Rector’s Reflections Thursday 23rd November 2023
Preparing for Advent
Yesterday, I wrote about the Parable of the Talents in Chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel. You will remember the story. One slave had been given 5 Talents; another slave had been given 2 Talents; and another had been given 1 Talent. These were incredibly generous gifts – in New Testament times, a “Talent” was a weight of preious metal which was worth an almost unimaginably large sum of money. In due course, their master demanded an accounting : what had his slaves done with the Talents he had so generously given them? Two of the slaves had put their Talents to work, but the third slave did nothing at all. He simply buried it in the ground. Why had he done this? It was done out of fear. This what the slave said to his Master : “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours”. The slave’s master was not impressed :”You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? The you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what is my own with interest”.
This Parable raises several questions which might be of help to us as we prepare for the season of Advent.
The first is about our feelings towards God. In the Parable, the slave who did nothing with the gift he had been given was quite honest about the reason for his inaction : he was afraid. I wonder if we, too, are frightened of God? And if this is the case, why might we find God frightening? There are many ways of looking at the Incarnation, but one way is to see it in terms of God’s way of revealing to us the sort of God He is. By becoming fully human in Jesus Christ, God is telling us that he is a “Jesus sort of God”. We know from the New Testament that Jesus was loving, compassionate and forgiving; and while Jesus could and did say some hard things, these hard things were and are an expression of his love and compassion.
I think most of us are frightened of God, to various degrees. Perhaps we have a guilty conscience. Perhaps in the past we have been let down by others, and find it hard to trust anyone in authority. Perhaps we live in a culture soaked in cynicism, and in such a world, it is hard for us to think well of anyone.
So if it is true that most of us are fearful of God, what might we do about this?