Thirty-third Sunday 1996 (#2)

Thirty-third Sunday, 1996 (#2)

Trust exists in time

The proverb that Erika did about a capable wife, is to say that it is something of an embarrassment. I don’t know why they put it here. You know, it would be okay if there were another passage in the same Book of Proverbs which had a big section about a capable husband, but the assumption in those days was that all of the husbands were capable, and if you got a capable wife that was an exception, and you better hang on to her... And so, this is another instance of the profoundly patriarchal environment out of which these texts came and, it seems to me, unfortunate that they picked this one, and I can’t even make a very good case for connecting it with the other readings except to say that, well, here we have a human being who is using her time diligently. I guess that’s what connection was intended. The other readings are doing the same thing as the readings last week and the readings next week are going to do, which is to somehow address the question of the end of the world, that is, the time when God is going to say, "okay, folks, this is the end, now we’re going to clear up this whole operation, and everyone can see what this is all about." Which is to say that we will all be constituted as a human family. The Kingdom of God, or the End of the World, or whatever word you want to use to describe it, but that’s what it’s all about. And it was a big problem, an enormous problem, for these early followers of Jesus because they believed that if God raised Jesus from the dead then the rest of them, the dead people, were going to be raised too, and the judgement would take place, and God would, in fact, effect what God had intended in creating in the first place: namely, the building of a real, genuine community. But it didn’t happen. So, we keep getting this problem of, "what are we gonna do about it?"

So, last Sunday we had this parable that Matthew probably made up about the ten bridesmaids waiting for a bridegroom who was late and today we have another version of the same sort of thing with a different kind of message, I believe; namely, this master who goes away for a long time and nobody knows how long he’s going to be gone and then he just sort of appears again. And the point of the reading, of course, is what do we do in the interim? You know, it’s trying to answer that question. The story is a little weird... just on the face of it, but, I think, I’d like to make a suggestion as to what may be going on here, and I think the text will bear this interpretation. The key to the thing is the little dialogue at the end between the master and the third slave: the master, obviously, is supposed to be God and the slave, they had set the story in the context of the time so they talk about slaves..., so the slave is just us human beings and what we do with our lives... I think the key word in this little dialogue is when the third slave says, "I was afraid." I mean, if you start thinking about what happens when we are afraid... of life, of each other, even of ourselves..., and to some extent we’re all afraid of those things of the world, to the extent that our life is lived under the sign of fear, we are detached from each other. We just kind of bundle-up into ourselves out of the fear of God. That’s what fear does; fear disassociates people. Fear pushes self -preserving. As a result all the doors and windows have to be closed down and locked, and everybody kept at a safe distance, or so we think... So, the problem here is that this third slave, basically, was totally wrapped up in himself means, as I suggested, being disconnected from him... as opposed to the other slaves. The key word, I think, with the other two people is "trust... trust-worthy servant," or "trust-worthy slave," rather. Trust is precisely the opposite of fear. I mean trust to grow, we can trust the possibility of creating a life here, we can trust other people. That means that you’re essentially both connected and to people and open to the world, and that’s why this sounds really tough, this business of "had this stuff taken away and given to these other people and threw this slave into the outer darkness." The third slave is in the outer darkness already. To the extent that we live by fear, and all of us..., all of us do to some extent, we’re already in the outer darkness. Darkness is the hall-mark of our existence. But it is also important to connect this to this business of waiting. Trust exists in time, it is not just something that happens once: "ohh, I trust you, and it’s finished, now let’s go do something different." No, trust means, precisely, that you hang on over a period of time. Trust is not some kind of instantaneous thing that comes and goes just like that.

So, what I think is one of the things that’s coming out of this is to say, "okay, if God is, if God is real, if I see my life and the world as entrusted to me, if God really trusts me, then I can build a life"-- as opposed to the counter example which is that if I am totally afraid, then I can’t build a life; everything that I do is simply one or another strategy to protect myself... from everything: people, events, the future, the world I live in... So what I think this does, at least for me..., it enables me to do is to ask some really basic and deep and searching questions. Trojcak, where are you really... in your life? How do you regard the rest of everything outside your own head? Is suspicion, or the fear of betrayal, or the fear of failure, or the fear of being hurt, the thing that marks the way you operate? This is a profoundly Jewish view of things because what is the crucial issue here is: how responsible are we? Which means, from the Jewish point of view, how able are we to respond to other people? The world? Life? That’s how they understand responsibility; not just "living up to my own standards... I’ve got to be responsible because I could not live with myself if I were not." Well, that may be good, Britannic stiff upper-lippery, but that’s not what the Bible’s about. The Bible is about "how much can I connect with? how much can I be inserted into? how much can I be related to other people in the world?"

So, and to do it over the life-long period, that’s what the reading’s about. And, as I’ve said, that leaves us these three weeks to start thinking about the end--I’m far closer to the end than any of you guys are, by a long-shot, so it certainly has a lot more urgency for me, but this is a question, I think, that is addressable to everybody, no matter where we are in our lives: starting out in university, or a career, or, like me, looking back over lots and lots of years... trying to figure out what I do until they carry me off.

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