deeper, try the
series of books called “For Everyone.” So in this case, it would be “Matthew
For Everyone.” And I’m always happy to loan out anything in my library or make
recommendations to you.
When it comes to this particular
passage, it is study that helps us to see the whole range of meanings of the parable.
In research, we learn that a talent isn’t a special skill or gift, it’s a unit
of currency. So, at the most basic level, this is a parable about money. We
learn that some have interpreted this as a parable about the importance of the
good news. Some read this as about the final judgment of all things and others
read it as a parable about current day economic practices. Some scholars note
that this parable might have originally been directed at communities with which
Matthew was at odds. Others read this as a counter-parable, meaning a parable
that doesn’t tell us about the Kingdom of God, but rather the broken ways of
the world. Some even read this as a political commentary about Archelaus, the
son of Herod the Great who ruled over a part of Israel in the early
first-century.
The reason why such study
is important is because the Bible never means less than what it did to the original
hearers. Yes, through the guidance of the Spirit, a text can transcend its original
meaning, but it never outgrows it. By studying Scripture, we learn from the
riches of our tradition, from the beloved community that has been reading this passage
across space and time.
We are then ready to inwardly
digest the passage – meaning we are ready to have it begin to nourish us in
faith. The adverb “inwardly” suggests that at this point, we stop working on Scripture
and allow ourselves to be worked on by it. So paying attention to our feelings
is important here. When it comes to interpretation, we tend to intellectualize things.
Our intellect is not bad, but it is not complete. We need to pay attention to
how a passage sits with us. What emotions does it evoke? For me, the Parable of
the Talents unsettles me. I feel uneasy with the harshness of the final
judgment. I worry about what sort of steward I am with the gifts that have been
entrusted to me. In this metaphor, these feelings and rumblings of the Spirit
are the digestive enzymes that help us to receive nourishment from the passage.
Finally, the Collect
tells us that the purpose of this process is that we might embrace and hold fast
to the hope of everlasting life. This tells us something about the overall nature of
Scripture, namely that it points us toward this hope. As we read Scripture, we use
through the lens of grace and love with the expectation of encountering the
abundance of eternal life. So, in a nutshell, such a reading might help to read
this passage as a challenging word against those who think they deserve what
they have earned. Those who ended up with double the talents do so not because of
their hard work, but because they were blessed with an enormous sum of money to
begin with. We might read those talents as God’s grace and love.
It then becomes a parable
that helps us to receive with gratitude the powerful and precious gifts of God,
compelling us to not keep these gifts to ourselves, but to keep that love in circulation.
And, when we hoard love and mercy instead of sharing it with others, well, we
end up in a self-made version of hell. A tough word, to be sure, but also an
honest assessment of what happens when we do not walk in the way of love.
Now, is this the only way
or the correct interpretation of the parable? I can’t say for certain, nor can
anyone else. That’s the thing about Scripture – we can’t ever claim to understand
it as masters, rather we stand under the words of Scripture and ask that, through
it, we be brought closer to the liberating, loving, and life-giving Word of
God: Jesus.
