Psalm 123:1–4 . Judges 4:1–7 . I Thessalonians 5:1–11 . Matthew 25:14–30

This week’s theme is God gives before he asks. In our Psalm, the people lift their eyes to God in helpless dependence, trusting only in the mercy of the Master’s hand already extended toward them. In Judges, God announces Israel’s deliverance through Deborah before a single soldier has moved. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul reminds believers that God has already appointed them to salvation through Christ’s death and resurrection, their destiny settled before they did anything to earn it. And in our pericope in Matthew, the master lavishes his own extraordinary wealth on his servants before asking anything of them, inviting the faithful not into mere reward but into the fullness of his own joy.

Reminder: This introductory paragraph is intended to show how the four RCL selections for this week are connected and to assist the preacher prepare the sermon. It is not intended to be included in the sermon.

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God Gives Before He Asks

Matthew 25:14–30 ESV

[Read of ask someone to read the passage.]

“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ his master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ his master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'” Matthew 25:14–30 ESV

Introduction

Near the beginning of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is a scene that has moved generations of readers to tears. A man named Jean Valjean has just been released from nineteen years of brutal imprisonment. His crime was stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. Nineteen years for a loaf of bread. A hungry young man was imprisoned and returned a hardened, bitter one. Everything in Valjean’s experience taught him about how the world works. You are watched. You are measured. You are punished. Every debt is collected in full.

Then one night a bishop takes him in. He feeds him at his own table and gives him a warm bed. But in the middle of the night, Valjean repays this kindness by stealing the bishop’s silver and slipping out into the darkness. He doesn’t get far. The police catch him, and in the morning, they drag him back to the bishop’s door, fully expecting to send him back to prison for life.

What happens next changes everything. The bishop looks at Valjean and says, in effect, my friend, I am so glad you came back. You forgot the best pieces. And he places his silver candlesticks, the most valuable things he owns, into the hands of the man who robbed him.

Valjean stands there holding a fortune he cannot comprehend. He came expecting judgment and received a gift. He came braced for the harsh master his whole life had taught him to expect, and instead he met generosity that asked for nothing in advance. It nearly broke him. And then it remade him.¹

Hold onto that image, because the parable Jesus tells in our text is about three servants who receive lavish gifts from their master. Two of them learn to live inside the gift. One of them, like Valjean early in his journey, is blinded by the image of a harsh master he has constructed in his mind. And the difference between them is the difference between joy and darkness.

The Gift Comes First

“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.” Matthew 25:14–15 ESV

Notice carefully how this story begins. Before anyone is asked to do anything, the master gives. He calls his servants together and entrusts his property to them,. his wealth,. his treasure.

We need to feel the scope of this. A single talent was worth roughly twenty years of wages for an ordinary worker.² Twenty years. This wasn’t a coin you were likely to lose in the cushions of your couch. So, the servant who received five talents was handed something like a century of income. Even the servant who received one talent was holding two decades of wages in his hands. The master literally poured out fortunes.

And here is what we must not miss. He gave first. He attached no conditions, no contracts, no instructions, no threats. He simply placed his own wealth into their hands and went on his journey. The gift came before any request, before any performance, before any accounting.

This is the pattern of God from the very beginning. God gives before he asks. He created a world full of beauty and handed it to humanity before we had done a single thing. He called Abraham and promised to bless him before Abraham did anything. He delivered Israel out of Egypt before he gave them a single commandment at Sinai. The rescue came first; the response came second. And then the Father gave us his own Son while we were still far from him. The gift always comes first. As Paul writes to the Romans,

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8 NIV

So, what are the talents in this parable? Be careful here, because the flattest reading turns this into a story about using your natural abilities, and then the sermon becomes a pep talk about maximizing your potential. But the talents are not the servants’ own abilities. The text is clear. This is the master’s property, wealth, and treasure, freely placed into their hands.

What is God’s greatest treasure entrusted to us? It is grace, which is the love and favor of God given to us as a free gift, never earned and never withdrawn. Grace is the Father loving you before you ever loved him. Grace is the Son giving his life for you before you ever asked him to. Grace is the Spirit dwelling with you, day after day, making the love of God real in your life. That is the treasure. That is what has been placed into your hands. The riches of God’s own life, entrusted to ordinary servants like you and me.

 Living Freely Within the Gift

He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. Matthew 25:16–17 ESV

See what the first two servants did? The text says the one with five talents went at once and traded with them. At once. No hesitation, no anxiety, no committee meetings. He took his master’s enormous wealth out into the open market and put it to work. The servant with two talents did the same.

These servants were risking someone else’s fortune. Trading in the ancient world was not safe. Ships sank. Markets failed. Ventures collapsed. Thieves stole treasures. And yet these two servants handled their master’s treasure with open hands and apparent fearlessness. How could they do that?

They knew their master. They knew his character. They knew he was generous, because they were holding the evidence of his generosity in their hands. A master who freely gives away fortunes is not a master who will crush you for an honest venture that goes sideways. Their freedom flowed directly from their picture of the giver. Because they trusted his goodness, they could live boldly with his gift.

God gives before he asks. And this is exactly how grace works. People who know that God is for them live differently than people who suspect God is against them. People who know they are loved take holy risks. They forgive, because they have been forgiven. They give generously, because they have received generously. They share the love of God with their neighbors, because they know there is always more where that came from. Grace received becomes grace in motion. The gift was never meant to sit still; it was meant to move and multiply and bless.

Then the master returns, and we reach one of the most beautiful moments in all of Jesus’ parables. Both servants come forward, and both hear the identical words:

His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master. Matthew 25:23 ESV

Consider “being faithful over a little”, or as the ISV puts it, “trustworthy with a small amount”. How shocking that statement would be to the servants who had been entrusted with an immense fortune! Clearly the master had something more in mind than finances. Notice two things. First, the master praises faithfulness, not results. The servant with five talents and the servant with two talents produce different amounts, yet they receive exactly the same commendation, word for word. God has never once compared you to another. Faithfulness with what you were given is the whole measure.

Second, look at the reward. It is not a salary. It is not a bonus. It is an invitation. Enter into the joy of your master. This is the first time in the gospel that anyone had been invited to share in the joy of the master. The reward for living within the gift is the Giver himself, and the servant’s own happiness thrown open like a door. This is where the parable becomes noticeably Trinitarian, which is the life of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. From all eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have lived in unbroken delight in one another. Joy is not something God has; joy is something God is. And the astonishing claim of the gospel is that through Jesus, the Father invites us into that very joy, and by the Spirit we begin to taste it now. The gift and the Giver were never two separate things. To receive the treasure is to be welcomed into the joy of the Giver: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Tragedy of Imagining a Hard Master

Then comes the third servant, and the whole atmosphere of the story changes. He steps forward, hands back the buried talent, and explains himself:

Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Matthew 25:24–25 ESV

Listen to that explanation carefully, because everything is in it. I knew you to be a hard man. So, I was afraid. So, I hid.

There is the whole tragedy in three steps. A false picture of the master produced fear. Fear produced burial or hiding. His failure did not begin with his hands; it began with his picture of his master.

And here is the question the parable presses on us: was his picture true? Is the master of this story a hard man? He freely handed out fortunes. He attached no conditions. He celebrated faithfulness over results. He invited his servants into his own joy. Nothing in this story matches the servant’s description.

The master who was demanding, taking where he hadn’t given, existed in one place only, the servant’s imagination. He hid from a master who never existed and missed the master who actually did exist.

And notice the bitter irony. The servant who believed in a bookkeeping master became the only bookkeeper in the story. “Here, you have what is yours”, he says, as if closing an account. He kept the ledger balanced. He lost nothing, risked nothing, owed nothing. By the standards of the false master he believed in, he did everything right. And he missed everything that mattered. The God who gives before he asks invites us into his joy, not into his ledger. The third servant chose the ledger, and the ledger cannot lead anywhere except the dark.

Robert Farrar Capon put it this way:

Here, therefore, as in the Laborers in the Vineyard, it is only the bookkeeping of unfaith that is condemned; the rest of the story is about the unaccountable, even irresponsible joy of the Lord who just wants everybody to be joyful with him.³

That is exactly right. The master’s response to the third servant is not the explosion of a harsh god finally showing his true colors. It is the sorrow of a generous lord handing a man the only thing he ever insisted on having, which was a world without grace.

…. cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Matthew 25:30 ESV

Jesus’ warning is sobering. Life apart from God’s grace is darkness. The servant’s fear has become the world he chooses to inhabit. Having rejected the master’s generosity, he experiences only the darkness his false picture of the master could produce. He believed in a hard master, and in the end, that is the only master he had left himself with.

This is where Jean Valjean and the third servant part ways. Both men began in the same place. Both had been taught by life to expect a harsh master. But when grace was placed into Valjean’s hands, he let it shatter his false picture. He let the candlesticks tell him the truth about the giver. The third servant held the same kind of evidence, a fortune freely given, and refused to let it speak. He clung to the hard master in his head against all the generosity in his hands.

So, the question this parable asks each of us is simple and searching. What do you believe about the Giver? Because how you live with God’s gift depends entirely on what you believe about him. If somewhere deep down you suspect God is a hard task master, you will bury things. You will bury your gifts, your honesty, your prayers, your heart.

But if you come to see the Father that Jesus came to reveal, the Father who gives his treasure away before we have done anything at all, whose Son went to a cross for us, whose Spirit pours that love into our hearts, then you will begin to live freely, openly, and even boldly with everything he has placed in your hands.

Here is an encouragement as we leave this parable. This week, refuse to bury the gift. Not by straining or striving, but by trusting the character of the One who gives it. Forgive someone, and trust there is more mercy where that came from. Give generously, and trust there is more provision. Share the love of God with someone who has only ever known hard masters, and trust there is more grace. Live like people holding candlesticks.

Because here is the good news. The Master of this story is not waiting at the end of time with a ledger. He has already given you his treasure. He gave his Son before you ever asked. He gives his Spirit without earning the gift. God gives before he asks, and he has never once asked for anything he did not first supply. The accounts have been settled in Jesus Christ. The fortune is already in your hands. And the door the Master holds open is not the door to an audit; it is the door to a celebration. Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master.

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• The Bishop’s Candlesticks Symbol in Les Misérables | LitCharts
• Lee Harmon’s Blog – Matthew 25:25, How Much is a Talent? – October 17, 2011, 07:00
• Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2022), 503.

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