It’ll be a such a huge relief to Sue and me when Joel (our 21 yr old son) finally – well hopefully - finishes his degree at King’s College in London. (he won’t mind be saying this) but when he managed to finesse his A Levels doing relatively little work, he will admit, and got into a Russell Group university we were both gob-smacked and of course unbelievably proud. It seemed to us at the time (& to Joel) that the education system is completely over-assessed – with students taking examinations and tests constantly. And now at the end of 4 years in university (he changed course and had to repeat a year) everything he’s done (or not) for the last few years will be assessed once more, and the results could well determine the course of the rest of his life: what sort of job he’ll get, where he’ll live, and a thousand other things.

There’s always a danger that people have this idea about Christianity: that’s it’s some kind of heavenly examination system where God – who has devised the syllabus to be followed - will one day come and set the final examination to assess who passes and who fails. (and with our luck it’ll be the wrong horrible unseen paper, like that Mr. Bean sketch!) Maybe there’ll be special rewards – prizes or scholarships – for those who do really well, and likewise special detention or something like for those who flunk the test.

But of course the whole of what we’ve been learning about Jesus’ ministry these past months should make us protest strongly against such a view of the gospel. We’ve been learning that it’s not a meritocracy where the brightest and best excel. (Just look at who gets invited to the parties!) Jesus always maintained that he hadn’t come to call the righteous, but the sinners; that he’d come to seek and save (who?) the lost. People were in no doubt then and they shouldn’t be now that it wasn’t the proud and self-satisfied religious leaders (the scribes and Pharisees) who were going into the kingdom, but the no-hopers: the tax-collectors and prostitutes – those who would have failed abysmally any examination that the Judaism of their day would have set. And Jesus spends an entire chapter in Matthew’s gospel (you can look it up it’s #23) telling these self-appointed leaders how dangerous it was to carry on thinking in terms of how successful they were in keeping all the rules of the Torah (remember? all 613 of them!)

So what’s Jesus getting at here in this difficult story?

The normal way of understanding this parable is to suggest that Jesus is preparing his followers for quite a long period when he’s not going to be around, during which he will have left them tasks to do – and on his return he’ll assess their performance. But this idea can easily collapse into the kind of examination-system thinking or performance assessment of which we need to be very wary.

The important starting point with any reading of the gospels is how would the Jewish people of the day have understood a story about a master leaving slaves to do some work? Well undoubtedly they’d hear this as referring to Yahweh and his people Israel. And the momentum of the challenge Jesus was facing the people with has been ‘hotting up’ to fever pitch. Tom Wright thinks we should take the parable in the same sense.

Let’s not forget Jesus has just been denouncing the scribes and Pharisees as painted houses/whitewashed sepulchres – in other words, hypocrites. Outwardly they were fine – those who looked at them couldn’t help but be impressed – but as the divine surveyor goes in, those nicely plastered pastel-shade walls are full of dry rot – they just look okay on the surface.

So the wicked servant who hid his master’s money is likely to represent these kinds of people. (By the way a ‘talent’ was a unit of money worth roughly what a labourer could earn in 15 years – and our modern word ‘talent’, in the sense of gifts or abilities people possess is derived from this – indeed precisely because of this parable). But in what sense had they been given something that corresponds to a talent? (Well let’s think about it).

They’d been given the law of Moses (the Torah).

They’d been given the Temple, the sign of God’s presence among them.

They’d been given amazing promises about how God would bless not only Israel as a nation but the whole world through them.

And what had they gone and done? They’d gone and buried all this in the ground. They’d taken the light they’d been given that was supposed to be a light to the world and shoved it under a bushel basket; kept it for themselves. And in doing this they had acted as no better than worthless, lazy slaves. And now, when their master was at last coming back, he was going to call them to account. The threatened destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was to be regarded as the master’s punishment of the servant who’d been unfaithful and had not done his will.

The emphasis of this story falls again and again on the third slave – the one whose folly (remember, as opposed to wisdom) is a failure to respond to the master’s generosity. But what about the other slaves who did respond to the master’s trust and clearly did better? (Well we’re probably getting more confident at picking the meaning up by now)

It seems these characters are those who hear the call of Jesus and develop what Israel has already been given so that it becomes something fresh and new.

These are like the mustard seed that starts small and then grows for all to see.

These are the signs that God’s kingdom is starting to bud and blossom.

These are those loyal servants who made wise use of the money entrusted to them – especially at such a crucial time when Jesus comes to Jerusalem to force a final confrontation between God’s kingdom and the religious system that had resisted and opposed it – despite all their superficial attempt to appear good and holy

So the whole setting means that any sense of a final judgement is placed within the larger context of God’s grace and love that are flowing at every point – his help to save any and all who call on him for help.

Yes God does long for his people to use the gifts he’s given them wisely

Yes God did come, in the person of Jesus the Messiah (‘Emmanuel’ as our carols are going to be saying – ‘God is with us’) – and he came to discover who of his chosen people have actually used the gifts he’s given them profitably – who’ve acted as good stewards

And yes, God will sift and weigh everything Christians do in this present life – we can’t ignore that part of the message.

But we must also, and always, insist that this parable and others like it (as commentators like Tom Wrights point out) “do not give a complete picture of the creator God, the maker and love of the world, the God who sent Jesus as the personal expression of his love”

Let’s remember when Jesus tells this parable. It comes near the end of the bigger narrative about God’s rescuing love which is about to reach its climax in the Cross, when the Son of Man gives his life as a ransom for many. When Jesus speaks of someone being thrown into the darkness outside, where people weep and grind their teeth, we must never forget that he was himself on the way into that darkness, where even he would sense himself abandoned by God.

On this Remembrance Day this is a fitting message. We remember with thanks all those who gave their lives in the service of their country. And then the ultimate sacrifice was made by Jesus, who went and died willingly – for you and for me. That’s the amazing gift he’s given us – each one of us. I wonder when was the last time we thanked him for doing that for us. Perhaps we’ve taken it for granted that he knows we’re grateful but have never told him so. So now’s a good time (as we move into our prayers).

Prayer – Song: Thank you for saving me.. (Martin Smith)