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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.
Life is a series of big decisions and little decisions.
The big ones seem to have an outsized importance: Where will you live and what line of work will you pursue? Will you seek higher education, get married, or remain single? What groups or associations will you join, and what projects will occupy your time?
Ultimately, you’ll generate a list of “been-there-and-done-that” accomplishments which the master of ceremonies will recite if you’re ever invited to speak before the local Rotary club.
The average life, however, features many more little decisions than big decisions.
They hardly ever make headlines. But they are the ones that shape your character. Roughly speaking, life’s big decisions direct what you do. Little decisions determine who you are.
Every day you get to decide: Will I tell the truth? Will I keep my promises? Will I overlook an offense or hold a grudge? Will I choose the path of love or bitterness? Such little decisions may not show up on your resume, but they will be what everyone’s thinking about at your funeral. Character decisions are far more indicative of a life well-lived than the so-called big decisions.
Then there are the crossroads you’re likely to face every day.
What do you do when you’re confronted with a difficult situation? Do you face it head-on or hope it goes away? Do you take risks and take action, or play it safe and hide in the shadows?
During the last decades of the 20th century, a great many authors, educators, preachers, and talk show hosts announced that giving children the gift of self-esteem – through stickers, applause, participation trophies, recognition, and higher grades – would assure them of happier lives and make the world a better place.
But subsequent research has demonstrated just the opposite. Self-esteem cannot be given away like Snickers bars to trick-or-treaters. Self-esteem is chiefly a gift that we give to ourselves.
It’s a gift that becomes ours when we choose to be brave instead of being afraid, when we choose to face problems instead of running in the opposite direction.
A pattern of avoidance gradually crushes our inner sense of esteem. Whenever we courageously face a difficult situation head-on, we’re likely to feel a little rush of joy. But whenever we back down or back off, something inside us dies.
Those may seem to be very small deaths. We may even console ourselves by thinking, “I’ll get ‘em next time.” But over a lifetime, such decisions begin to add up. We gradually become the kind of people who back away from daily life.
The fascinating thing is that even if things do not work out – even if the risk doesn’t yield the hoped-for results – we still end up growing. This is simply the way God has hardwired human hearts.
That truth is front and center in Jesus’ Parable of the Talents, which appears in Matthew 25:14-30. He begins: “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey.”
Jesus is reminding us that we are God’s servants who have been entrusted with God’s property. A “talent,” in the first century, was in the neighborhood of 75 pounds of gold or silver – roughly equivalent, in today’s money, to a million dollars.
The wider teaching of Scripture suggests Jesus isn’t talking just about money. There are also five-talent, two-talent, and one-talent people when it comes to gifts, abilities, energy, and being uniquely positioned to make a difference in some regard.
Whether it’s the ability to solve differential equations, to work with wood, to be exceptionally patient with young children, or to lead an important strategic initiative, God’s gifts have not been distributed equally. That’s one of the realities of belonging to God’s household.
But even while we don’t receive equal gifts, we are equally responsible for what we do next with what we have.
In the story, the servant who has received five talents immediately goes to work – digging, investing, and risking – and presents the master with an additional five talents. “Well done, good and faithful servant,” the master (Jesus, that is) responds. “You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.”
An identical experience awaits the servant who transforms the two talents that he has been given into two more. Significantly, the master doesn’t say, “So why didn’t you come up with five talents?” Servants are accountable not for what they don’t have, but for what they do have. Are we willing to step up and step out, for God’s sake, with our gifts?
Then comes the drama.
The third servant says to the master, “I know that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid [those are key words] and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.”
It seems evident at this moment that the third servant expects applause. Or at least a participation trophy. His mission is accomplished: Despite everything that could possibly have gone wrong, at least he didn’t fail. He made sure of that.
What a shock he receives. The master erupts, “Why didn’t you at least put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest?”
Why is the master so disappointed? It’s not because the servant was a management failure. In fact, failure would have been fine. Failure would have implied that some action had been taken.
Instead, the third servant is rebuked for attempting nothing. Because he was afraid of taking a risk, he played it safe. He even rationalized that he had done the master a favor by not losing what he had been given – thereby failing to grasp that the essence of life is to risk the resources, opportunities, gifts, and challenges that God continues to place before us.
You’d think that God would most value those who play it safe and don’t take chances, who never get carried away by stepping out. But it isn’t so.
There is a Day coming, Jesus announces, when each of us is going to have a conversation with him as to what we did with our lives. The Apostles’ Creed puts it like this: “From there [from heaven] he will come to judge the living and the dead.”
In the traditional English rendering, which many of us still recite on Sunday mornings, Jesus is coming to judge “the quick and the dead.” That’s also thought to be the answer to the question, “What are the two groups who attempt to jaywalk across a busy highway?”
The word “quick” is an antiquated synonym for “alive.” Jesus will judge both those who are still alive at his Second Coming and those who have already died.
The very notion of God’s judgment is exceedingly unpopular. It goes against the grain of contemporary American culture, which asserts that each of us is the author of his or her own identity. We shape our own legacies. We are accountable to no one.
Scripture counters with the declaration that there is a God, and it is not you. We are fully accountable to the One who creates us, sustains us, and redeems us – none of which we can accomplish in our own wisdom and strength.
What will be front and center in our judgment conversation with Christ?
At root, it’s whether we have stepped across the line of faith as expressed in verses like John 6:29: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him who he has sent.” That takes us all the way back to the opening words of the Creed: “I believe.”
When Jesus steps into the role of “master,” as described in the parable, he won’t be wowed by our resumes. Judgment is not just about the big decisions.
What did we do with the myriad little decisions that comprised every day of our lives – the ones that even now are shaping our character?
Fear whispers that God isn’t big enough to handle what we have to face today. He isn’t going to show up. We’re not really safe in God’s hands.
But – steadied by a decision to abandon ourselves to Jesus as our ultimate security – we can choose to be brave.
And where does that leave us? Don’t bury your talents. Don’t run from difficult moments. Otherwise, you will never find out whether God’s presence and power are all you really need.
When you think about it, that’s the one thing in life truly worth finding out.
And, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” are the only words ultimately worth hearing.