Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Have you
noticed the tabloids lately? Every fall, they start with their doom and gloom
prophetic – I use the word very loosely – headlines that signal the end
of the world. They do it, of course, to sell magazines. Ironically, these same
headlines get one thing right: the end of all things is drawing closer. The
Last Day. The Judgment. The Day of the Lord. The coming of Christ in glory. The
fancy word for this is eschatology. You probably know it simply as last things.
For many,
the mention of last things brings with it a cacophony of fear. What will happen
to us? Will our Lord deal with us graciously or harshly? Will our faith be
vindicated or will be ashamed, or worse, at the coming day? Will the Last Day
be a day of wrath or a day of mercy?
Last week,
we were reminded that the Last Day comes suddenly and quickly, but it doesn’t
come unexpectedly, at least to those who hear the words of Jesus and take them
to heart. His last words to His Church in the Bible are “I come quickly” to
which the Church replies “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!” Christians have been
living and praying in that expectation for 2000 years. Every generation, from
the apostle Paul, to the early church, to Luther, to our day, has thought that
the end would come in their lifetime. While the unbelieving world sleeps in a
drunken stupor, you stand ready, like a soldier on watch – sober, vigilant,
watchful, with the breastplate of faith and love protecting your heart and the
hope of salvation protecting your head.
And here’s
the point: God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through
our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake (that is
alive) or asleep (that is dead) we might live with Him. That’s what the Last
Day is about for the baptized believer – not a day of wrath but a day of
salvation, not a day of death but a day of life. That is what we now must
believe, and what we do not yet have in ourselves.
The time
in-between is the time of faith, which brings us to Jesus’ parable of the three
servants. Each is entrusted property in form of money called talents. A talent
is large sum of money, about 20 years’ wages. So 5 talents is over 100 years’
wages for a common laborer. No small piece of change. Nor is two or even one.
A rich man
entrusted his wealth to three servants. To one five, to another two, and to a
third one. And then the man went away without so much as a word of instruction
as to what to do. The first two doubled the investment. The one who had five
traded with them and made five more. The one who had two did the same. But the
third one took a different approach. He dug a hole in the ground and hid it.
After a long
time, the master returns to settle accounts. The two who turned a profit are
praised with a hearty “Well done” and get to share in the joy of their Master.
The third is condemned to outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth for
bringing back his buried talent all safe and sound.
On the
surface, the parable sounds like a judgment of works. The one who made much
received much and even got the talent from the third servant. And so do all
that you can do for God, hope for the best, and pray that you show some sort of
profit at the close of business or you’ll be joining that third servant in the
eternal unemployment line.
But the
third servant is the key to understanding the judgment. Why didn’t he turn a
profit? Why didn’t he do business? Why didn’t he transact with the world and
invest with money that wasn’t his in the first place? He really had nothing to
lose, after all. It was his Master’s money, not his. And his Master gave no
instructions, made no demands, set no profit margin goals. He simply sent out
his servants to do business with his property. And he knew his coin was good.
He knew there would be a profit and his servants would have a share in his joy.
So why didn’t the third servant do anything? Why take that shiny talent and
bury it?
Why do we?
What keeps us from doing things, from taking risks, from going outside our own
comfort zones? From inviting a friend to church, speaking the truth in love to
a neighbor, not backing down to HR when told the cross on the cubicle is
intimidating to a coworker. Fear. In a word, it’s fear. Fear of failure, failure
of being disliked, fear of punishment, fear of loss, fear of a disapproving
gaze. Fear is the great paralyzer that prevents us from even getting off the
starting line.
I spoke with
a young mother recently. She was so proud of her son. He got such good grades,
and she told me that she always praises him for his grades and rewards him. I
asked her if she ever praised him for trying something he wasn’t good at and
failing. Which received more praise, the easy A or the hard-earned C? She
smiled as she thought about it and said she was going home to praise him for
taking that advanced math class that was just a little beyond his ability.
If you’ve
grown up with hard to please parents, a demanding father or mother for whom it
was never good enough, then this parable is likely to strike a raw nerve. Fear.
You can hear it in the servant’s voice: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man,
reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I
was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.”
That’s you
and me under the Law, my friends. The Law is a harsh taskmaster. The Law
demands perfection. If you offend in one point, you’re guilty of the whole
thing. The Law demands obedience but it cannot produce a single obedient work.
All it can produce is fear, dread, terror of the final day of reckoning when
our works will be put through the fire of judgment.
And if
that’s your view of God as your heavenly Father, and if the Law is the only way
to deal with Him, that’s where you’ll wind up too. Cornered by the critics.
Paralyzed in fear.
But the good
news is that Christ has set you free from that. What matters is not the
abundance of your works, because they are not your works anyway. They are God’s
works worked in you. How can you take credit for something that isn’t yours in
the first place? What matters is trust, trust that Jesus settled your account
on the cross with His perfect life and death so that you can transact in this
world without fear of failure. And like the servants in the parable, there are
no rules. Simply faith toward God and love toward others.
What was
lacking in that third servant was not a profit but faith. He believed that his
master was harsh, demanding, and cruel. And he got what he believed. Had he
believed that his master was happy go lucky and carefree, that so long as you
did business with the world and spread the master’s good name around he didn’t
care what you made, that servant would have gone out and boldly done business
as one who had nothing to lose.
You have
nothing to lose. Salvation is yours. Eternal life is yours. The treasures of
heaven are yours. The judgment ends in Jesus, and Jesus was judged in your
place. You are free in Jesus to do what God has given you to do, knowing that
in the doing it is God at work and He never fails. And even through your
failings, your shortcomings, your weaknesses, His will is always done.
Yes, our
works will be judged. They need to be cleaned up. The dross of our sin needs to
be burned away. The fingerprints of the old Adam need to be wiped off so that
we can clearly see that what has been worked in us has been worked by God
Himself. Our works will be judged, but we will not be judged by our works but
simply by faith.
For God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should
not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to
condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who
believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the
judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather
than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates
the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.
But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen
that his deeds have been wrought in God. (John 3:16-20)
In the name
of Jesus,
Amen
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