"Jesus proceeded to tell a parable because they supposed that the Kingdom of God was to appear immediately. A man of noble birth went to a distant country to be appointed King."
Luke 19
I've always found this parable, referred to as the "parable of the talents", a complicated one. There is just so much going on in the story. The parable was told by Jesus because He saw that His disciples and followers had a heightened sense that the Messiah would soon appear and usher in God's Kingdom of love, peace and justice, and all would be well with the world.
What is the danger in such thinking? The danger is that we would all sit back and complacently wait for it to happen. We would sit and wait for it to magically appear. So Jesus tells the parable to break this illusion. Through this parable, Jesus is trying to convey, in messianic terms, the coming of God's kingdom. So the parable explains to us something of how God will work in His plan and His purpose in building the Kingdom. And it is far from something that will magically happen.
The parable speaks first of God's trust in us, his people and servants. He trusts us with the talents and gifts to be used in building His Kingdom. This is illustrated in the parable as entrusting us with a sum of money to be invested or used. There are no strings attached to these gifts. With each gift, God also gives sufficient grace and strength to use them wisely. The whole question that arises in the parable is how do we use them?
God honors those who use their talents for doing good. Those who are faithful are entrusted with even more. But the parable also shows that God abhors an attitude of indifference, an attitude that says: "its not worth trying". For those who neglect or squander what has been entrusted to them, they will lose even what they have.
For me, this is very similar to working through the problems we have in relationships.
Recently, we have had a lot of problems in our church for many reasons I will not go into here. But it has led to a lot of hurt, frustration, confusion and division. The question that I've had to ask myself, and I suspect many others have asked it as well is: Is it all worth it? It seems so simple to thrown up our hands and walk away from it; yet, is this what God wants us to do? This parable to me indicates not.
God's Kingdom will not magically appear. It comes through the willingness, the desire, and the energy that we His people put into it, through the help of Grace, to make it happen.
In fact, is this not the means by which we build our marriage and family relationships? Once fear, mistrust, frustration, and ill-will become the dominate qualities, then even the little that we have will be lost. But if we remain firm in our resolve to be the instruments of building God's Kingdom, then the time of darkness will pass, and we will once again enjoy the fruits of the Kingdom, which are synomomous to the fruits of the Spirit.
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