This week’s reading from Matthew 25:14-30 has that difference contained in it. Today we might say, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and mean it as praise. We might say “Come into the joy of your master,” and use it as a welcome to worship. (This phrase has really been used at some congregations Peter [not the disciple] has attended.) At this end of time these platitudes may sound affirming or maybe just innocuous, but, when Matthew is recounting these words, they were as scary as hearing the mower in the middle of a hay field.
You know that the Church has experienced perilous persecutions in various time periods. When Matthew is writing his Gospel account, Rome was conducting one of those periods of persecution. Christians were being sent to the coliseum, tortured, and killed for being purveyors of Jesus’ words to the people. Rome, however, provided people the possibility to preclude being sent to the coliseum or undergoing other torture and death. They were given the opportunity to recant their faith and return to pagan practices of proclaiming the emperor as god. When a person recanted, they heard the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master.” Can you hear the difference?
This week we hear of events which preceded a man’s journey. He entrusted his property into the paws of honored dependents. He gave one dependent $3,000,000; to another he gave $1,300,000; and to a third he gave $630,000. (These figures are all approximate and subject to change depending on inflationary trends.) The patron was gone a long, but indeterminate, period of time. In due course, he returned pressuring them to make an accounting.
The stage is set. The protagonists are poised for prodigious revelation. The question looms, “What is faithful living?” In the context of the world, making money, showing profits, kissing up to power appear to be faithful plays. Thus, they proffer in effect, “Sir, you entrusted me with more money than I ever imagined possible, and I doubled it for you. To accomplish this, I surrendered my ethics; I extorted funds and property from the people; and I gambled it on stock market futures, all for the privilege of being one of your preferred people.” The second makes the same statement.
As a reward, they hear those words of praise, “Well done, my sycophantic pup. Penetrate the joy of your master.” (O.K. I have taken some poetic privilege with the protagonists’ parlance, but it is for a point.) This is the world where the rich and entitled get richer and more entitled while the poor have what little dignity they have stripped away, and their poverty only gets abjectly deeper.
Now, the third person is encountered, and we begin to feel the pinch. Remember when we heard Jesus say, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor and to God the things that are God’s?” Remember when Jesus challenged the Sadducees telling them that they didn’t know what they were talking about, that “[God] is not God of the dead, but of the living?” And don’t forget Jesus’ response to the question of the greatest commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all of your [true self], and with all of your mind. …You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
These previous encounters inform the present situation. They empower the third dependent to speak truth to power—“I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow. I refuse to be part of the theft and extortion you encourage. Permit me to present to you your property.” (Again, I have taken poetic privilege to make the point.)
He expresses a different faithfulness, a faithfulness that adheres to Torah with the admonition against making interest, against gaining at the expense of others, a faithfulness of ethical living. In short, he refuses to part with his faith for the service of wealth and prominence. For this pledge, putting God in the position of occupying the most prominent place in his life, he is excoriated and punished; he is pitched out into the place of outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
This poignant place of punishment presents a conundrum for us. No one wants to be excommunicated. No one seeks shunning. Once in outer darkness, however, we find it is the very place of God’s creation plan. In the place of weeping, we find God’s blessing. Where there is gnashing of teeth, we hear the cry of oppression and God’s liberating word.
In the midst of Passion Week, in that time between Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (city of peace) and the empty tomb of Easter Sunday, we witness Jesus speaking words of truth while others are plotting to pitch him out, to crucify him, to employ their preference for the worship of power and pain. Jesus stands against this world of plunder, pillage and power inviting us into a place of potential, promised peace. This peace is not the Pax Romana (peace of Rome) enforced by fear and bloodshed, not the city of peace (Jerusalem) that kills the prophets, but the peace that surpasses all understanding in the kingdom of heaven.
Here, in the perpetual presence of Christ Jesus, the poor in spirit are known as a blessing, those who mourn know laughter, the naked are clothed, the sick and imprisoned are visited, the hungry are fed with the bread of Life, the thirsty partake of the potable potion of pardon and hope-filled promise. (O.K., I know that I am getting a little ahead of myself here, but the danger promoted by pericopes (Bible clippings) is that we forget that each reading (lection) is part of a whole; it is not “an island entire unto itself.”)
As precarious as our lives become, as scary as the outer darkness may be, let me tell you it’s not that bad. I’ve been muddling around in it for my entire life and aside from that inauspicious and problematic incident with the farmer’s wife (more particularly the carving knife she was holding at the time), it’s been pretty good. After all, it has provided the venue for me to pen this epistle to you. For those who are weeping, may you be a consolation. For those who are gnashing their teeth, may you be an advocate for liberation. Like the prairie, the hayfield, and the hedgerow in which I grew up and matured; the outer darkness is the patch from which we will rise, more compassionate, more understanding of our partners in pain, and more passionate in the privilege of promoting God’s salvific plan for our planet.
Your pal,
Nicodemus
Editor, Theologian, Counsellor, Mouse
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