It was this final part of the reading that didn’t go down too well. It concluded Matthew’s version of the Parable of the Talents with the words,
“Cast this worthless servant into the outer darkness. There, men will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Matt 25:30 RSV)
Charming! These are the bits of the Gospel we don’t particularly like. We prefer the “gentle Jesus meek and mild” we used to sing about in Sunday School.
Outer darkness, weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth is generally well kept off the pulpit agenda unless the preacher for the day has got up out of the wrong side of the bed.
Yet, while this passage was being read in churches all round the world, there have been worthless servants being cast into outer darkness and there have been men (and women and children) weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. In the world backdrop to this passage, Prime Ministers of southern European nations have been summarily dismissed from political office. Most of Europe still is in daily anguish over this humungous debt hanging overhead like a thundercloud threatening to burst into the recession we may still have to have.
I don’t know how many have joined the dots between this Gospel reading and the European debt. Definitely, those who ought to have known better have wasted their talents, living and spending beyond their means and avoiding paying tax. Now the vultures are coming home to roost and almost everyone is going to hurt. Worse still, waste and irresponsibility are by no means confined to the shores north of the Mediterranean. There but for the grace of the banks go us.
What is worse is that while wealth floats upward, poverty plummets downward. We do not yet know how to discipline the rich without the poor suffering more, neither do we yet know how to raise the poor without the rich benefiting further.
From deep within this dilemma, the jacaranda trees remind us with their cascading purple blossoms that we are once more entering the season of Advent where the purple is also displayed in worship. Like Lent, Advent bids us pause and reflect even within the most hectic time of the year. Even the shooting agapanthus keeps reminding us with its own purple that THE time is coming.
God, we need hope! We can’t rely on the market! That’s up and down like a Manly ferry crossing the Heads, also sending us pale. But hope cannot come without personal and corporate responsibility. Only when we avail ourselves to bring hope to others can we appreciate hope for ourselves.
It is interesting to read that the Parable of the Talents is immediately followed by the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats where we are accepted or rejected by the grace we extend “to the least of these”. Grace, hope, peace, trust and love dry up within us if we do not also pass it on. What Jesus does for us, we pass on even “to the least of these”, even to those who have failed the test of the parables of the bridesmaids and the talents.
These acts of grace, I believe, would have saved a lot of anguish in Europe. Just as motor parts grind when the oil is not applied, neither can any economy survive without the practice of grace.
We receive God’s gift of His beloved Son, born like us, and we pass it on.
This Advent we will hear Christmas Bowl stories of humble people who have been walking in the darkness of poverty, still looking for a great light, the good news of great joy of Jesus Christ expressing himself to them through our gifts that have first come to us in him.
May God empty himself again this time to you with his full expression of hope that this dysfunctional world still needs.
