A Sermon preached at Christ Church Cathedral
16 November 2008
“For 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”
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit
The prophet Zephaniah does not mince his words: Shut up! Pay attention! ‘For the day of the Lord is at hand’ (Zeph. 1.7) What follows is a nightmarish apocalyptic vision: swollen with wine, the inhabitants of Jerusalem sit putrefying in their sins and godlessness – one translation of our first reading talks of them ‘stagnating’; they are like fruit rotting on the trees or a harvest decaying in the fields. No feast can be made of them or for them, no acceptable sacrifice. And all because of their inactivity, their complacency, their paralysis in the face of the divine injunctions. These men are utterly indifferent towards God – ‘The Lord will not do good,’ they say, ‘nor will he do harm’ (v.12): for them God is remote and irrelevant. And so upon them in their drunken stupor comes ‘the great day of the Lord’ (v.14), irrupting into the Jerusalem night, wreaking havoc and devastation upon those who have neglected the Lord, laying waste, hurtling forward to visit desolation and despair upon a forgetful people. Zephaniah captures the breathless imminence of this time when he describes the day of the Lord as ‘near, near and hastening fast’ (v.14), and impresses upon us the utter finality and ultimacy of this divine judgement – ‘in the fire of his passion the whole earth shall be consumed; for a full, a terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth’ (v.18). The fire of his passion is ‘a refiner’s fire’ (Mal. 3.2), at the same time purging and purifying those who will survive the Lord’s judgement, and annihilating the dross and worthlessness which stain and deface the wedding-garments of righteousness (c.f. Matt. 22.1-14).
And so too in this morning’s Gospel, one of Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom, which invites us to compare two ways of responding to the faith with which God has entrusted us; and again, the backdrop to this scene is the impending day of the Lord, a day which brings with it ‘the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matt. 25.30). But here in Christ’s words there is hope – for this terrible end is not the fate of all; instead, Christ describes a response to God to which not curses, but blessings, are added: ‘enter into the joy of your master’ (vv. 21,23). Where is the difference? What is it in this parable which marks off the ‘good and trustworthy slave’ (ibid.) from the one who is ‘wicked and lazy’ (v.26)? For what reason will some receive blessings upon blessings – an ‘abundance’ (v.29), ‘enough and to spare’ (ibid. NEB) – while from others, even in their nothingness, ‘what they have will be taken away’ (ibid.)? I suppose there are two elements I wish to draw out of this passage, two qualities in our Christian lives which I wish to emphasise: one a factor in our subjective attitude towards God, the other the objective consequence of this. And I would like to start with a very innocuous little word, so seemingly insignificant that perhaps you would miss it if you did not know to look: that word, in the original Greek of the New Testament, is poreutheis (v.16). In translation this means ‘he went off at once’: the emphasis is on the instancy and promptness of the man’s response – he does not hesitate to set to work his master’s money. It is by no means insignificant that Matthew chooses to emphasise the sense of urgency evident in this servant’s actions: this unhesitating response to a master’s command is familiar from the evangelist’s own history, for we recall in Matthew 9.9 the details of his own invitation to follow Jesus – ‘As he was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.’ In contrast to Jesus’ unhurried passage through the Galilean countryside, there is the devastatingly simple command: ‘Follow me’; and, to this, there is Matthew’s unqualified acceptance of discipleship, his complete obedience to the one whom he recognises as Lord. In light of this, the sin of the third slave, the discordant and incongruous element in his behaviour, is revealed as the absence of dynamism, as indifference and inaction, as stasis. Like the miserable Jerusalemites of Zephaniah’s prophecy, the third slave stagnates and stalls in the face of that which ought to be irresistible – the Master’s Word.
There is a dreadful irony in the image conjured up by this parable: ‘the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money’ (v.18) – he is planting a seed which shall never germinate, never grow into a living organism – and this because, as the example of the other slaves shows, the talents given by the Master require the activity of dynamic engagement.
Consider the logic of the faithful servant as he greets his master’s return: ‘you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents’ (v.20). To this man it is a veritable consequence of the master’s investment that there should be a return: it is a condition of the trust the master places in his servant that that trust be repaid. In S. Luke’s Gospel this idea is made explicit: ‘From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded’ (Luke 19.48). This is the flipside of that rather appalling conclusion to our own Gospel passage: ‘For 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’ (Mt. 25.29). Although responsible action – that action which constitutes a fitting response to the uttered Word – will gain a reward wildly disproportionate to the initial investment; however, being invested with great faith demands a great return.
But I hasten to stress that this is not a transactional relationship – the servant has no right to demand entry into the joy of his master – after all, as S. Luke reminds us, the dutiful slaves can say only ‘we have done only what we ought to have done’ (Lk. 17.10); this is instead a relationship of covenant, one of the richest biblical motifs. The scandalous extravagance of the Master’s favour – bestowing upon his servant an abundance – shows that this is not Law, this is not justice as the human mind can comprehend it: this is Love. This is the Love which was so great that the penitent Magdalen ‘came to her beloved with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it upon him’ (Mt. 26.7), outraging those who as yet did not know the wild excesses of this passionate fire of love (c.f. Zeph. 1.18). And so we are brought back again to Zephaniah and his disturbing vision of blood and fire; but now we may look at it afresh, and see that the blood spilled in this moment of judgement is the blood of the Lamb (c.f. Rev. 7.14), which, in this Eucharist, will wet our lips also; likewise we now see that the ‘fire of his passion’ is the fire of God’s love, with which we are caught alight and in which our weakness and indolence are burned away – for we shall move in these flames like the three young men condemned to the furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar: like them we shall walk ‘unbound’ (Dan. 3.25), loosed from our limitations, and like them we shall, in the midst of this inferno, sing hymns to God and bless the Lord (Song of Thr. 1.1).
For at the heart of this fire, at the heart of the covenant relationship, what prompted Mary Magdalen to break open her jar of perfume upon Jesus, what prompted Our Lady herself to sing her Magnificat, what has animated the saints and martyrs throughout the ages, and what I desire to indicate to you this morning, is Love. Who among us does not want to be loved? Know this – God loves you. The Master loves his servants, but such is love that it demands a response – this is not logic, this is not the language of cause and effect, of input and output – this goes beyond all of that. To be loved by God means to respond with joy; it means to bring before Him that which He has given us. And that requires an awful lot of courage – to dance in the flames rather than to cower in the darkness; to burst into bloom rather than to languish in the tomb – to come forth, to get up, to go – at once – to God. ‘Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God’ (Ps. 31.5). The riddle is not nearly as difficult as we supposed: ‘For to all those who have, more will be given … but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away’ (Mt. 25.29). Without God we are nothing, because without God we are without Love – ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4.16) – and even ‘if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing’ (1 Cor. 13.3). To be loved by God is to be animated by his Love, to live by the new commandment ‘that you love one another’ (John 13.34)’, to live, as our Gospel tells us, kata dunamos, according to the dynamic at work within us, the love of God within us, which maintains us through the heat and the flames of the purification on the day of the Lord.
Know that you are loved, and then act in this knowledge, according to this dynamic. Be enlivened and empowered and inflamed by the love of God – be ‘trustworthy in a few things’ (Mt. 25.23), and then ‘enter into the joy of your master.’ May the angels in heavens, whose praise of God is ceaseless, pray for you; may the saints, who knew God’s love and danced in it in their lives, pray for you; may Our Lady, Mother of those who love the Lord and who are in turn his beloved, pray for you; and now, receive this sacrament of Love made manifest upon this altar, and take it into the world (c.f. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis).
Amen.
Mr Richard Norman Sacristan of Pusey House