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Easter 3
14/4/2024

Acts 3:12-19
Luke 24:36b-48

Festering
Many of you will have noticed that the Brittany Higgins-Bruce Lehrmann case returned for another of its many, many regular appearances in the newspapers this week. The case concerns an alleged rape in Parliament House in Canberra and has been accompanied by vigorous commentary from all sides about what happened and what it signifies in a culture of fear, duplicity and suspicion. The whole affair has become the kind of thing for which the word “sordid” is perhaps the most apt description.

Nonetheless, the story still claims the headlines. This is likely because it tells us something about ourselves, touching as it does upon the dynamics of power, desire, trust, guilt, safety, justice. It is a classic tale in which we ourselves are played, and we look on wondering whether it will turn out to be a tragedy or a comedy, in the literary sense: will it end low or high? We watch to learn our own prospects in similar situations: are we living tragedies or comedies?

I raise the matter today not to risk speculating or commenting on the allegation but simply because it is now five years since the alleged attack. As well as being luridly captivating, the story lingers as a festering wound. Even if a “resolution” finally comes, that wound will not likely ever be healed. This will probably be so for those directly involved but more broadly, we know that this story is neither unique nor not the last of such stories. We know these kinds of struggles, and that they will not end.

The Higgins-Lehrmann case, of course, is not the only thing in the news or our lives which has this character. This festering dynamic is replicated in most of what ends up in the news, apart from those contrived little comedies we call “human interest” stories. What is the Gaza war but such an open wound, or the Ukraine conflict or, more profoundly, the ongoing impact of colonialism, racism, sexism, or rapacious capitalism?  Whether it’s the continuing impact over five years of an alleged rape, or of the 80-odd years of the Palestinian conflict, or of the 400 or so years of Western imperialism, or of 2000 years of Christian antisemitism, it looks suspiciously like the peace we hope for is not coming. The stories we are forced to live continue to be agonised ones we hope will turn out to be comedic, but we fear will be tragic. As hopelessly pessimistic as this might seem, none of us turns on the news expecting anything other than more such struggle.

Ignorance
Let’s hold that thought for a moment as we turn to our reading this morning from Acts, in which we hear part of a sermon by Peter (Acts 3.12-19). The death of Jesus was another sordid tale now slowly slipping from public interest. Peter lays the blame for Jesus’ death unambiguously at the feet of the crowd he addresses, and then comes to my focus text for this morning:

“I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer”

The meaning appears straightforward: it is because of “ignorance” that the messiah suffers. The implication seems to be that had his audience known, they would not have crucified him. Jesus’ death now looks like an accident, in the same way that we might not notice that we put red knickers into the washing machine with the whites, delivering to us a new, rose-tinted wardrobe: “Oops, if I’d known they were in there, I would have pulled them out!” Oops, if I’d known you were the messiah, Jesus, I wouldn’t have crucified you. My bad.

The problem with this is that it suggests the error was one of not having the right information. But now, finally, the knowledge is given, and the endless, festering suffering will cease. We want to hear this kind of story, of course, because it finally resolves things: the hidden truth is now known, the confusion melts away, the estranged lovers are reconciled, the music swells in the background as the credits begin to roll and all is now right with the world, at least until the house lights come back up.

But the ignorance with which Peter charges the people here cannot be a mere lack of knowledge. One of the features of Jesus’ ministry is that it is often rejected precisely at the point that it is most appealing, most persuasive, most informative. In John’s gospel in particular, Jesus’ power and so identity are as close as possible to being irrefutable because of what he has done, yet still his opponents cannot see. Ignorance is here not the absence of knowledge; it is the inability to know. And so it is the inability to act differently, to change radically how the story will end, the inability to stop the rot, to close the festering wound. This kind of ignorance is a condition and not a matter of information. More concretely, it is the likelihood that, had we known that Jesus was the messiah, we would still have crucified him because knowing who he is would not be enough to stop us from doing so. Our capacity to crucify the image of God in Jesus springs not from ignorance but from the fact that we very often crucify the image of God in this Rachel or that Abdul.

While a lot has changed since Peter preached, a lot has not. We live in an age in which we might have expected that we had worked a few things out, that a few wounds would now be well healed. We have managed this, of course, on the relatively simple level of nature, at the level of mere knowledge. Penicillin, bypass surgeries and organ transplants treat wounded bodies very well. But wounded souls are a whole other matter, whether the souls of individuals or the souls of whole societies. While we tell ourselves that we live in an increasingly complex world, this is an evasion. Despite our sense of increased complexity and despite the promises we might have imagined the modern world would bring, we still see our troubled selves in ancient texts like the Scriptures. And while “religion” lingers as a convenient scapegoat in our modern context, this defence masks the painful reality, even where the wounds look to be religiously inflicted. Religion is one feature which distinguishes Israelis and Palestinians, but it is not why they are killing each other; religion is not why men rape, or someone might turn to alcohol; it is not why psychotherapists are flat chat treating fractured spirits. Our problem is profoundly human, not religious.

And neither is any of this about how much we do or don’t know. When Peter speaks of ignorance, he speaks of what we cannot see without the specific light of the resurrection: You could not know him then, Peter says, but now you can. You could not know yourselves, but now you can. Peter’s “in ignorance” is not that we crucified the wrong person; it is that we crucify at all, that we imagine that crucifixions heal our festering wounds, rather than exacerbate them. What are the reports which fill our newsfeeds but crucifixions, or fear of crucifixions? Our ignorance is our condition, is our suffering.

Light
This would all be utterly hopeless if Peter stopped there, for what can such ignorance do to teach itself? But he continues: In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his messiah would suffer. The messiah suffers because our ignorance causes our suffering, and he is one of us. The messiah – the image of God – suffers because we are the image of God, and we suffer.

But while our suffering only festers, the suffering of God in the messiah changes things. God’s suffering changes things because it reveals something we cannot otherwise see. This is why Peter’s talk of ignorance and suffering arises in the context of his proclamation of the resurrection. The risen Jesus is not merely risen, not merely un-deaded. The resurrection reveals the crucifiers’ knowledge of Jesus as ignorance. To say that Jesus is risen is to say that the crucified one is risen, the one who apparently deserved crucifixion because such a thing surely could not have happened to God’s anointed.

But if this one is raised, then the resurrection is a light which reveals what we could not know, what we could not see. The resurrection reveals how very, very dark it has been, how dark it still is, and what it would take for us to begin to see.

But Peter’s proclamation is that “what it would take” has already been achieved. If Jesus is risen, then there appears now a revelation by which hidden things might now be seen, by which unknown things might now be heard, by which untouched things might now be felt, by which broken things might begin to be healed.

This light makes possible a radical re-valuation of what we are, what we do, and what is done to us. If we saw by this light, what would that mean for even the possibility of rape, or for the idea that bombs are an efficient instrument of justice, or for our assumption that a person is only what we can imagine her to be, or for the conviction that tomorrow is better secured with money than by trusting each other?

Whatever it would mean, we won’t know unless we heed Peter’s call: Repent, and turn to the God who embraces the crucified and crucifier alike, so that our wounds might no longer fester but be healed in God.

Repent.
Re-think.
Re-view.
Re-imagine.
Re-form.
Res-urrect.

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Good Friday
29/3/2024

Philippians 2:1-11
Luke 9:44-48, 51-56

If we do not keep hold of the crucifixion, Easter Day becomes mere kitsch which has nothing to say to this broken world.

——

It is forty years since the appearance of Milan Kundera’s novel, The unbearable lightness of being. The book is the account of four lives set against the background of the 1968 Soviet suppression of the Czech Spring, although Kundera is less interested in this historical context than in the fact that his protagonists must live somewhere. How can we live in our particular Where? Should we fight for life or do we flee from it?

Kundera begins by asking about the “weight” our actions have, and whether it is better that they be heavy or light. Two possibilities present themselves. First, our actions gain substance by means of eternal return (after Nietzsche): weight and meaning arise from repetition in recurrence or constancy; this is the struggle for life, and holding it tight. The second possibility is that our actions can only be “light”, fleeting, once-and-never-again events which are then lost with the oblivion tomorrow ultimately brings. Kundera proposes that the lightness of our being is that it will soon be as if we and all we love never existed; the unbearability of this is that we must still exist in relation to each other, nonetheless.

The idea of an unbearable lightness has increasingly coloured my reflections on Easter and the thinking any Christian must do around the confession of Jesus’ resurrection. Is there not, for the sceptical but also for believers who are paying attention, an “unbearable lightness” about how Easter is often celebrated and proclaimed? This is not quite Kundera’s unbearable lightness but relates more closely to another concept in his book: “kitsch”. Kitsch is representation which hollows out the substance of the thing represented. Easter is susceptible to kitschification, to the extent that promises of resurrection locate our most authentic existence in a future world beyond this one. Kitschy Easter proclamation leaves this world behind. Whatever such a future might be, it tells us little about how to be in our fractured present.

Against this too familiar reading of Easter, the resurrection might better be taken to point backwards rather than forwards. That is, the true miracle of Easter is Jesus’ life up to and including the crucifixion. The path to the cross is the true miracle because the real shock in the Easter story is not that the dead might one day live again. It is rather that there are worse things than being crucified.

This is perhaps a little surprising, given the horror of death by crucifixion. Yet the lightness of the crucifixion here is not What it entailed but That it happened, despite the What. Contrary to atonement theories which require Jesus to be spent as some kind of salvific coin, dying as he did was not necessary but was the indirect consequence of a decision to live in radical openness to human (and divine) truth, undeterred by the potential lethal cost of such a life in a truth-denying world. Jesus came to live, not to die. On this reading, “worse than being crucified” seems to be, for Jesus, a life without openness God’s truth and its claim on our relationships with each other. When, then, as in our Gospel text this morning, Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem”, it is with an openness to this living future in this world, and not with a commitment to escaping the world through the cross into an easier eternity.

This resonates on one level with Kundera’s interest in lightness of being. Not motivated by the desire to establish weighty institutional legacies or even simply to survive as long as he can, Jesus enacts an openness to truth and a fearlessness in the face of the horrific death which looms because of that freedom. Life is more than surviving. But for Kundera’s protagonist Sabina, who seems to represent what he himself holds to be true, the fleeting nature of our existence translates to life as flight; lightness is finally freedom from the entanglements of relational commitment and responsibility. Sabina’s truth is finally detachment – from others and so from meaning. Such a life has its own harsh authenticity, but it is finally as lonely as the sheer eternity of Easter kitsch is empty.

In contrast, while Jesus lived with a Sabrina-like lightness of being which did not fight for grandeur or survival, neither was his life flight from others into lonely solipsism or by escape to heaven. Precisely the opposite: as Paul described in our reading from Philippians this morning, Jesus takes the form not of a fleeing survivor but of a servant. This is a radical being for others which neither betrays nor abandons them. If it is such a one who is resurrected, so also is resurrected the possibility of a life that neither fights nor flees but proclaims and lives into an uncomfortable one-and-all social and political tension which could lead to a cross. An Easter resurrection which recalls the cross does not promise time with God someplace else; it promises the presence of God here and now in any life lived in openness to bearing the “unbearable” other.

The cross arises from a social and political ethic which does not destroy and does not abandon, and it is just this ethic which is raised on Easter Day, and not merely the individual Jesus, understood to have died a few days earlier. The heaven of Easter day is the heaven which led to Jesus being crucified.

This matters today because – contrary to the gospel of the risen crucified one – the struggles which wrack this world are precisely struggles for some heaven or another, each conceived as an eternity without the requirement that we bear this or that particular human other. Someone is always missing from our preferred heavens. And so those various eternities become visions for which we can justifiably crush and kill or abandon the other who won’t be in our heaven anyway: we want a heaven with no Israel to live with, or no Palestine; a heaven with no gays, or no fascists; with no difficult bodies but only easy souls; with no tangled histories but only tidy logic; a heaven with no appalling chauvinists or uppity feminists; no traffic, no stop lights, no waiting; we want a heaven with no differences to overcome and so, what all this could only finally mean: a heaven with no one else there. The heaven proposed by crossless Easter kitsch – and by every fight or flee social or political program – is finally an unbearably lonely eternity.

We need a better heaven than this. That better heaven will have something to do with a resurrected cross. An Easter which does not forget the cross speaks of the miracle we need: the revelation that our life with each other is bearable, and is not merely bearable but is the possibility of a joy worth dying for, though not killing for.

In our Lenten Studies text this year, Sam Wells writes that the kind of reconciliation we see in Jesus – and so salvation he brings – is one which “[holds] together profound but incompatible loyalties, [straddles] deep but rival relationships, [is] the battleground for terrible and uncontrollable enmities”. The proclamation of Easter cannot exceed this, for this is the nature of the one who is said to be risen, and this is what that risen one continues to do. The risen crucified one spans our incompatibility with each other, our rivalries, our enmities.

To return then to the question of Kundera’s book, “How should we live in our particular Where?” What has the Easter of the Crucified to say to this? Our life is to reflect not other-worldly Easter kitsch. It is to reflect God’s being with us in the midst of our fractured here and now.

We are to live with the understanding that this is the only place given to us to live, with these people and no others.

We are to recognise that life’s promise will only be realised in the form the other human being.

And we are to learn to bear the cross-shaped burden we can each sometimes be to each other, for their sake and so for our own.

This is the reconciliation, salvation and call of the Easter of the crucified Jesus.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2023

Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:1-7

Distracted
What we pay attention to matters so much in economic terms today that commentators speak of our now inhabiting an “attention economy”. We experience this in all its social, commercial and political dimensions through the notifications on our phones, the clamouring of influencers, and increasingly in-your-face advertising.

With this competition for our attention comes the corresponding experience of distraction. When something vibrates or “tings” nearby, we are distracted from whatever we are doing. If the distraction is well-designed, the interruption grips our attention. This is how we might be sucked into a vortex of binge-watching something into the wee hours, or have a study session cut into confetti-sized bits by group chatter, or find ourselves with a hefty fine because1 we’ve tried to answer a text while driving. So pervasive is this experience that some have suggested that indistractability is the most impressive superpower of the present age.

But what does it say about us that we are so distractable? Distraction works as a commercial and political method because there are “buttons” in us which can be pushed by noises or flashing lights which will cause us to look up from whatever we are doing. These buttons are being pushed, of course, because our responses translate into dollars or votes for the button pushers.

Incomplete
But my immediate interest is that we respond, because our response tells us something about the tension between the real, tangible value of what we might already be doing and our sense of the possible value of what the distraction promises. What’s common to these kinds of distractions is the positive possibility of an “addition” to ourselves, and the corresponding negative experience of incompleteness.

This is perhaps most obvious when counting the number of online friends, followers, views, votes, shares, or re-tweets: more is more, and more matters because it is “less incomplete”. But it’s much the same with other distractions: the distraction of the latest version of our now superseded thing or of the novel “experience” we might have the money to buy. The possibility of the new thing distracts us because we imagine we are not yet complete. Where I am now, what I am doing now, what I am – these don’t seem to be enough. I am not yet enough; there must be more, and it’s not here but perhaps it’s there – in the next notification, in a different life partner, a new job, or when I finally retire

Christmas and completeness
So, what has all this got to do with Christmas? Christmas is about completeness in the midst of, and in the very form of, incompleteness.

“…And [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger…”

Luke’s Christmas narrative is filled with signs of incompleteness. It speaks of the displacement of the holy family by the will of empire, of their marginalisation despite Mary’s condition, and of the humiliation of being laid in a manger. There is not a lot of fullness in the circumstances of the birth of Jesus.

But born, wrapped securely, and laid down safely, the child is complete. Of course – as with most children – there are many things he will do and say, many things he will enjoy and suffer. But none of that will exceed the completeness he is in himself: he is already all he needs to be. The Christmas story is about a completeness in the midst of poverty and powerlessness – a wholeness despite want and need, the utter absence of the need for distraction.

We don’t believe this, of course, which is why Christmas is often the opposite for us: a season of not enough, a season of incompleteness. And so we can be driven to distraction by the Christmas imperative to provide for the accumulation of more: more stuff for people who don’t really need it, more money to pay for the stuff, more work to earn the money to pay for the stuff, and so on. This kind of incompleteness is not merely a condition but a process, a way of life.

By contrast, there is a completeness in the Christ child to which nothing needs to be added. Yet this is not sentimental gooeyness at the image of a newborn. And neither is it a nostalgic harking back to a lost era when things were simpler. These are both themselves distractions. Sentimentality distracts us from the whole truth by telling only what might be appealing, and so sees only the cradle and not the cross. Nostalgia distracts by denying a fundamental truth of history – that though our circumstances may change significantly, we ourselves do not. And so, nostalgia imagines that the story from the cradle to the cross is not really our story.

But that first Christmas was the beginning of a story of wholeness in full awareness of our deprivation, a vision of completeness despite absence. We could moralise this by saying that Jesus remained true despite his lowly beginning, the opposition to his ministry and the final injustice of his crucifixion. This is worth saying, but it also reduces Jesus to a mere hero. The problem is that we don’t need heroes to do it for us; we need to be able ourselves to live complete lives in the midst of incompleteness. We need to be able to live lives which are not constantly haunted by the suspicion that there’s a better life, a better option, just behind the next glittering, ringing, distracting thing. Because there really isn’t.

Being enough
If Jesus does remain true from the cradle to the crucifixion, it is not by mere moral courage. It is by the conviction that he is complete wherever he is, whatever he is doing, whatever is happening to him. That is, Jesus knows his life to be a point at which God reigns in the world. It is this presence of God in what he does and experiences which is Jesus’ completeness. And this is despite appearances. God reigns in the child in the manger, in the sweaty teacher on the dusty streets, in the argumentative troublemaker and in the despised figure on the cross.

To get Christmas right is not to reduce it to a small part of our incomplete lives but to see it as being about everything in one thing: the whole of God and ourselves in just one small child and what he was to become, and perhaps also in us.

The reign of God – the gift of God’s self to the world, to our very selves – is not a distraction from what we are doing. It is the revaluation of what we are. You are not the sum of everything you have done, if this means there would be more of you if you did more, experienced more, viewed more, or sampled more. With the God of the cradle and the cross, you are enough before you begin doing or experiencing anything.

We lose this somewhere along the way, strangely becoming less as we do and own and experience more. The child in the manger will one day propose that unless we become again as children, we cannot be whole, cannot know God’s kingdom, cannot know that time and space in which whatever belongs to us, we belong to God (Matthew 18.2-5).

Indistractability is about this gift of completeness – trusting that even though there are many things we can do and we can add to ourselves, it is enough that we have been born, and swaddled, and laid in the manger of the world.

Because with this God, You. Are. Enough, however incomplete you think you are, however tempting it is to want to be more.

Rest, then, under the loving gaze of God, as did Jesus once under Mary’s eyes of love, and know yourselves to be complete.

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Advent 3
17/12/2023

John 1:6-8, 23, 26b-28
Psalm 126
Luke 1:39-55

In the season of Advent, our Scripture readings do strange things with time. We are called to remember something which is yet to occur while, at the same time, called to prepare for the arrival of one who, common sense would say, has been and gone. The same kind of time-twisting is heard today in Mary’s song of praise:

⁵¹ [God] has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud…⁵² He has brought down the powerful …
[he has] lifted up the lowly;
⁵³ he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

Whatever we might think about where we are in the midst of these powerful and lowly, hungry and rich, the claim is unambiguous: God has worked with power to change the order of things in the world. Yet, this doesn’t ring true. From time to time, we might see the lowly lifted up and the haughty brought down but, for the most part, things don’t seem to be going the way Mary’s song would imply on a plain reading; the assertion that God “has” done such things is not convincing.

But the issue is not only that we don’t see this kind of change in the time between Mary’s song and now. The thing about her song is that nothing could have happened yet – at the very time she sings – if she is singing the gospel – singing what God has done in Jesus. Jesus is not yet born, but she still sings,

[God] has shown strength …; he has scattered … He has brought down… [he has] lifted up… he has filled… and sent away…

It is odd that Mary should speak in this way.

The key to understanding this strange speech is to see that there is no “history” here, in the ordinary sense. So far as Christian confession is concerned, there is little interest in the order or timing of revelation but only in what is revealed. And what is revealed about God’s work for the poor and the hungry? The only sense in which faith can say unequivocally that God has shown strength to lift up and fill the weak and poor is in relation to the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. He is the powerless and lowly one filled and lifted by God.

But consider what this now means! Mary does not sing the praises of the God who has lifted her up, as some readings of this text run. Or, at least, this is a secondary sense of her song. Rather, Mary praises the God who raised her son, the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. And here we see the Bible’s strange sense of God in time: Mary praises God for having done something that has not yet happened at this moment in the story.

This is bad history by most standards, but is in fact good biblical theology. Not unreasonably, we typically read history from start to finish, as if it were simply the unfolding of events from beginning to end. The very way in which we read a book – including the Bible! – reinforces this. Yet the Scriptures read, or tell, from end to beginning. The “end” is some experience of God, a salvation of some sort: an exodus, a healing, a restoration or a resurrection. This new thing is of such proportion that the beginning cannot be merely the first thing which happened on the way toward the present experience. The beginning is what must have been the case for us to have experienced the salvation we have.

And so, when it comes to what Mary sings, the important thing is not that she did say this – for it would make very little sense if she did. Instead, for Luke himself, bursting to speak of the work of God in Jesus, there would have been nothing else Mary could have said: the prelude must anticipate the climactic finale. If, in view of the resurrection, we imagine that Mary might have sung a song of praise to God at the news of her pregnancy, it would have to have been a prophetic song, because of what was going to come of her child. The song would point to the end which is Luke’s real purpose in telling the story: God’s work in Jesus. Why does Mary sing? Because of what God has done. And what has God done? God has raised the crucified Jesus from death. All of this then, and most strangely, makes the singing Mary the New Testament’s first believer in the resurrection.

Once again, we acknowledge that this makes no sense: it hasn’t happened yet, when Mary sings. But all belief in the power of God is like this: all confidence in the power of God is the bringing into the present some promised but unrealised future as if it had already happened. All belief is a living out of what God has done before it has been done, a living towards what we expect God to do.

Faith is a lived-out vision of the future. Faith says, That is how things will be in the end, so this is how I will be now: live with others now, speak of God now. The real question in faith, then, is simply the vision: how will all of this end? What will we say God has done in our story when it comes to being able to tell it in as finally completed?

To see what is at stake in this way is to see also that faith is not merely a “religious” question. Any life – whether it knows God, is still seeking God or is altogether indifferent to God – is the backward projection of some expected future, some time of completion, some sense of what it is all about. Every conscious action (and most of our unconscious ones) speaks of our sense of where we are headed, of what will finally be declared about the proper order of things. When Mary sings that God has done this, she declares her place in the world and the world’s place in God, despite every contradictory appearance. My soul magnifies the Lord, Mary sings, because God “has” magnified Jesus and will magnify me.

And, to the extent that she not only says this but lives it, she begins to appear, a glimmer of God’s intention for her. And God begins also to become clearer, a glimmer of Mary’s own future.

This is Advent faith: no mere wish that things were different, but a life lived differently because we have caught a fleeting glimpse of the possibility of a new order in which is set right all we know is wrong within us.

Let us live, then, as if what will finally matter has already happened and we are its reflection: an image of the God who is justice, mercy and peace.

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Pentecost 25
19/11/2023

Zephaniah 1:7-16
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

How are we to do God’s will when God’s voice is so tiny. Elijah found this to be true. He expected to hear God in storms and earthquakes and cataclysmic events – stuff accompanied by big noises. Afterall, if God is so big it follows that God has a big voice. Not so, says Elijah. God speaks in sheer silence. No wonder I can’t hear what God is saying. That, at least, is the complaint implicit in the one talent servant who buried what was entrusted to him and returned it to the master on his return. He complained that he knew what kind of man his master was and what he would expect and out of fear he kept the talent safe, buried in the ground.

This calls for a little bible study. There are a few things to say about the parable that could be helpful. There is another version of the story in Luke. Luke’s version has quite a different feel but in this version one notable difference from the one in Matthew is that the master gives instruction as to what the servants are to do with the money. He said, ‘Do business with these until I come back.’ (Luke 19:13) The third servant wrapped the money in a cloth to return it but the master admonished him for not even putting it in the bank where he could have earned some interest.

The Matthew version of the story is the third in a series of parables that follow a theme. They are about waiting. There is the unfaithful slave who is behaving badly when the master returns. There are the foolish virgins who had run out of lamp oil when the bridegroom arrived. Then comes the absent master who returns to assess the management of his property entrusted to three servants.

Parables can be tricky. Sometimes we can see them as metaphors that depict what God is like. It seems reasonable to let the good Samaritan remind us of Jesus. It seems reasonable to do the same with parable of the lost sheep. Indeed, in iconography, the shepherd who finds the lost sheep is usually depicted as Jesus.

There is a temptation to make these connections in all Jesus parables but if we did that we would be considering divine attributes that belong better with inhabitants of Mount Olympus. The masters and the bridegroom in the three waiting parables are unreasonable and vengeful, not the loving and gracious God we have come to expect.

How interesting that Jesus told stories with main characters who shape the outcome of events in these parables who have values and personalities devoid of what we might expect to be divine attributes. How interesting that gospel writers reported these stories and expected their readers to derive lessons in them for being more faithful in their following Jesus. How perplexing that so many of these stories with characters who have just mist the point rather than being outrageously bad, who look like they have been treated unfairly, how come they are the ones that end up gnashing their teeth.

Remember, Matthew is the one who reports Jesus’ words, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Some chapters later Matthew tells of someone who asked, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16) The two of the waiting parables in chapter 25 look like part of the answer to this except that the actual doing part is not spelled out, much to the misfortune of the foolish virgins and the servant entrusted with one talent.

Now, we who have sat under the scriptures and sound preaching all our lives Sunday by Sunday are fully aware that the juxtaposition vis a vis us and eternal life is not dependant on our doing but on what God has already done through Christ. The baptised are in Christ living in a sure and certain hope of eternal life.

What we must do is not our path to eternal life. Christ has already trod that path. Whatever we might do is in response to the gift of life. There is doing to be done. There is the leading of God to be heard and obeyed. Problem, the voice of God is very tiny. But, thanks be to God, the returning master who admonished the one talent servant for treating what had been given him as if it were dead by burying it gives a clue as to how to get round the apparent silence of God.

Indeed he taught him with his own words. As he flicked mud from the exhumed talent offered him by the lazy servant he said, “You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?” (Matthew 25:26) There it is. The absent master did not need to leave spoken instruction because those who had lived with him knew him and his expectations. Knowing the master informs the doing of obedient servants.

Matthew and his church knew the lazy servant’s dilemma. Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh as he been before his death. He was not with them to teach and instruct and provide a living example of doing that befits eternal life. They were living in the waiting time of the absent Lord.

Followers of Jesus are entrusted with bearing witness to what God has done and is doing in Christ. Bearing that witness, doing what is expected calls for listening to a master who is present in the Spirit, but that kind of presence looks a lot like absence. So how can the faithful followers know what to do? Part of the answer is revealed in the parable of the talents. Those who know the master know what is expected. Knowing Jesus makes God audible. Knowing Jesus makes sense of the sheer silence of the voice of God.