Luke 19:11-27 "In the Meantime" Scott Hoezee

At one point in the film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers we see three of the main characters spending days doing nothing but running and running in hot pursuit of a squad of enemy soldiers. Two of their companions had been captured by the enemy and so the man Aragorn, the elf Legolas, and the dwarf Gimli give chase across a varied terrain of hills, rocks, valleys. But it was nearly too much for the stocky dwarf. At one point as he huffs and puffs and lags ever farther behind, Gimli laments, "We dwarves are wasted on cross country! We are natural sprinters--very dangerous across short distances!"

As many of us know, there is a big difference between cross country runners and sprinters who run the 100-yard dash. There is a reason why you do not see Olympic marathon runners competing in also short distance races. The training and preparation are quite different for each of these two forms of running.

But even apart from athletics, we know intuitively how to prepare for differing scenarios. You are going to pack the car one way if you are taking the kids for an overnight stay at Grandma's house and a very different way if the family is taking a two-week trip to Yellowstone. It goes without saying that you get into trouble if you train, plan, or prepare for one scenario only to discover that the opposite situation is the one you find yourself in.

It reminds me of the college student who bribed a custodian to take a look at a biology professor's desk in advance of a big zoology exam. If the custodian could tell the student what materials were on the professor's desk, that would give a huge clue as to what the exam would be about. The custodian saw lots of material related to camels, and so this student spent a week cramming camel information into his head. But when the exam day arrived, he was presented with a test about bees. Not to be undone, however, the student began his exam by writing, "The bee is completely unlike the camel, which . . ." and he then wrote twenty pages on camels! It seems unlikely that he got a passing grade, however!

In Luke 19 we find Jesus teetering on the brink of entering Jerusalem. What we now call the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday follows immediately on the heels of tonight's parable. In the structure of Luke's gospel, Jesus has been heading for Jerusalem ever since Luke 9:51 when Jesus resolutely set his face toward the Holy City. The closer Jesus and his followers got to Jerusalem, the more the anticipation was building. Nevermind that all along Jesus had been predicting that only suffering, rejection, and death awaited him there. The disciples shrugged off that kind of talk. Maybe the Lord was just having a bad day when he said such gloomy things. But surely it did not need to turn out that way! Surely they could help Jesus avoid the negative and so at long last fight his way to become a new king, re-establishing Israel, throwing out the Romans, and so ushering in a new golden age the likes of which had not been seen for 1,000 years in the time of David.

In other words, the disciples were limbering up and training themselves for a sprint, a 100-yard dash to the finish line. But Jesus needed cross-country, marathon runners who could endure over the long haul. They were boning up on camels when Jesus knew the exam would be about bees. So he told a parable that Luke overtly tells us in verse 11 was intended to slow things down, re-orient the minds of the disciples, and basically lower expectations that anything like a visible kingdom was going to be established anytime soon. On this Mission Emphasis evening, these are words we need to hear.

But I wonder if we can hear them. We are, after all, two whole millennia on the high side of the day when Jesus first told this parable in the Jericho residence of Zacchaeus. Commentator Joel Green makes a good observation in connecting verse 9 with verse 11. In verse 9 Jesus said "Today salvation has come to this house," referring to the conversion of the erstwhile crooked tax collector Zacchaeus. And it was exactly that kind of immediate, short-term language the disciples loved to hear. To their minds the entire kingdom was going to come any day now. It could be today. Could be tomorrow or the next day but for sure it would be soon.

So in verse 9 even Jesus said salvation could be "today" and yet in verse 11 he needs to qualify that for the sake of those who were looking for the kingdom to come "at once." Salvation is "today" in one sense, but kingdom fullness is even so not "at once." Seldom can you find the concept of "the already and the not yet" so clearly spelled out in just three verses. There was then and still is now a "today" or "already" aspect to God's kingdom. Zacchaeus became a kingdom citizen that very day and did so because in Jesus the kingdom had already come. Even so, however, the complete fullness of that kingdom was "not yet."

But we know that, don't we? Sure, the disciples could say, "Any day now Jesus will be coronated king!" But since the time when they thought that long about the year 30 A.D., something like three-quarters of a million days have come and gone. If the purpose behind this parable was to convert sprinters into long-distance runners, then what relevance does this have for us seeing as we can look back on a cross-country race that has so far lasted for around 725,000 days and nights!?

We don't have a hard time believing that the fullness of the kingdom might just be a long time in coming. So there is little sense in approaching this parable tonight with the sole purpose of reminding ourselves of something we know right well as it is. But does that mean there is little we can learn? No, because this parable works just as well to address something else that may be true of us: the temptation to lose heart, to have God's kingdom become something that does not loom very large on our mental horizons most days. If the error of the disciples was to locate the kingdom just around the corner, the error to which we are prone is to push the kingdom so far off into the future that it vanishes. So let's read Luke 19 with an eye toward refreshing our sense for kingdom urgency.

As most commentators point out, the parable itself is a strange one. It seems politically strange and foreign to us in that we cannot quite make sense out of how a nobleman from one country might somehow be able to become king in another country. The politics of all this seems odder than even, say, something like a man from Austria becoming governor of a state in America! But historians, including that ancient font of historical information, Josephus, tell us that something like this scenario was quite common. Who ruled what country was dictated by the Caesar in Rome, and even as today a president might choose from among his most loyal friends when assigning cabinet posts, so back then the wealthy who donated lots of money to the Caesar might just be rewarded by being appointed king or governor over this or that portion of the then-sprawling Roman Empire.

So that explains one odd portion of this parable but another oddity is figuring out why the king is so ruthless. It is always tempting to turn parables into allegories. An allegory is a story in which every character and event in the narrative corresponds neatly to a real-life person and event. Sometimes there are allegorical elements in Jesus' parables, but scholars remind us that none of Jesus' parables just is an allegory and so we should not always be trying to figure out who stands for whom. In the case of Luke 19, if we say that the king stands for Jesus, and if we further try to allegorize every aspect of that king, we might end up with a Savior who does not come off looking very nice. A ruthless person who summarily executes enemies and who is renowned for being an expropriator of other people's goods, is definitely not the Jesus Luke has been presenting so far in this gospel.

In other words, the king in the story both does and does not stand for Jesus. We must not over-interpret or over-extend the imagery. But now that we have explained the politics of this story and reminded ourselves not to allegorize it all, let's look at the actual parable.

The man who became king quickly set up shop and, as good leaders must always do, delegated responsibilities. Among other things, he gave each of ten servants about four-months' worth of wages and told them to get busy in doing something useful with this money. He himself was going away for a while but the implication was clear: when he got back, he expected to see results! Eventually he does come back but when he does, we hear about only three of the original ten. What became of the other seven we don't know, but neither do we need to know: the first three servants suffice for us to get the idea.

The first two had worked well and with some real savvy, vastly multiplying the original sum. Who knows how they did it, the point is they did something rather than nothing and it earns the king's glowing approval. But the third man had kept the original sum safe and sound. His reasoning appears to have been that no matter what he did with his mina, risk would be involved. Invest in the stock market and you may or may not make money. You could even lose the whole shot. Go out and buy a team of oxen to try to raise some corn, and your cows might get hoof-and-mouth disease and die, it might be a drought year and so you'd have no crop to sell, or any one of a thousand things could go wrong. The only way to ensure he would have something, as opposed to nothing, was the good old security provided by putting the money under the mattress.

Oddly, though, you get the impression that things would have gone better for this man had he tried something and lost. Even rolling the mina into a 12-month CD at the local bank would have drawn enough interest to have gotten him off the hook. Granted, it would not have been as impressive as the men who increased their money by factors of 10 and 5, but even interest from a bank can pile up eventually. But in the end it wasn't that this man did not do enough, it was that he did nothing.

It is not in the least difficult to see this parable as a call to faithfulness and as a warning against being idle. If God has given you a talent, you must use it. Take risks, put yourself out there, allow yourself to be challenged. Even if you fall short of the mark, at least you tried! Even if you cannot do spectacular work for the kingdom, you can do your part, however insignificant it may seem. Be faithful in all you do!

Now, of course, all of that represents key lessons of this parable. But what does any of it have to do with how we began this sermon (and how Luke framed this parable) in terms of long-distance running as opposed to short-distance sprinting? How does the failure of the third servant tie in with that? It almost seems as though we have completely lost sight of the "already and not yet" stuff we thought about earlier. After all, the third servant did not say that he decided to be idle because he figured the king would never return. For that matter, the two who were faithful did not seem to do their work with any particular timeframe in mind. So how would this parable have accomplished Jesus' goal of helping the disciples slow down their kingdom expectations?

To be honest, I'm not sure! But if we assume up front that Luke was correct in verse 11 when he told us Jesus' purpose, then we must read this parable as a call to kingdom faithfulness even in the absence of having any visible kingdom around us. The key to this parable is in the fact that the king went away. We said a moment ago not to over-allegorize this fictional king, but at the very least we can see the parallel between this king's return to his home country and what would soon happen to Jesus with his return to heaven. Even in the story, it is profoundly odd that no sooner is this man made a king and he leaves the country over which he has authority. We would not have liked it a few years ago if, within hours of his having been inaugurated as president. George Bush moved back to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and hid out there. Such an action is, logically speaking, inexplicable.

Of course, within a week something equally inexplicable would happen to the man whom the disciples were hoping would soon be made king. Jesus would die, and you can't get much more "gone" than that from any kingdom anywhere! Yes, he would return but only for about 50 days before once again disappearing into a cloud.

So in this parable Jesus is as much as saying, "Look, everybody: it is right that you pin your hopes on me but brace yourselves because things are going to happen that will shock you. I will be gone in every conventional sense, and I will be gone for a long while. But in the meantime, I am still the king. There is still work to be done on my behalf. In fact, in my absence, my work can be done only through you. If you do not at least try, then nothing will happen, and the gospel work of revealing the hidden kingdom of God to the world is far too important for anyone who knows better to be merely idle."

All of which helps us to land squarely on our larger theme of missions tonight. No, we do not have a hard time believing that the full advent of the kingdom might take a while. It already has! Our struggle after all these years is keeping up the energy to keep talking about something that has grown remote. We don't necessarily expect Jesus to come back any moment now, at least not with the kind of imminence the disciples sensed in Luke 19. In fact, sometimes we act as though he will never come back at all.

Some while back I told you the fable in which three demons tried to capture the world. The first demon declared, "There is no God!" But too many people had a sense for the divine in their hearts already. The first demon was not believed. The second demon said, "There is no sin!" But the newspaper keeps hitting the front porch every day with evidence to the contrary, so this demon was not believed either. The third demon was more savvy, however. He whispered, "There is no hurry!" and he captivated millions.

Being faithful missionaries, declaring the good news of the kingdom is fueled by one-part genuine faith and one-part kingdom urgency. We don't focus on the "not yet" aspect of the kingdom but rather on the "already" part. The kingdom is already here. Whether Jesus returns tomorrow or in another 1,500 years, the fact is that he is present to us right now. In Luke 19 Jesus was simultaneously trimming back the disciples' idea that the kingdom was urgent in the sense of coming the next day and he was boosting their sense of urgency by revealing the reality of the kingdom in this present moment. That's why missionaries who worked for the kingdom 1,700 years ago did their work for the exact same reason as those missionaries who work in the year 2003: because the folks back then and all of us now know that we are already part of the kingdom.

What keeps our legs pumping all along the course of this very long, cross-country race springs not, like the energy of a sprinter, from being able to see the finish line close at hand but instead from the reality of the finish line hidden already now inside our hearts. It's not the finish line out there that motivates our mission, it's the finish line in here at this very moment that makes us want to bring others along with us.

These days the wild success of all those Left Behind novels about the rapture reveals once more that the longing to be Christian sprinters has not died away. If only we could see the finish line a mere 10 or 20 yards ahead of us, why we would lunge at it with every fiber of our being. Luke 19 tells us that we need to have that same kind of zestful urgency for mission not because the rapture or some such thing might be tomorrow but because Jesus is here with us today. It is because of his presence that in our missions we keep running with the Good News for all to hear. Amen.