Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
We’ve been in a series the last couple of weeks where we are studying the Parables of Jesus. I have to admit, parables can be difficult. They aren’t explicit in the way a simple story is. Jesus at one time said, "I spoke in parables so that you would get this and others wouldn't get it." They can be a little bit tricky to interpret. Parables are stories with a meaning, often to jar a listener into learning something new about the economy of the kingdom of God. They were a bit jarring to the original listeners ---remember, they heard them first---because they challenged conventional wisdom at the time. Most of them have a twist or an 'aha' moment of some kind that turned that thinking on its head. So to understand parables, we have to understand the culture and dominant thinking they were birthed into, and try to find the principle within it and bring it forward into our day and age. Because they can be a bit difficult, I’ve pored over the parables and tried to find the easiest one, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today. No, I'm kidding. Today, I’m going to walk through a parable that’s considered a complex parable. There are four characters that we see, but they're treated as three. And there is a surprise twist at the end.
We are going to walk through the Parable of the Talents from Matthew 25, so go ahead and turn there in your bibles or navigate in your bible app. The parable of the talents is part of a series of three parables that have themes of waiting for the arrival of someone special---a master or whoever it might be---and also a picture of what the appropriate behavior of the characters while they wait looks like, and all three finish with a strong depiction of judgment. And I’ll be honest and say these parables are fascinating and amazing to read until we get to the very last part. I remember when I knew I was going to do this parable and I reread it and......oh, I really like it....oh, this is interesting....uh oh! The very end is this harsh judgment part. It would be a lot easier to teach without that, but I think there is an important lesson in the judgment that we don’t want to gloss over. So what I want to today is to walk verse-by-verse through this parable, point out some things we can learn from it along the way, and then end with some practical things we can do to apply this to our own lives as we seek to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus. Sound good?...
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