Buried Treasure: the Parable of the Talents

Here in Keswick, you tend to look up at Skiddaw or across Derwentwater, or around at this little town with its church, market hall and shops and the crowds that surge through the streets in summer. But if you go to the stone circle at Castlerigg, you might think about looking down. This place five thousand years old guards its secrets. Famously you can’t even count the stones: every try gives a different answer. The big mystery is what it was for.  And as you stand on that ancient site, you wonder what lies beneath your feet. What might be buried there, if not a hoard, then witnesses, memories of a world that’s lost to us? You look down, but the grass looks innocently back up at you and yields no clue.

Somewhere, once upon a time, said Jesus, if you had stood in a particular field and looked down and started digging, you would have found buried treasure. A silver talent worth a labourer’s twenty years’ work, a six-figure sum in our money. It’s only a story. But it’s vividly told, this rapacious master who goes away and entrusts his fortune to his slaves so that he can profit from them. Two of them invest their talents profitably and are praised. The third, risk averse or maybe lacking the requisite business skills - or perhaps to get back at his cruel master? – does nothing. He buries his talent, not even playing safe by depositing it in an interest-bearing bank account. I say “only a story”, but the outcome is meant to shock. “As for this worthless fellow, throw him into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” No happy endings there.

I’ve heard sermons without number on this parable that link it to Christian stewardship and time, talents and money. But I’ve never been convinced that the weeping and gnashing of teeth can have much to do with the average Church of England congregation. 

No, the story is about more portentous things. The setting in St Matthew gives the clue. Chapter 25 is the last before we come to the account of Jesus’ passion and resurrection. Our parable is one of three about the end time and the crisis is coming upon the world. Jesus has already spoken about “the day and the hour” that no-one knows but God himself, what we call the parousia or the appearing of the Son of Man in his glory. These three parables draw out the significance of this belief that’s so central to the synoptic gospels. The one before is about the wise and foolish virgins: were they ready for the bridegroom to arrive or not? Hard on the heels of the talents follow the sheep and the goats standing before the Son of Man at the final reckoning. How have they lived their lives? How have they served the Lord who is present in his brothers and sisters? Sobering stories to bring the Year of St Matthew to an end and usher in Advent. 

Now I don’t think Jesus intends us to imagine that God is like that master who deals so capriciously with his slaves. See it as a kind of satire or morality play. The fact that he focuses on such fabulous sums of money is meant to tell us that we are in storyland where normal rules don’t apply and everything is exaggerated for effect. But underneath the playfulness is a deeply serious insight. It is that the decisions we make about the way we live are of much more than momentary significance. Like all the parables, this one drives home a challenge, tells us that our decisions have consequences that determine our destinies. I don’t mean that Jesus is thinking about the afterlife. Rather, those references to eternity are a way of focusing attention on the choices we make here and now. And these choices are life-changing in their outcomes. They imprint themselves on our characters. They control our attitudes and motives. They shape our moral and ethical behaviour. They ask us how purposeful we are in pursuing the truth by which we are going to live and die.

So what do we make of the third slave who did nothing with his talent but buried it? The clue is to look at Jesus’ audience in these last days before his passion. He has already entered the temple, thrown out the money-changers and roundly condemned the religious leadership of his times, among them the scribes and pharisees. What’s his criticism? That they did not read the signs of the times, did not see the kingdom of heaven coming, did not point people towards the salvation that they longed for. Instead they laid burdens on them impossible to bear, drove them into the ground by the sheer weight of obligation, took away their hope. It was a religion that demanded everything but gave nothing – at least, that’s how it’s depicted in the gospels. So I think the parable is primarily about what religious leaders do with the treasure they have been entrusted with. They can put it to use in the world to grow the kingdom’s values of truth, justice, goodness, peace and love. Or they can bury it where it does no work, makes no difference, and changes no lives.

But this is also true for each of us, whoever we are. The talent stands for everything that a wise and loving Master has entrusted to us as the people of God. It’s the most precious treasure we have. It can stay buried, like the bad slave’s money, squirrelled away in the dark like the lamp in the sermon on the mount hidden under the bushel and all but snuffed out; like the seed in the parable of the sower suffocated by the weeds that grew up all round it. Or we can invest in this work God wants to do in us and through us. We can release it, expose it to the clear light of day and help it to flourish so that it becomes something renewing and life-changing and profound.

If this is right, it faces us with important truths about ourselves. What does it mean to be a Christian? What do we do with God’s treasure that he has entrusted to us in baptism? How do we become good witnesses to the One who is present among us and whom the nations long for, this God who is so often hidden from sight? Advent is the right time to put ourselves among the audience and listen as Jesus tells these powerful and urgent parables. For the Lord’s coming changes things and will changes us if we want it to. 

Soon we shall sing Come, thou long-expected Jesus born to set thy people free. Born to reign in us forever, he is the most welcome of guests. When he comes, we shall not hide him away where he cannot be seen or touched, where he remains as one unknown. He will teach us what it means to give our lives to him so that we can testify of him to others. We shall greet him gladly, and bless when we hear him say, “enter into the joy of your Lord”. 

St John’s Keswick, 19 November 2017 (Matthew 25.14-30)

What are we Building For? Heritage, Advent and Mandela

What will become of all this? What will become of us?

The time will come when we are just a memory; and maybe not even that if the psalmist is right that ‘we fly forgotten as a dream flies with the opening day’.  And if life is transient, so are its most enduring monuments, even those that outlive us by centuries.  In the gospels the disciples are overcome by the size and beauty of the temple in Jerusalem.  ‘Look Master, what wonderful stones and wonderful buildings!’  And Jesus tells them that the day is coming when not one stone will be left standing on another: all will be thrown down. 

We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t marvel at wonderful stones and buildings, least of all when we are sitting among them in a World Heritage Site.  But that doesn’t mean that it lasts for ever.  Buildings, like people, are mortal. What Jesus says about the temple is also true of this place.  We can hardly bear to think of these wonderful stones and wonderful buildings lying toppled one far-off day in a heap of rubble.  And yet, in aeons to come, when the sun is in its death throes and planet is swallowed up in a vast red expanding disk, and the history of the human race is done, the Cathedral, like everything else we have built and cherished, will be dust and ashes.  To claim anything else would be idolatry.  St Paul says that what is seen is transient; it is what is unseen that is eternal. We need to judge accurately where eternity belongs. Temples have their day and are gone: in the celestial city, says the Book of Revelation, there is no temple.

This Advent has brought good news for this Cathedral in the form of a Heritage Lottery award of nearly £4 million.  This means we can press on with our Open Treasure project to enhance this Cathedral’s mission in the way we welcome guests here, and open up our wonderful medieval spaces round the cloister so that they can see and enjoy and understand and love the treasures of which we are guardians. And this means not only buildings and artefacts but this environment of lived Christian experience as it has been down the centuries and as it is now here in Durham and the North East. 

We need to make intellectual and theological sense of this word ‘heritage’ if we are not to have an uneasy conscience about being awarded so much public money. Our legacy from the past and our commitment to be good stewards of it, isn’t just a matter of buildings, artefacts and landscapes. It means fostering respect for what our forebears bequeathed us, whether in religion, culture, public life, ideas, literature, industry and art, everything that human beings do that has enduring value.  We are blessed with the capacity to treasure memory and draw on it to invest in the future, and where they meet in the present, to honour goodness, truth and beauty. Heritage connects us in tangible ways with our past and makes us aware of the passage of time, so it puts us in our place, reminds us what we owe to those who have gone before.  It instils a proper sense of our dignity.  It opens our eyes to the wisdom and insights of our ancestors and invites us both to celebrate and emulate them in our day.  To acknowledge our debt to our forebears and imitate their achievements is one aspect of the virtue the classical world called piety.  We must not neglect it.  

But we can’t be satisfied with piety alone, important though it is. To build and to renew are not ends in themselves. They are symbols of a larger aspiration, metaphors of what we should be doing in deeper ways. When we build, what are we truly building? When we conserve and renew what is old, what are we truly investing in? We must answer those questions in the light of why we are here today, which is to worship a God who has larger purposes for us and the human race. So when we talk about building, it should ultimately be to create the kind of human society that embodies the goodness, truth and beauty our structures exemplify. When we talk about renewal, it should be the renewing the life of all humanity, and our part of it, the church, so that it is fit to play a transformative role in re-creating a world as God would have it. This lies at the very heart of Advent as we contemplate the future and pray to be delivered from all that is disfiguring, degrading and false. So we need to know that our investment in our treasure from the past will make a difference to what is to come, open up in new ways the treasure of God’s good news for the world.  

In our gospel reading we heard about John the Baptist fearlessly crying out that the kingdom of heaven has come near. It takes courage to summon a brood of vipers to repentance. These past few days we have witnessed the death of a latter day John the Baptist, like him giving his life to say no to evil and injustice.  It’s been deeply moving to see the worldwide outpouring of admiration and love that has followed Nelson Mandela’s passing. There are few men or women of any century who have had his power to touch so many millions in every place, an old man who never lost the capacity to dream dreams. We are privileged to have lived in his times and seen for ourselves the life-changing effect of a life dedicated to forgiveness, reconciliation, generosity and hope. If we needed an answer to our question, what are we building for, surely he gives us it. In his inaugural address as South Africa’s newly elected President in 1994, he said this:

The time for the healing of wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us…. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace….We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

There is our mandate. I see our project, indeed everything we do in this Cathedral, as focused on nothing less than building in the way Mandela spoke of.  Our mission as a Christian church can never be less than this: building a just and true society, raising up a kinder, more Christ-like world where all are reconciled to one another as God in Christ has reconciled us to himself; renewing ourselves in the service of a God who is always reaching out to us in the Son whose coming we long for in Advent. A New Testament letter speaks about God’s people being ‘living stones’ in the temple he is building out of us.  Only the virtues of faith and hope and love can build for eternity, can renew our life together here and now, can make the dry bones of our stones and buildings come alive so that they become sacraments of grace and truth. 

Yet as our gospel reading said, God is able out of these stones to raise up children to Abraham. This place will one day will be no more. But precisely for that reason, it points beyond itself to a heavenly city where there is no temple, where the wolf shall live with the lamb and a little child will lead them; to the one who comes as the Desire of all nations and who even now implants hope in the breasts of millions’; to the time when the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.  Here in this sacrament where God welcomes us to his table, we walk tall with no fear in our hearts. We gladly seize the whole of the life God holds out to us, and to build a glory that lasts for ever. And we begin by opening the gospel’s treasure to all who come within these walls as we utter the Advent cry of every longing heart: Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus.

8 December 2013

(Isaiah 11.1-10; Matthew 3.1-12)