UNOH

Matthew 25

Gospel Readings:

Matthew 25:1-13
Matthew 25:14-30
Matthew  25:31-46

Devotion 1

Wait: Take time to sit in silence together, allowing space for God’s voice to be heard.

Read: Matthew 25:1-13

Having spoken to his disciples about the coming crisis of war and the destruction of Jerusalem and painting a picture of hope for the transformation of current realities using the language of the coming of the “Human One”, Jesus now tells another parable, inviting his disciples to consider what God’s reign will look like at such a time (The “Then” at the beginning of verse 25 tells us that Jesus is still talking about the time of crisis).

The parable of the “Ten Bridesmaids” is a curious tale which pictures ancient Near Eastern wedding traditions. At such an event, in a patriarchal society where marriages were decided by the girls’ fathers and future husbands, it was the role “of the young women to present themselves as good future wives.”1  Since this wedding apparently takes place at night, the young women will need lamps. Men, according to Kenneth Bailey, need not carry lamps as there is usually enough light to see by in such settings.

But women, young and old, always carry lamps. Their reputation, and in some cases their personal safety, depends on the lamps. For young unmarried women to move around in the dark without carrying lamps is unthinkable! What might they be doing in the dark and with whom?2

In what unfolds, five of the young women take no extra oil, and so when the wedding party is delayed, they run out. The other five, however, take extra oil. They are the wise young women who, because they don’t need to go and buy extra oil, are able to enter the wedding banquet at the proper time. The foolish women, on their return from buying extra oil, find the door shut and are excluded from the banquet.

How are we to understand such a story? Is the bridegroom, as is commonly assumed, to be understood allegorically as Jesus? While the New Testament does contain a tradition which speaks of Jesus as bridegroom, there is nothing in this story which necessitates Jesus being identified with the bridegroom. It is a story, rather, of a very common cultural event.

In it, two groups of people from the underside of power—young women—are pitted against each other because of an apparent scarcity of oil. One group—the “wise” young women—asks the other—the “foolish” young women—to share, but are refused. Their anxiety over the scarcity of resources leads those with oil to break solidarity with the young women without. Schottroff asks,

Where is their neighborly solidarity? There is no need even to bring the commandment of love of neighbor into play to show that, measured against the biblical tradition of the shaping of human relationships, the clever women are behaving in an unsolidary manner and are subjecting themselves to the socially expected condition of competition.2

Division, distrust, and animosity are created between those who think they’re “doing it right” and those seen to be “doing it wrong.” And all of the young women are playing according to the rules of the powerful figure of the parable—the bridegroom.

Perhaps there is another way, however, other than the competition created by focus on the scarcity of oil. Would there be enough to share? Could the young women share lamps? We’re not told the answer. But the economics of the Gospel of Matthew, poetically pictured in birds who are neither sow, reap, nor gather yet have enough to eat (Mt 6:26), and played out in fabulous feasts in the wilderness (Mt 14:13-21) might tell us that there is a way other than the anxiety of scarcity.

Nowhere are we told in the parable that the refusal to share oil is equated with faithfulness. The women with extra oil are wise, yes, but wisdom, Jesus has just taught, must be coupled with faithfulness (Mt 24:45)—faithfulness to living out the way of Jesus even when there is a cost.

The primary thrust of the present parable is, however, neither wisdom nor faithfulness. It is to “keep awake”. The reality bought into by the young women is that shrewdness will win the day when scarce resources are hoarded. But the cost is the exclusion of their sisters. If they were to be “awake”—to see through the reality presented to them—they might see that there is a generous and creative way for all to have enough and to be included. A way to be wise and faithful.

Reflect

Pray

Share Communion 

Close with the Lord’s Prayer

1 Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Augsberg Fortress, 2006), 29.

2 Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008), Kindle loc. 3242.

3 Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, 31.

 

Devotion 2

Wait: Take time to sit in silence together, aware of God’s presence in a broken world.

Read: Matthew 25:14-30

If the last parable invited Matthew’s hearers to think critically about what it is to be wise, then today’s reading will invite them to think critically about what it is to be faithful.

As with all parables in Matthew, we need to understand the context in order to hear what is going on. Journeying through Matthew thus far, we have seen the difficulty faced by peasant farming communities because of tax demands and the dangers of falling into debt. Matthew’s community likely was made up in part of just such families who had fallen into debt and, unable to make repayments, had lost their land and eventually come to an urban centre such as Antioch in search of day-labouring work. They had been reduced from autonomous farming communities to the most vulnerable form of labour with all the day-to-day uncertainty which it entailed.

From an elite perspective, one’s wealth was increased primarily through the acquisition of landholdings which, in turn, was made possible through making loans at high interest rates:

The elites used their wealth to make loans to peasant farmers so that the farmers could plant the crops. Interest rates were high; estimates range to 60 percent and perhaps as high as 200 percent for loans on crops. The purpose of making such loans was not so much to make a large profit, at least by the standards of the ancient world, but to accept land as collateral so that the elites could foreclose on their loans in years when the crops could not cover the incurred indebtedness.4

In the Parable of the Talents, just such activity is going on. An astronomically wealthy landowner distributes talents to his high-level slaves, with the expectation that they will work to increase his wealth.5 When he returns he calls them to account. The first two slaves have done just as the master wanted, and they are rewarded with the words, “Well done, good and faithful slave; you have been faithful in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” They are indeed words of high praise, but for Matthew’s community on the underside they might be met with suspicion. The master commends his slaves for being good. But throughout Matthew’s Gospel, we have seen that it is just this notion of “good” that is so fiercely contested. Is what the master says good, actually good? Moreover, in a story where this contestation of good is brought clearly into view—that of the rich man of Matthew 19:16-30—giving oneself to economic wealth at the expense of the poor is shown to be not good. Rather than leading to joy, as the master in this parable claims, it leads to grieving (Mt 19:22). Matthew’s hearers are invited, then, to think critically about the notions of “good” and “faithfulness” presented by the master in this parable.

When the third slave comes forward, he voices what is clearly seen by those on the underside but never said in public. His words are not those of one who is cowering guiltily before a just authority. Rather, they expose the master’s activity, which is considered by the powerful and wealthy as good economic policy, as plain stealing. He reaps what others have sown, and gathers what others have scattered. Moreover, now that the master has been exposed like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz finally found out to be a fraud behind a curtain, he drops any pretence of just behaviour. His reveals that he has no interest in keeping Torah, which forbids the practice of charging interest.6 He can no longer rely on smoke and mirrors to make his systemic robbery seem right. He must now resort to violent coercion.

The third slave has refused to engage in systemic robbery even though he knows he will face the wrath of the master. He, not the first two slaves, is the “hero of the parable. By digging a hole and burying the aristocrat’s talent in the ground, he has taken it our of circulation. It cannot be used to dispossess more peasants from their lands through its dispersion in the form of usurious loans.”7

Matthew’s community have been exhorted to be “faithful and wise” (Mt 24:45). The Parable of the Talents invites them to think more carefully about what it is to be faithful. Does faithfulness to the way of Jesus invest in maintaining the economic status quo in the interests of the rich and powerful, or does it, even in the face of consequences, refuse involvement in systems which exploit, make destitute, and eventually kill those on the underside?

Faithfulness, Matthew would say, is giving allegiance to what is “good”. And what is good? This has been the question running like a thread right through the Gospel. And as Matthew’s final teaching discourse comes to close, we are about to find out.

Reflect

Pray for one another.

Share Communion 

Close with the Lord’s Prayer

4  William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 161.

5 A talent was worth six thousand denarii. See Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins, A Sociopolitical Reading (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000), 489. This would represent for a day labourer up to twenty years’ wages.

6 Deut 23:19; Ex 22:25, Lev 25:36-37. Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech, 166.

7 Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech, 167.

 

Devotion 3

Wait: Take time to sit in the silence of repentance together, aware of our inadequacy and God’s grace.

Read: Matthew  25:31-46

Today’s reading begins with the depiction of the Human One coming “in his glory”, reprising the language of Matthew 24 and evoking again its context of crisis, war and suffering. It stands out as different in nature to “real life” parables such as the Tenants and the Talents, with the reference to the Human One linking it with the parable of the Tares—a parable which speaks of judgment and vindication. Today’s parable affirms that God will indeed vindicate the righteous and judge the wicked. But on what basis? Who is just? Who is good? This is the very question which has weaved its way right through Matthew’s Gospel, beginning with the preaching of John, and being taken up by Matthew’s Jesus as he has continually invited his hearers to question their assumptions about what is good and just.8 In the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Mt 20:1-16), for example, Jesus invited his hearers to think critically about whether it is indeed “just” to pay workers a wage barely enough to live on for working on land which the landowner has expropriated through exploitation. And in the immediately preceding parable of the Talents (Mt 25:14-30), Jesus has invited his hearers to discern whether the slaves who used the talents to make loans at interest in order to plunge debtors into debt and eventually acquire their land through foreclosure are indeed “good”.

Now, finally, the question of what is “good” and “just” will be answered. It is those who are found with the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick and imprisoned, caring for their needs, who are finally found to be “the just”. This is, of course, a far cry from the assumptions of the elite—because it is a different understanding of justice. This is justice viewed not from the “top down”—justice which is concerned primarily with order and legality. This kind of “justice” has enabled the legal theft of peasant land and the suppression of the rights of the poor. Jesus’ justice, on the other hand, is justice viewed from the “bottom up”—justice concerned with the rights of the poor and marginalised. This, from Matthew’s point of view, is “primary justice.”9

For Matthew’s community, this is a critique of the “justice” of other groups more closely aligned with power. Many of Matthew’s community, after all, may well have been left hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned at the hands of those more powerful than they. Many have fled Judea and the rural villages of Galilee and come to Antioch as strangers needing to be taken in.

But it is also a powerful call to practice justice on the underside. Matthew’s community are not to mimic the ways of elite groups in their practice of “justice”, but are to be a community of the margins practicing radical inclusion and generosity and seeing that all carry the image of God.

Reflect

Pray

Share Communion

Close with the Lord’s Prayer

8 Mt 3:10; 7:15-19; 12:33-37; 13:36-43, 47-50; 19:16-30; 20:1-16; 21: 33-46; 22:1-14; 25:14-30.

9 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton Univerty Press, 2008), Kindle loc. 298.

 

Devotion 4

Wait: Take time to sit in the silence of gratitude together, giving thanks for the ways you’ve experienced God’s loving kindness.

This week’s Common Value: Partnership

Read: Jeremiah 29:1-14

 

Reflect

Pray

Share Communion 

Close with the Lord’s Prayer

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