The Divine Universe

 

 

Jesus told a parable (Matthew 25:14-30) about a man who planned a long trip away from his business and made arrangements to look after his liquid assets. Let’s try it in modern dress. These assests totalled $800,000. He gave his general manager $500,000 to look after, his assistant manager $200,000 and his chief accountant $100,000.

After many months away the man came back and asked his staff members how they had got on. The general manager had made a hundred percent profit on the money he was given; the assistant manager had done the same, but the chief accountant had kept his $100,000 in the office safe. He was afraid to take any chances with it, even in a bank (which would not surprise us these days).

The proprietor eventually returned and was delighted with the work of his two managers and promoted them both. However, he was understandably angry and disappointed with the chief accountant and gave him the sack. In fact he had him thrown out of the building.

Jesus didn’t tell these stories simply to entertain his listeners. He was trying to challenge them, to get them to think. The two managers inspire us to be smart and industrious. They were achievers. Principally, they were good at making money. That’s all very well, of course but, frankly, if all we know about them is that they were good at making money, I find those two rather boring. It is the third guy, the chief accountant who grabs my interest. He was a timid man, afraid to take risks, and that was his downfall, but bean counters tend to be like that. Maybe, like St Paul, he had even discovered that love of money (philargura) is the root of all kinds of evil.

This is not a literal story, however, it is a parable. Everything is symbolic. In Matthew’s version (probably much closer to Jesus’ original than mine), the money is in huge currency items called talents. In interpreting this parable, people have traditionally understood ‘talents’ to mean God-given gifts and abilities, not sums of money.

We can all think of individuals who God appears to have given lots of talents to; they are famous. Some of them have made the world a better place by the use of their talents. Others have been winners at the expense of losers. Not all achievements, however spectacular, glorify God.

Most people are not great achievers, important people in the public eye. Jesus was, both in his lifetime and posthumously. He was a genius, and he made the fullest use of his talents as a healer and exorcist and, it seems, more than that. His instinctive understanding of human nature, of all of nature in fact, was extraordinary – unique. Although we are assured that each of us is loved equally by God, there are big inequalities between individuals. Jesus was not only supremely gifted; he was a uniquely perfect human being. But he achieved that perfection, St Paul says, through the things he endured. It didn’t come easy.

With this parable, I think that Jesus intended his listeners to be interested in the third man. He should face us with a challenging question: Am I that timid and lazy man? 

If I rise to Jesus’ bait, another question arises: What is that talent? It’s an intriguing question. It has to be something fairly universal or the story would only have a narrow application.

John gives us a clue when he tells us that God is simply and essentially love (1 John 3:8) The source and essence of our very being is love. The medium in which we live is love. It is so completely enveloping and permeating that we cannot objectively define it.

Although it permeates us, we are not fully absorbed by love. It can seem dangerous. It can make us nervous. We resist, often confused. We flounder clumsily about, gingerly trying to get a handle on it. Love can get us into all kinds of trouble. Sometimes it attracts hate: look what it did to Jesus. So we are tempted to bury our capacity to love and be loved under a load of mundane activity, worries and cares, and, of course, possessions.

Love need not be buried by busyness The Book of Proverbs tells of a woman who was full of good works (Prov. 31:10-31). Her busyness was her way of loving. But love includes more than simply serving others. It includes passion. I’m sure the woman’s love of her family and compassion for those in need included powerful emotions. Emotions can be dangerous, so we need also to be wise.

A word about wisdom. Wisdom is not, I think, a natural talent, like intelligence. It isn’t something you’re born with. People acquire wisdom through a sustained, attentive and positive attitude to life. Wisdom is, in fact, a by-product of loving. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same. Intelligence is to do with structures in the brain that produce a good memory and the ability to think fast. Wisdom doesn’t depend on something called our IQ; it depends on a deep and passionate interest in life, in people. Getting wisdom needs patience; it takes time, a willingness to learn rather than teach, to sympathise and respond rather than to analyse and judge.

Wisdom is a precious thing, but of all the gifts, as Paul said, the greatest of all is love. And love is a universal gift: it is the creative energy and the motivation of cosmic creation. We can’t define it, but we know it when we find it. We can ask: “Is that a loving thing to think, to say, to do?” Instinctively we know the answer.

We need to exploit our capacity for love. I don’t think that we bury it completely, but we tend to put it on the shelf or in a glass case or in the ‘too hard’ basket. Like the successful servants in Jesus’ parable, we need to be proactive and be willing to take risks.

The Torah gives us the Ten Commandments and the commands to love God and our neighbour. Jesus said, “A new commandment I give you: that you love one another as I have loved you.” It was new because he now referred to himself – a person rather than a book of rules. If you want to know what human love is, the perfect example is Jesus, and Jesus is not just a character in a book; he is a living person whom we meet every day.