Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday before Advent 2023

In a world full of wrath, and where there is way too much weeping and gnashing of teeth, how are we supposed to understand our readings today?

Should we say that what we are witnessing in the Middle East—what has been grinding endlessly in Ukraine—is all God’s will—God’s wrath being poured out on the earth; a sign of the coming Day of the Lord, and of the ‘full and terrible end’ that Zephaniah describes? If so, then I’m not sure why we would think that we should be spared. If God is in the business of wrath because of human sin then wrath is what we should expect too. If God is violent in this way, and God is eternal and unchanging, then eternal violence is what we face.

Or perhaps, it might be argued, God uses violence to bring about his ultimately peaceful purposes. God has torn us and he will heal us—so we read in Hosea. The Cross was pretty violent, and we believe it brought about the salvation of the world—in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself (we read in the second letter to the Corinthians).

There can be no doubt, for Christians, that God is at work in human history; all of it. The Incarnation, God in Christ appearing within the physical and temporal creation, makes it impossible to imagine a God who simply watches from afar as the universe unfolds. But the Incarnation suggests that what God was doing in Christ is what God has always been doing, and what God will always be doing until the end of time: as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

What God does and who God is cannot be separated—the one flows directly from the other. And what we see in Christ, in his birth, in his passion, death, and resurrection—apart from one slightly troubling incident with a fig tree—is one who doesn’t inflict violence, whether in self-protection or in revenge—but one who suffers violence, who undergoes it.

So, from this we might ask the question where the violence, the wrath, the stuff we see and sometimes experience—where is it actually coming from? Some theologies of the Cross seem happy to talk about God the Father inflicting violence on God the Son; the Son stepping-in to take the full force of the Father’s wrath, his anger at human sin, which would otherwise be inflicted on us. The good news of this is that any wrath is neutralised within God, by God—within the relationship of the Father and the Son. God has destined us not for wrath—Paul reassured the Thessalonians—but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. This is clearly good news for us, and makes Zephaniah and his prophecy of doom look unnecessarily gloomy. The difficulty is that if the wrath, the violence, begins in the Father, it must do so eternally—God does not change—and so the dynamic of the Trinity must entail the eternal assuaging of that wrath through the Son’s eternal suffering of it. This seems a long way from the assertion that ‘God is love’; that the Trinity is an eternal communion of love, which overflows into creation and redemption, and in which we are called to share. In only the most coercive and abusive of relationships is violence ever confused with love.

In truth we do not need to look much further than the Cross to see where the wrath, where the violence comes from. It is all human. It was the crowd who rejected him; the soldiers who viciously mocked him, Pilate who ultimately ordered his execution, and human beings who carried it out. In the ruins of Gaza, on the frontlines in Ukraine, it is human wrath we have to reckon with.

Christ, as the innocent victim, the lamb who does not open his mouth, unmasks the suppressed violence of our human rivalries, violence that is expressed in the rejection of the mutually acceptable scapegoat. If we ascribe wrath to God the Father, then we fail to see what Jesus is showing us; the mirror he holds up to us by his own person crucified and risen—which is our own violence and wrath, our secret sin, unmasked, and forgiven.

But this doesn’t mean we stop listening to Zephaniah; his blast against spiritual complacency, and the false security sought in wealth and military might, and the threat (the promise) that these blasphemies will result in our destruction—a text frequently set to terrifying music as the Dies irae of the Requiem Mass. We can, and should, hear the urgency, the call to reform, without having to ascribe violence to God.

Yet we do sometimes feel that God is angry with us, even brutally so. We echo the plaintive cry of the psalmist:
   we are afraid at your wrathful indignation.
You have set our misdeeds before you
   and our secret sins in the light of your countenance.

We are laid bare, our sins like scarlet, before the Cross of Christ—and it is frightening, exposing. It can feel brutal.

But (St Paul assures us) God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.

In his resurrection, the return of the innocent victim, proclaiming not vengeance but peace, we are forgiven—we die to our sin and then live, through him, with him, in him.

Paul reframes the whole idea of impending divine wrath and the Day of the Lord, by saying that we are already children ‘of the day’—living on this side of the death and resurrection of Christ means that the wrath is behind us; the wrath (our wrath) was all undergone and suffered in the full and final sacrifice of Christ crucified. We need to arm ourselves now, not with missiles and body armour, but with the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

And in the light of all this, we might look again at the parable of the talents, and be ready to find new meaning within it. We might be less inclined to think this is just a story about the danger of wasting our gifts and being punished for it; or indeed of being rewarded for clever investment, for our economic shrewdness. We might begin to wonder whether this is a parable about the kingdom of this world, to which the kingdom of heaven might be compared—similar in some ways, but radically distinct in others—the kingdom of this world, where those who have more get more, and those who have less end up so often with nothing, or worse than nothing—outer darkness, gnashing of teeth. Perhaps we are being asked whether we really think our economics is the economics of the kingdom of heaven—an economics which works handsomely for some, but desperately badly for others. The Master, the ‘harsh man’ in the parable may not be the God of Israel, after all, but the god of the market, who rewards those who have plenty of resources to play the game, but not those who genuinely fear losing what they have.

Some may, quite reasonably, object that this does not seem like the most obvious or most traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but the parables are not obvious stories, neither is their meaning exhausted by traditional interpretation. They are endlessly strange, twisting, perplexing, surprising. We are inclined to assume that the main character must always represent God—like the Master of the slaves to whom the talents (considerable quantities of money) were given. But Jesus does not say that the Master is God—on the contrary, he says the Master is ‘a man’. A man mistaken for God, perhaps, or mistaking himself for God?

The slave given the one talent is fearful of this man, his Master, and the Master believes the slave to be wicked and lazy. Does this really sound like the kind of relationship between God and humanity that Jesus reveals? Doesn’t it sound rather more like the kind of disparity of power, and lack of trust, that is commonplace in workplaces the world over, and especially where disparities in wealth are widest?

Is this parable in some sense a commentary on the world that is to be judged in the concluding part of Matthew chapter 25—which we will hear next week—where judgement is rendered not, it appears, on the basis of our economic fruitfulness, but on our ethical performance towards the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick or the prisoner—in short, the poor. Today’s parable of the talents, as part of a whole section of teaching about the end times, (the Day of the Lord, the Coming of the Son of Man) reaches its ringing conclusion with the prophecy we shall hear next week; the Last Judgement, the sheep and the goats—‘Insomuch as you did it for one of the least of these (the hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, prisoners), these who are my brothers, or members of my family, you did it to me.’

If we consider the parable of the Talents in context, it begins to look more like a contrast is being made between the ways of the world and the ways of the kingdom; between the Master who judges according to financial return, and the Son of Man, the king, who judges according to our deeds; specifically, our care of the poor.

There is a wider point to be made about the nature of parables, as hinted at earlier. They are deliberately strange, twisting, perplexing, surprising—making the familiar unfamiliar—constantly challenging our ‘obvious’, even our traditional reading of them. Why would Jesus teach in this way? Perhaps because we need to be unsettled from what we consider to be obvious—the assumptions we make without even considering them. We need to be estranged from this world, and its ways of operating, riven as they are with inequity and injustice; we might even need to be estranged from the traditional ways of reading these parables. Only then can we begin to perceive the kingdom that Jesus is proclaiming; the kingdom we are being called to inhabit even now, in this world, as children of ‘the day’, even as we await that Day’s fulfilment, when the Son of Man shall come in glory.

We live in a world too full of wrath, of weeping, of gnashing of teeth. As children of the day, we are called to proclaim him who unmasks all our secret violence, who suffered it, and who embodies the victory of God and invites us to share in the banquet of peace, even at this altar. May we then rejoice that in Christ God has destined us not for wrath but for salvation; and so, to proclaim that good news that we never ascribe violence to God, neither permit anyone to justify violence in his name.