What God Will We Worship?
Luke 19:11-27
This week we are preparing to hear a biblical story that I think many of us are familiar with: the Parable of the Ten Minas coins in the gospel of Luke. A version of this parable is also told by Jesus in the book of Matthew and is called the Parable of the Ten Talents.
These seem like the same story at first glance, but the version in Luke adds extra details. There is the stuff we generally assume:
slaves, or servants depending on the translation, of a wealthy man are given portions of money to be "entrusted with" (Matthew) or to "do business with" (Luke) until the man returns from his journey.
One slave doubles the amount he was given, and is handsomely rewarded. Another slave increases the amount given by an additional 50%, and is also rewarded.
The final slave comes forward and says, "I knew you were a harsh man and I was afraid of you. So I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth/buried it in the ground." In both accounts, this final slave has this bravery in telling the figure in authority exactly what he thought of him.
In the Matthew version of this parable, the servant might be the bad guy. We might compare him to the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit which Jesus curses in Matthew 21.
But this parable in Luke is different than the story we always seem to hear when it's time to pledge money to the church!
In Luke, the amount of money--1, 5, or 10 minas--is astonishingly less money than the Talent in Matthew. A minas is a few months of wages, a talent is many *years* of wages. In Luke, we also see that this person is a noble born person who is going off to receive authority to rule elsewhere while being chased by a people who do not want him to rule them, a detail that isn't in the Matthew version.
And at the end of this story in Luke, we see this same ruler slaughter those who dared to speak out against him ruling over them.
Here is the thing that might be controversial for me to say: I don't think that the servant who refrained from investing the money he was given in the story of Luke is the bad guy of the story.
In the first chapter of Luke, one of the first characters we meet is a king that no one wanted to rule over them: King Herod. The same king who married his sister Herodias, served her John the Baptist's head on a plate, and also ruthlessly sought the destruction of those who opposed his rule (at least according to the historian, Josephus).
Jesus told this story to an audience who would have automatically filled in the blanks for some of this story. Mentioning a noble person who went off to get their authority to rule over people that didn't want him to rule is a direct reference to Herod seeking authority to rule Judea from Caesar. Also mentioning how this ruler slaughtered his detractors is a direct reference to King Herod's own vengeful acts as King.
Jesus didn't have to say his name for his audience to know who he was talking about.
I find it so interesting how hard it is for us to see this passage in any different way than what we already have been taught--some version of "God wants us to bear additional fruit with what we have been given."
It might be disturbing for us to see this story instead as a kind of "cautionary tale" where Jesus' parable illustrates how his reign and the Kingdom of God is the opposite of what this parable describes--where wealth, avarice and punishment are valued rather than mercy, generosity and equity.
Where we once might have seen God in the character of the master who gave money to his slaves, we can consider instead how this master is the opposite of what God intends from those who have much and are in authority.
In what ways do we place authority and value people who have a lot of money in our own culture? Elon Musk has the ear of policy makers and has a cultural platform seemingly due to his obscene wealth. We turn our ears toward the likes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, valuing their perspective on policy decisions over others. Our nation has financial institutions which have become "too big to fail," and are thus saved from their irresponsible financial decisions by taxpayer dollars--such as what occured in in the 2008 financial meltdown.
In our culture, we seem to equate having much wealth as also being entitled to leadership and authority.
Jesus—and scripture in general—talks about money frequently. I wonder how much we miss when we try to turn stories that are about money into metaphors instead--distancing ourselves from talk of money (its convenient that in Matthew the word is "talents" in light of this, isn't it?) so we don't have to scrutinize or question the cultural value of wealth in the first place.
What if wealth in and of itself is a problem? How do those of us who are wealthy (so many of us in the United States), grapple with that reality? Is wealth a God we worship? In Luke it also says "You cannot serve God and wealth."
So what God will we worship? Whose Lordship will we follow?
