Ennathinks

We are living between the departure and the return of Jesus Christ. How should the church live faithfully in this interval? To help us answer that, Jesus tells four parables in His Olivet Discourse (Mt. 24–25). We have already seen two of them. Now let us sit with the third — the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14–30).

The Setup: Enormous Trust

The master entrusts enormous wealth to his servants according to their ability. One talent alone was massive—years of wages, not pocket change. Two of the servants, upon receiving it, act at once. They take risk, engage, multiply, and return a 100% profit to the master.

Notice what the master celebrates: not their ability, but their faithfulness.

The third servant, however, takes a very different posture. He accuses the master of being a kind of thief — someone who reaps what he has not sown. He says he was fearful, and so he simply hid the talent and returned it intact. The master is agitated. He asks why the servant couldn’t have at least put it in a fixed deposit and earned basic interest. The talent is stripped from him and given to the first servant. The master calls him lazy — and throws him into the outer darkness.

The Church Is Not a Spectator

The church has been entrusted with the Kingdom work. We are commissioned people — participants in God’s mission, not spectators or consumers sitting in the stands. God has entrusted us with enormous responsibility and enormous resources to fulfill it. The question worth sitting with is this: Are we even aware of the commission and the resources God has placed in our hands?

Passivity Is Not Neutral

The third servant was not staging a rebellion. He did not run off with the talent. He simply did nothing — and that, in the master’s eyes, was just as serious. He was fearful, lazy, and disengaged from the master’s business. Passivity looked safe to him. But it was not.

Church, are we fearful of the political climate swirling around us? Are we self-occupied and quietly opted out of God’s mission? We may tell ourselves this is a “passive phase” — a season of waiting. But in God’s sight, passivity is also a form of rebellion. It is disobedience dressed in inaction. Watch out.

Your View of God Shapes Your Faithfulness

The first two servants never saw the master as a harsh taskmaster. But the third saw him as greedy, as a thief — and that distorted vision produced fear, and fear produced failure.

How do we see God? As a Father who has commissioned us — who trusts us, who is for us? Or as some kind of heavenly ATM that exists to bless us on demand?

Our theology of God is not abstract. It shapes everything. True knowledge of Christ should move us to obey Him. A servant who mistrusts the master will bury what he was given every single time.

Faithfulness Is Measured Over Time

In this parable too, the master’s return is delayed. And Eugene Peterson’s phrase has never been more apt: “Faithfulness is a long obedience in the same direction.”

The delay is not an accident. It is part of the plan. But in that delay, the question the parable puts to the church is not, “Are you momentarily excited about the mission?” It is, “Are you still at it — faithfully — for the long haul?”

The Accounting Is Real

This parable does not end with a symbol or a moral lesson left floating in the air. It ends with a reckoning. On the day of Christ’s return, every life will be assessed. Our God walks among the churches — and every church will be evaluated.

And the reward is equally real: it is not a gold star. It is participation in Christ’s joy and His rule. “Enter into the joy of your master.”

What Are We Doing With What We Have?

Jesus named two things that choke the growing wheat and make it unfruitful: worry and the delight of becoming rich. Note that carefully — it is not riches themselves, but the delight of being rich. The love of it. The pull of it.

Peter once said boldly, “Silver and gold I do not have.” Those words ring hollow in many churches today. If we genuinely believe these resources are God-given, are we actually deploying them for God’s purposes?

You cannot serve God and Mammon. But you can serve God with mammon. The moment money becomes the master, it stops being a resource and starts being a rival god — one that determines destiny, and that destiny becomes decay.

Two houses, Two answers

History gives us a striking contrast that makes this parable uncomfortably concrete. Consider two remarkable women from roughly the same era who both received enormous resources. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, popularly believed to have been driven by fear and guilt that she poured her vast wealth into building a house that went nowhere — stairways that lead to ceilings, doors that open to walls, construction that never stopped for 38 years, all in a desperate attempt to appease the spirits of those killed by her family’s rifles. The wealth was real. The resources were enormous. But fear buried it into a monument of anxiety and waste.

Then there was Pandita Ramabai — a Brahmin widow, a woman with no inherited fortune, who took what God had entrusted to her and built the Mukti Mission in Kedgaon, Pune. She housed widows, rescued children from famine, educated the marginalized, and sparked a revival that shook a nation. Same period. Vastly different answers to the same question. Sarah Winchester’s house still stands as a tourist curiosity — a testament to what fear does with resources. Mukti Mission still stands as a living community — a testament to what faithfulness does.

The master is coming. The question is not whether we received—but whether we responded.