Buried

 The parable of the talents, as I may have mentioned before, is so deeply ingrained into our collective psyche, that the use of the word 'talent' to mean skill or ability came directly from this parable. Before this, talent referred to a weight. 

A talent weighs 129 pounds,14 ounces. Pretty heavy if you think about it. And that's a weight of a precious metal. Imagine the level of trust you would have to have in someone to give them 5 talents of almost anything. In Canadian dollars, a talent of copper is valued at $655.90 . 5 talents of copper is worth $3,279.50. That's a lot of money, and that's not a particularly valuable metal. Silver will clock you at almost $62 thousand dollars per talent, gold at $3.7 million. Per talent. This is a lot to invest, no matter how you slice it. The man going on a journey is entrusting his servants with a lot. An awful lot. 

The expectation from the master is that the servants would, you know, do something with the resources with which they were entrusted. The idea is not that they should sit around and be idle with it, but rather that there is work to be done and that the talents they were given should be put to good use. 

But that's a lot of money to be playing around with, especially when it isn't yours. Investing always carries risk. I know you have to have money to make money, economics 101, but truly investing in a proposition that can go down is risky. And if you're playing with money you can't afford to lose, can you afford to risk it? That's the question that all the servants had to ask themselves, and 2 out of 3 decided to take the chance. They rolled the dice, made investments, and not just recouped the money, but essentially doubled it. That's what the master had in mind. But when he comes to the third one, the one who was given the least, that third one took the resources and buried them. That way, when the master comes back, he'll get back exactly what he put in.

Now, here's the issue. It is the temptation in the heart of us all to take the talent and bury it. And I'm not talking about money anymore. I'm talking about the things God has entrusted you with. Believe it or not, and I hope you do, you are made completely unique. That is, there has never been another you, nor will there be another one. You are one of a kind. And just like a talent is a weight measurement without any clear composition of material, so too could a talent that you have be anything. But God has entrusted everyone with a talent, you know. Absolutely everyone. All of us have at least one talent that God, in his ineffable wisdom, has entrusted us. He has given you and only you the makeup that forms you into who you are, and he has given that to you for a reason. 

Think about the nature of humanity according to Scripture - You are God's workmanship, created by him to do good works, which he has prepared in advance for you to do. You have been put into this world with the talents that you've got in order that you might do something with them. But the thing is, by and large, we don't think about our talents as being worth very much, or being very useful. There are people all around you who have skills, talents, abilities far more than you could ever possibly hope to keep up with, and they're real useful. The five talents, the two talents, they have a lot they can do, and are doing. And then there's you. One talent. It's not worth much. What are you supposed to do with that? Just take it and bury it? Probably. 

But the thing is that that talent has been entrusted to you for a reason. Because you are the only one who can do anything with it. Nobody else can use your skills or talents, nobody else can do anything with what has been entrusted to you. It's been entrusted to you, you know. Something amazing that happens with us as Christians, is that we have been uniquely equipped and placed to minister to and to work with matters of eternity. The people who you deal with on a regular basis are eternal, they are people for whom Christ died. Therefore, by definition, what you do with them matters. It's of eternal consequence. And what that means is that you have been given time and space in which to operate and to engage in matters that are of crucial importance to you and to them. 

yeah, but what's the point?

 I try my best to not spend more time traveling to a place than I'm going to spend at the place. Like if you're going to drive to Saskatoon from here, you'd better spend more than 6 hours in Saskatoon, otherwise what's the point? It becomes a sink, and I'd rather not drive all the way to Saskatoon, eat at Fuddrucker's, then drive back. Harder and harder to justify all the time.

Now, let's say that it's a sink proposition, but involving earth itself. Imagine if you knew for absolute certain, no doubt whatsoever, that there was an asteroid approaching earth that we could collectively do nothing about. No last minute reprieve, no space cowboys, no Armageddon, no nothing. Just the knowledge that things were going to wrap up in about a week and a half. What do you do? 

Well, the first thing people would do would be to stop planning for the future. All done with that. No planting, no watering, no gardening, nothing. People would probably spend all the money in their bank accounts, but who would be around to take the money? People would spend time with family and friends as much as possible, but why bother being kind and generous to strangers? May as well eat all the fatty and salty food you want, given that your waistline is about to get atomized. And so on and so on. 

If you knew for sure that the entire world and all human beings who had ever lived were just going to get fossilized, then why bother being brave or noble or helpful or charitable or any of it? If you don't believe that there is a God or paradise or anything, then it wouldn't make sense to do any of that at all. Because as time grows short, you may as well focus more and more on yourself, and tickle that lizard brain with whatever you can. Drink, do drugs, and the fewer and fewer long term consequences that there are, the less it's going to matter. That's why very very few last meals that prisoners order are healthy. May as well get a giant bucket of Kentucky fried chicken, if there's not going to be a tomorrow to worry about. 

But for the Christian, the outlook changes completely. If you know that time is running out, then you have a limited time indeed to do anything good. Not that paradise will be bad, you understand - it'll be paradise. By definition. But if it's paradise, then your bravery and generosity will not be needed. Not that they're not good things, but they're good in opposition to the badness that we have here on earth. If you believe in paradise as a place where the tears are wiped away from every eye and the sun will not strike you by day nor the moon by night, all that, then you won't have to take care of people in the same way you do here. Here is where you have to be good and generous, here is where you have to do what is right and true. Here is where your neighbor needs your help because here is where he is cold, lonely and miserable. He won't be in paradise. But he is here. 

If you knew for sure that Christ was going to return in a week, you would, hopefully, be all the busier leading up to that than you would otherwise, because he both commands it, and because this is a limited time affair. Heaven is forever, but your opportunity to be brave or noble or to sacrifice yourself or anything like that is really quite limited. Hebrews 10 discusses how we should encourage each other towards good deeds, and to not neglect meeting together especially now as the day of his return is drawing near. That was two thousand years ago. Christ still hasn't returned. Does that mean that Paul, Peter, James and John were all wrong in assuming that the return of Christ was imminent? Or does it mean that all Christians must live as though the return of Christ was right around the corner. 

If we believed that the return of Christ was both soon and inevitable, then we would likely behave differently. Spread the gospel more, be more charitable to people, work harder to feed and clothe people before judgment day and the end of everything. In both scenarios (asteroid and return of Christ) the world ends and it's all over. But for the Christian, even if the world blinks out of existence, the people that inhabited it are still around, and are, in fact, eternal. 

The world's gonna end either way. You know it and I know it. And you have a couple of ways that you can look at that information. Either the world ends and everything you did was completely inconsequential, or the world ends and how you treated people is of desperate, eternal consequence. Surprisingly enough, even people who have no faith in God tend to behave more towards the latter being true than the former. It's probably a good idea every once in a while to think about why that is.