This sermon was preached at St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Darnum (9am), Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Traralgon (11am) and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Bairnsdale (3pm).
Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text (Lk 19:11-27)
The first came before him, saying, “Lord, your mina has made ten minas more.” And he said to him, “Well done, good servant!”
Cu ram in nhiam ben nhiamdɛ, wëë i̱, 'Kuäär, yiëëth dääpädu cɛ yio̱w da̱ŋ wäl nööŋ.' Kä cuɛ jɛ jiök i̱, 'Gɔaaɛ ɛlɔ̱ŋ. Ɛ ji̱n läät mi gɔaa.'
Prayer: Lord God, our heavenly Father, enlighten our darkness with the light of your Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord, so that I may preach well and we all may hear well. Amen.
There was an American pastor in the 20th century who described the message of the modern church as talking about “God without wrath bringing men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
What do you think?
Here we are on the Last Sunday of the church year, which is normally a day on the church calendar where we commemorate the end of time and the final judgment. And to be honest with you, it’s a topic that we trendy forward-thinking Christians of modern times tend not to get too excited about. Why? Probably because we don’t really believe that it will happen.
But in our reading today, we notice the words of the nobleman to the third servant: “I will judge you…” In fact, the words are “I will judge you with your own words”, or more literally, “I will judge you out of your own mouth.”
But at the beginning of the bible we read the words, which we all know well, and which we say in the creed every Sunday: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The heavens and the earth were not always there, but God was. And the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.
There was a time when there was no heaven and earth. And when God is done with the earth, the universe, and everything in it, He will bring it to an end, just as in the same way he gave it a beginning. In the beginning he separated light from darkness, night from day – at the end he will separate sheep from goats, good from evil, faithful from unfaithful.
And in our gospel reading today, we see that Jesus pictures himself as a nobleman. And we read that this nobleman calls 10 servants together, and gives them each 10 minas. A “mina” (or in the older translations of the bible “a pound”) was about 3 months wages for a labourer. Quite a lot of money! In today’s money, it would amount to maybe about 7 or $8000. And when he returns we read:
The first [servant] came before him, saying, “Lord your mina has made ten minas more.” And [the nobleman] said, “Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities.” And the second came, saying, “Lord your mina has made five minas”. And he said to him, “And you are to be over five cities.” Then another came, saying, “Lord, here is your mina, which I kept laid away in a handkerchief; for I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man. You take what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.” He said to him, “I will [judge] you with your own words, you wicked servant! You knew that I was a severe man, taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I did not sow? Why then did you not put my money in the bank, and at my coming I might have collected it with interest?” And he said to those who stood by, “Take the mina from him, and give it to the one who has ten minas.”
These are sobering words. And I want you to focus on these words which the man speaks, “For I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man.”
It can also be easy for many of us to treat Jesus like this, and to pray the prayer in our heart, “Jesus, I am afraid of you, because you are a severe man.” You’re tough! You’re stingy!
Have you ever thought, I won’t ask Jesus for what I need, because he probably won’t give it to me anyway? He never listened to me before, so why should he listen to me now? He’s never helped me before, so why now? Why bother? Why try?
Have you ever thought like this? It’s very easy to get cynical like this if sometimes we don’t see the answer to our prayers immediately. It’s easy to turn the God who reveals himself to us in the bible as “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” into a selfish, aloof tyrant, who enjoys to see people suffer.
Well this isn’t true. He’s not that sort of God. But it’s in the devil’s best interest to make us think that he’s that sort of God. Because when we think God’s a tyrant, we won’t touch him with a barge pole. We won’t go near him. We’ll go as far away from him as possible and hide our mina in a handkerchief, in a dirty old rag, in some old burial cloths.
The way we think about God impacts how we relate to him. It’s common for people to talk about “your relationship with God” or “your relationship with Jesus”. And I usually avoid using language like this, because it gives the impression that it’s all up to “you”. All the emphasis is put on the quality of “your” devotion, “your” prayers, “your” dedication to God.
And then there are some people who, no matter how hard they try, can’t seem to achieve this relationship with God that everyone else seems to be speaking of. And most often they are not “bad Christians”. They are often people who come to church regularly, and pray and read the bible, and still they feel such an isolation. And they get cross with God because he doesn’t seem to be doing anything. He doesn’t seem to be doing his job! He’s not filling in his paper work for us!
These people are often very honest – and take God very seriously. But they say, “Lord Jesus, I am afraid of you, because you are a severe man. You take what you did not deposit and reap what you did not sow.”
And then, amid all their frustration, all they hear in return is God in his anger, saying to them, “I will judge you with your own words, you wicked servant!”
Perhaps you too feel like this. If you do, it is a good sign, because it means that God has allowed you to know that you are a sinner. And the only person who lets you know this is the Holy Spirit – the devil doesn’t want you to know, or else he wants you to perceive it to such an extent that you think that there can’t possibly be any forgiveness for you.
But listen to these verses from Psalm 18:
“With the merciful you show yourself merciful; with the blameless you show yourself blameless; with the purified you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous. For your save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down. For it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness.”
Listen to those words again. “With the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.” Notice how in our parable today, the “wicked servant” makes his master out to be a harsh man. And so the master says to him, “You want a harsh man, you’ve got one! I’ll be harsh if you want me to be.”
It’s funny, to my ears, the wicked servant doesn’t seem to me to be so evil, but rather he’s full of self-pity. He makes his excuse by saying, “I was afraid of you”. He says, “It’s not my fault I didn’t do anything with your money. It’s your fault – you’re the one who’s a harsh man.”
But notice the first man who comes to his master and says, “Lord, your mina has made ten minas more.”
Notice he doesn’t say, “My mina” but “your mina has made ten minas”.
The mina belongs to the Lord. And as it says in Psalm 18, “it is you who light my lamp; the Lord my God lightens my darkness.” It is the Lord who gives, and the Lord who takes away. The mina belongs to him. Psalm 115 says: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory.”
“Your mina has made ten minas.”
It is easy for us to think of these different servants as ones who worked harder than each other. And there’s an aspect to this in the command which the master gave his servants, “Do business until come”. “Work!” “Here’s some money! Do something with it!”
But the focus for us should be on how the different servants viewed their master. The one who was judged simply thought that he was a harsh man, a severe man, a hard task-master, a tyrant, a cruel despot!
The servant who thought like this, couldn’t do anything, because he was paralysed. He’d given up before he started. And by doing this, he flatly refused to do what his master asked of him. He simply refused! No, I’m not going to do business! I’m going to sulk instead!
But look around you this morning in this church and see what’s happening! The Lord who made heaven and earth has sent his Son into the world to forgive your sins. And your sins are forgiven again today through the ministry of the church here in this church service! You have been baptised into Christ, so that it is no longer you who live but Christ who lives in you. And the fact that Christ lives in you means that he constantly takes all your sin, and covers it with his blood, and forgives you for it. And then he gives you the gift of his gospel – the words of grace which are poured out on you in the church! And not only that, he gives you the body and blood of his Son Jesus Christ for you to eat and drink!
It isn’t your gifts to God that are the main focus of our worship. But it is God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who gives his gifts to you! They are his minas. The important thing for us is not to reject the gifts and hinder their power. But simply to put out our hands and receive them.
God has sent his Son to die for you, because (as it says in John 3:16) he “so loved the world”. He’s not a severe man. He doesn’t take what he didn’t deposit and reap where he did not sow.
He’s the God who made you, and formed you while you were in your mother’s womb. He’s the God who sent his Son, our Lord and God, Jesus to suffer and die on the cross, and to rise from the dead for you. And he’s the God who has washed us with the water and the Word in Holy Baptism, who richly and daily forgives all our sins, and who lays out and prepares for us the Holy Supper of the body and blood of Christ.
On this Sunday, where we commemorate the final judgment, and we come to remember and think about this parable about the judgment of God, don’t forget that in the church and in this house of prayer today, the final judgment is given to us ahead of time: Forgiven, forgiven, forgiven. The pastor doesn’t say, “Upon your confession, I will condemn you according your own words, wicked servant”, but “upon your confession, I as a called and ordained servant of the word announce the grace of God to all of you.”
Because if we didn’t have these words spoken and breathed upon us, we would have no right to sing the songs of angels and to join in with them: Glory to God in the highest, and Holy, Holy, Holy.
But in fact, God does forgive you for the sake of Jesus Christ his only Son, and he wants you to know again and again that he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
So you have nothing to fear.
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, we confess that we have not lived as we should, or as we would have liked, and as you would have liked. But we thank you that you have suffered, died and risen again from the dead for us, and won for us the forgiveness of all our sin. Send us the Holy Spirit today and bless us in everything we do. Amen.
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