These are not the texts an intern hopes for on her first week preaching at her supervising congregation. Following the texts on Reformation Sunday and on All Saints’ Sunday, God’s wrath, destruction, and the weeping and gnashing of teeth seem to put a stick into the spokes of the direction I would have liked to have gone. “You are saved by grace through faith…” and “God will wipe every tear from their eyes,” are much kinder starting points.
I think part of the difficulty with these texts, Zephaniah and the Psalm, in particular, is that they hit a little too close to home. Many questions arise when we hear the words, “The LORD will not do good, neither will he do harm.” What does this say about God? It makes an assumption that God is either impotent, unable to act, or ambivalent, unwilling to. Either one leads to the question, “What is the point?” An impotent God is hardly worth being the object of our faith. An ambivalent God would probably not demand our faith. Looking at the situation into which Zephaniah speaks, in which both the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel are in exile, it makes it difficult for us to assert that God is either impotent or ambivalent. The Israelites are in this situation because God has acted. God’s decisive action has landed the unfaithful Israelites in exile and still, they insist, “The LORD will not do good, neither will he do harm.” God is neither impotent nor ambivalent. God is able to and, indeed, does act.
If this statement is, then, not reflective of God, it more likely reflects upon the humans who make such a statement. These words seem to relate to a story long long ago and far far away, until we start to consider the culture around us, in which many people - even those in church - identify as agnostic, or as, “spiritual but not religious,” and when hear the words “The LORD will not do good, neither will he do harm…” we realize it is not just they, but we, we who find it so much easier to be Christian only on Sunday mornings and leave it conveniently behind Monday through Saturday. Out of convenience, we attempt to make God either impotent or ambivalent to match our own powerlessness and carelessness. Externally, there is peace and security. Internally, there is that nagging hunger, for a God who does more than reside in heaven, unaffected by God’s earthly creatures. At the same point, we want God to act in ways that we prescribe, to behave as we would have God behave, but will this fulfill our desire for a God who acts?
We are hungry for the light, yet we sit in darkness. We believe in God, but what do we believe about our God? What do we believe about how God works in the world? How decisive is God’s claim upon our lives? God has claimed us and all that we are as His. So what does this say about the kingdom of heaven?
It is hard for us to say. In many ways, we are torn between the realities of earth and the promises of heaven. They seem to conflict with each other. The Gospel text, I think, illustrates this tension. 14“For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; 15to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.” A talent is somewhere between 15-20 years’ worth of wages, so this is not chump change we’re talking about. This would be anywhere from 300,000 to over a million dollars in today’s terms for one talent. The slaves are left with no instructions with what to do with the money. The first two slaves double their money, the third buries it in the ground. No wonder he was only given one talent. The question of who we want to be in this story seems pretty obvious… so often, we are programmed to identify with the protagonists, and the protagonists are usually the ones who come out on top, the winners, if you will. “Master, I knew you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed, so I was afraid… here is what is yours.” Now, coming on the heels of a parable exhorting the bridesmaids to be ready though they know neither the day nor the hour the bridegroom will arrive, it is possible to read this parable as one that follows naturally: be diligent and be ready, for we do not know when Christ will meet us. If this parable only spoke to the importance of being responsible with what God has given us, then we could talk about the importance of giving our all to God and, indeed, God deserves all of who we are and our best stuff at that. If this parable is only about human action, then it is easy to see that the slave who buried his money is indeed wicked. The parables, however, typically teach us as much about God as they do about humanity. So, then, do we describe Christ as, “a harsh man, reaping where he does not sow and gathering where he has not scattered?”
Often, this parable is read as an allegory, in which the man going on a journey represents Jesus and the slaves represent humans. To be certain, we are each given blessings, challenges, and responsibilities according to our abilities. To be certain, we are entrusted to be stewards of all that God has given us. All of this said, I find it difficult to reconcile the kingdom of God, in which the last is first and the first is last, to the statement, “To all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Are we truly able to view Jesus as a man who reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he did not scatter? This parable, it is true, occurs in a group of parables regarding judgment and readiness. The timeline in which it happens is just before Jesus’ arrest and trial. Jesus has every reason to caution us here… but I have trouble reconciling this parable with Jesus, who earlier in the Gospel exhorts us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, who tells the scribes and Pharisees that the “greatest among them will be their servant.” These characteristics hardly seem to have much in common with a man who takes what is not his.
With Christ, everything is the opposite of what we would expect. Those who worked all day are paid the same as those who have worked an hour. Further, when we read of Christ, we do not read of a man who gives earthly power in exchange for our faithfulness; we read of a man who goes to the cross, is shamed by the world, and dies for those who call for his execution. As one commentator states, “The surprising aspect of the gospel is what comes next. In a glorious moment of redemptive reversal, Jesus, who embodies God’s return to Zion and accompanying judgment, moves into the week of his passion. In an act of immeasurable grace, he then takes the judgment promised onto himself. He becomes the Judge who is judged in our place on that Good Friday day of the Lord. When he does so, it shakes the earth to its very foundation.” So, the slave gives back the coin, and says, “This belongs to you. My integrity and my life, they belong to Another, the One who gathers his children as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. The one I serve has already been invested with power from on high, by power this earth cannot touch, cannot crush, and cannot own.” God’s action inspires our action. Belonging to God, we cannot bow to another power, for God has demanded our entire allegiance and God has promised to act.
God will, and certainly does, act. He acts in a way that subverts our understanding of what it is to have a God, that is, it subverts our notions of casting God in our own image. This God reaps where he sows and gathers where he has scattered, for all of Creation bears the indelible mark of the Creator. God’s power is markedly different from how we understand worldly power to work; this is the way in which we are able to recognize the work of God. We are moved to disagree with those in Zephaniah who say, “The Lord will neither do good, nor will he do harm.” We know this is not true. Although our salvation is secured in Christ, our God is not ambivalent toward creation. God is not removed from us. Christ is God’s decisive move for us. We see in God’s action that God is for us, God is with us, and God is neither impotent nor ambivalent. It is certainly not what we would expect, and sometimes we wish God would wield the power of which we hear in Zephaniah so that, just once, we could see our enemies be crushed. That same weight, however, would crush not only our enemies, but ourselves as well, for often, we are our own worst enemy. Being our own worst enemies speaks of our hunger for a God who will act, but the selfsame fear that ensues when our God springs into action. Deep down, there is part of us that fears we will receive what we have coming to us, that is, death and destruction.
Again and again, over and over, we see God giving us the opposite of what we deserve so that we may learn what it is to love, what it is to forgive, and what it is to live. We are saved by grace apart from works, though there is a part of us that waits for the other shoe to drop. Indeed, we die, but we die to sin, we die to death, and we die to the powers of evil. We die to our notions of what it is to have a God, trading our false images of God for the true God.
God’s decisive claim upon our lives is more than a command, more than a demand that we do something with what we have been given. God’s claim upon us is not based upon our ability to be successful or get it right (how many Bible characters can you think of that got it right?), but based upon grace, based upon a free promise which we have received through Christ - apart from our failures to save ourselves. We have not been given earthly power, we have been given salvation. We have not been given a kingdom on earth, we have been given a king in heaven. We are to be ready, but we aren’t called to be ready in the way the earth asks us to be ready. When earthly powers ask us to be ready, we arm ourselves, stockpile our belongings, invest our earnings, and are vigilant toward those who threaten us. When God asks us to be ready, we arm ourselves like the Thessalonians: with the breastplate of faith and love, and the helmet of hope of salvation. We are not destined for earthly power or for earthly vindication, but for salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. So we return here, week after week, to meet Christ’s presence in the Word and Sacrament, in bread and wine, receiving here the foretaste of the feast to come in which the first is last and the last is first. Of that feast, there shall be no end. Amen.
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