The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

Good News: Jesus Does Not Want to Make a Difference in Your Life!

Jesus does not want to make a difference in your life. I’m not kidding! In all seriousness, Jesus does not want to make a difference in your life. Or mine. Or anyone else’s. Can you believe that? If so you understand the gospel. If not, well, this sermon’s especially for you!

If you think or want Jesus to make a difference in your life your gospel is too small! It may be conservative/traditional or progressive/liberal or somewhere in between, but it is not the Bible’s good news. Such a gospel remains wedded to a fundamentally inadequate view of Jesus.

What do I mean by that? Just this. A Jesus who only makes a difference in human lives is either a gnostic redeemer figure (for conservative versions) or a figure whose noble life and death inspires in or models for us the way life should be lived (for progressive/liberal versions). Either way, Jesus adjusts, tweaks, recalibrates, or even radically reorients the lives we have already begun to live. He gives us a new focus, a fresh sense of purpose, even a whole new vision of life. We might call this Jesus a Wisdom Jesus or a prophetic Jesus. He teaches us how to live life well and work for a better world.

The Jesus who makes a difference in our lives is a Jesus who wants to make a difference in our world. We may want to outlaw abortion or pornography, end racial or sexual discrimination, protect our children, save the environment, or, well, you can fill in the blank.

I want to claim, however, that there is another Jesus found in the Bible. We might call him apocalyptic Jesus. That’s a slippery term, I know. But what I mean by it is that this Jesus announces and brings to an end the world we try to make a difference in!

Apocalyptic Jesus invades this world constructed and ordered by the assumptions and protocols of making a difference in a world Jesus fits into as a wisdom teacher or prophet. Instead, apocalyptic Jesus brings all that an end and inaugurates a whole new world - a different world!

A world in which he does not make a difference in our lives but in which he gives us a different life. That’s right. Jesus does not want to make a difference in our lives. He wants to give us a different life.

-A life beyond the capacity of human imagination to conceive.

-A life beyond the wisdom of humanity to implement.

-A life beyond the moral parameters we determine appropriate for us.

-A life that can never be satisfied with making a difference in the world apocalyptic Jesus has brought an end to but being a prototype of the new world he brings into being.

But what does that mean? All this airy talk about wisdom Jesus and prophet Jesus and apocalyptic Jesus sounds very abstract. Can I be more concrete about how all this matters?

Yes, I think I can. It’s called the theology of the cross. And it is opposed to the theology of glory. The latter is what most of us have been raised on in the church. Whether we learned a victorious higher or deeper life or were rallied to march in the streets or flood legislators with phone calls or letters calling for or demanding change on this or that front, the theology of glory calls us to be those who make a difference in our world by example or action.

We want to be this kind of people because we like this world, have succeeded in and benefitted from it, and want to give something back to it by trying to make it approximate a bit more closely what we believe God wants this world to look like. Wisdom Jesus and prophetic Jesus are quite congenial to this enterprise.

Apocalyptic Jesus pronounces a pox on the theology or glory with all its making a difference and even on the wisdom and prophetic versions of himself it employs.

Apocalyptic Jesus puts forward the cross as the sole measure of success in the new world he brings. That’s what his resurrection means, isn’t it? That his way of solidarity with the “losers” of the world, his suffering with and for them, serving them as the royal children of God they are, and even dying to give them this new life he brings is the way God is in a world like ours. Not a difference maker but simply different. Someone who does not compute or make sense or gather masses to his cause. One who loses himself in the service of others which, paradoxically, turns out to reflect the glory and power of the Bible’s God. And call his followers to do the same.

The apostle Paul says we have been crucified to the world and the world to us (Gal.6:14). That old world of difference making has been cancelled and a new world of being different is now the order of the day.

Still a bit abstract, but getting closer to the concrete and particular, I promise.  Before we go on I want to make a crucial clarification. Being different will and must make a difference in that old world apocalyptic Jesus has announced the end of. It can hardly be otherwise. As a people living a different life trusting in apocalyptic Jesus and embracing his cross as our criterion of faithfulness and practice of our faith we enter into conflict with the old world that is passing away and our differentness will make positive differences here and there in that decaying old corpse. Thus wisdom Jesus and prophetic Jesus may well be retooled to serve apocalyptic Jesus but in ways quite different from their role in a difference-making mode.

The epistle to Diognetus, probably the earliest example of a defense of this Christian way of differentness (late 2^nd century or earlier) is worth a close reading here.

"Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign. 

Living a different life does not entail separation from others, or making distinctions of identity out of particular customs or taboos but living in solidarity with the people with whom we reside.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.

Our difference does lie in relativizing all human identity markers and forms of participation in the interest of including and caring for outsiders and those neglected by the majority culture. We do not expose the unwanted to destruction or extermination. Generosity of the table (sharing goods and community) with others goes hand in hand with exclusive commitment to spouses in marriage.   

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred. 

We live by the theology of the cross:

-our homeland in heaven governs our passions, priorities, and practices

-we live in accord with the law but always do more and go further than it requires

-we love all, including our enemies, even those who kill us in hope of resurrection

-abused we blessing, insulted we take no umbrage

-punished as enemies of the people, we rejoice for knowing we are doing our job

-attacked, persecuted, and hated but all without good reason

Is that concrete and specific enough for you? If not, try out this description of Christians in the mid-2^nd  century Aristides of Athens to the emperor:

 “It is the Christians, O Emperor, who have sought and found the truth, for they acknowledge God. They do not keep for themselves the goods entrusted to them. They do not covet what belongs to others. They show love to their neighbors. They do not do to another what they would not wish to have done to themselves. They speak gently to those who oppress them, and in this way they make them their friends. It has become their passion to do good to their enemies

They live in the awareness of their smallness.                                                                                                                   

Every one of them who has anything gives ungrudgingly to the one who has nothing. If they see a traveling stranger, they bring him under their roof. They rejoice over him as over a real brother, for they do not call one another brothers after the flesh, but they know they are brothers in the Spirit and in God.

If they hear that one of them is imprisoned or oppressed for the sake of Christ, they take care of all his needs. If possible they set him free. If anyone among them is poor or comes into want while they themselves have nothing to spare, they fast two or three days for him. In this way they can supply any poor man with the food he needs. This, O Emperor, is the rule of life of the Christians, and this is their manner of life.”

I don’t think it requires much imagination to envision what such a way of life might look like even here in 21^st century America. It beggars our imagination, however, to actually consider doing it!

And one final specific sample. During Cyprian’s plague in Rome (250-280 ad), which may have been smallpox, is estimated to have killed 5000 people a day just in Rome (including two emperors). It was a vile and horrifying disease and death. Dionysius wrote of the Christians in Rome, “Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains.” While pagan Romans left town to remain safe, many Christians stayed and cared for the ill and dying because they were different.

Christians, of course, had their share of sins and faults. But the demonstrated enough of the differentness apocalyptic Jesus gave them to elicit such enduring testimonies. Prudential and pragmatic considerations played second fiddle and were employed in service of the apocalyptic conviction that with Jesus the cross has triumphed and become the baseline and criterion for Christian practice.

The theology of glory never quite gets this far or cuts this deep. Its prudential and pragmatic calculations never got beyond making a difference to these costly and distinctly Christian form of service to the world.

We are at a moment in history in the West when the credibility of the church’s witness is pretty well shattered. Fighting to pass laws, win legislative battles, form movements for social change (wherever on the political spectrum you fall), however helpful and good a difference they may make, will not witness to the difference apocalyptic Jesus has won for us, given us in the Spirit, and by which alone we bear full witness to him as Lord and Savior.