THE Second Sunday before Advent turns to the second parable in Matthew 25. Like the opposite two, it’s an urgent warning that point is fleeting, pressing ever onward.
The concept that time is linear is so embedded in our minds that questioning its truth can seem silly. But not all cultures imagine time like this. Christianity pictures time as directional since it has a historical place to begin — or, strictly, two: “In the start” (Genesis 1.1, and John 1.1). Likewise, it expects a culmination: “The one who testifies to these items says, ‘Surely I’m coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22.20).
The sequential arrangement of the books in a Christian Bible reinforces a linear concept of time, which is further corroborated by the Christian view that Old Testament prophets are mainly about predicting the long run. Judaism focuses more on prophecy as declaring God’s current concerns to his people.
The more that we take into consideration time, the harder it appears to be to understand. Witness St Augustine’s struggle to point out that “the current” exists in any respect (in Confessions 11). He remarks that “time doesn’t go idly by nor flow to no purpose through our senses,” and that “it does strange things to the mind” (Confessions 4). Understanding time begins to look as difficult because the more obviously mind-boggling concept of eternity. Ford Prefect put it like this (in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy): “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
Our perception of time has the ability to distort happiness while, at the identical time, generating anxiety. Perhaps it is because our understanding of it’s so inadequate. When we’re under stress or pressure, we put the blame on a scarcity of time. In reality, it is normally an imbalance in priorities; for anxiety distracts us from essential matters by displacing our attention on to unimportant ones, which we feel higher capable of manage.
But our dreams confront us with what our waking minds refuse to see; for this parable strikes me as a form of tension dream. Almost all of the dreams that I remember on waking are anxiety dreams: I used to be late; I used to be wearing the flawed clothes; I forgot something vital. Whatever the circumstances, being condemned by those that witness our failure is what we dread and, due to this fact, most vividly remember.
This parable focuses on the slave who gets only one talent with which to do something. We know that he’s in trouble, since the first two slaves were praised for doing what he didn’t do. So we intuit his dread, flinching on the bitter irony that his own fear is what has brought down upon him his master’s wrath.
That slave, though, was in a lose-lose situation. The household’s slaves wouldn’t all have been expert traders in stocks and shares: most of them would have been labourers, secretaries, cooks, and the like. Their master must have told them that, in the event that they felt unable to take risks along with his money, they must put the cash within the bank to realize interest. Instead, he virtually forces his less expert, more cautious slaves to fail. Here is the essence of an anxiety dream: unavoidable failure, humiliation, condemnation.
Letting people down makes us feel horrible. I can see why Jesus desired to discourage people from doing nothing with what God gives them, but why did he should make failure (on this, and the opposite two parables in chapter 25) so terrifying? The fear of being condemned and humiliated doesn’t encourage people to succeed: it makes them hide mistakes, and bluster to disguise their weaknesses.
At this point, I want to remind myself that this story is parable, not history. However we translate the Greek adjective (“worthless”? “useless”? “unprofitable”?), the label “worthless slave” is oxymoronic; for, in point of fact, he wouldn’t have been thrown out of the home, but sold.
I hope that this just isn’t the purpose, nonetheless, and that God just isn’t to be straightforwardly identified with the cruel “master”; for the parable is less a straightforward guide to divine judgement than a nightmare distortion of it (i.e. the Kingdom of heaven as our fears and guilt make us see it, not as it truly is),
To avoid being just “myself creating what I saw” (William Cowper, The Task, “The Winter Evening”), we could do with informed reassurance that divine judgement is mercy-full, pity-full. Thank goodness Paul gives context to Matthew’s dark warning: “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
