The Holy mystery we call God

Many scholars have pointed out that the birth narratives in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels were only written 80 years or so after Jesus’ birth and so may not be authentic. This may be so, but there must have been something about the man Jesus that led people to believe that he really did come from such a humble background.

Another point is that one of the reasons we are told for Jesus coming, was to set people free. The royal family is one of the least free families around. They do not live full lives. They are under constant scrutiny. Their lives are severely restricted by what we say they can and cannot do. We have much more freedom and as Christians should ask ourselves what we are doing to these fellow humans in demanding that they spend their lives playing out the roles that we assign for them, even if they are well paid to do it, rather than allowing them to be who God created them to be.

Both the reading from Hebrew Scripture and the one from the Gospel talk about God being aware of the injustice and bullying that goes on in our societies.Christ the king, the judge, the ones who sorts the sheep from the goats, the dispenser of eternal joy or eternal punishment. All nations will be gathered before him, not just Jews or not just Christians. People who have never heard of Jesus will be rewarded because they behaved with justice and compassion. They worshipped God by treating others with respect even when they were unaware that this was what they were doing.

Scripture was not written for stories to be read in isolation. This reading from Matthew follows immediately after the parable of the talents. For centuries the church has interpreted this story consistently with God favouring the rich and talented rather than from the underside of Jesus showing how greedy those with much are and how poorly they treat the less well endowed.

It is unbelievable that we who are called to follow Jesus could have accepted the interpretation we were given of this parable and closed our eyes to the social justice implications in it. We always knew that talents were units of money. Why was it treated as a metaphor?  The final two verses tell us that what money the third man had was taken from him and given to the one who had most. It has ever been thus that the rich benefit at the cost of the poor and in the Western World, the gap between the rich and the poor is ever growing.

The story tells us that the slave knew that his master reaped where he did not sow and gathered where he had not scattered seed. These are exploitative actions. No one deserves to take advantage of other people’s labour in these ways. It confirms the suspicions we might have had about how the other two who received the money had been able to make such exorbitant profits for their master.

In the Emerging Church, the concepts of every member ministry and the priesthood of all believers are coming to be one of the main defining elements. Each one of us has the responsibility to decide how we choose to see and follow Jesus Christ. We no longer want to behave either like sheep or like goats. We are called to ponder the revelations brought to us and act accordingly from our relationship with the Holy Mystery we call God.

Rev Julianne Parker

(for full sermon see sermons page)