Then the one who had received the one talent came forward and said
“Master, I knew you were a demanding person;

harvesting where you did not plant
and gathering where you did not scatter;
so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground.
Here it is back.”
”His master said to him in reply, “You wicked, lazy servant!
Should you not then have put my money in the bank
so that I could have got it back with interest on my return?
Now then! Take the talent from him 
and give it to the one with ten. 

For to everyone who has,

more will be given and he will grow rich;
but from the one who has not,
even what he has will be taken away.
And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside,

where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
                                                                  
                                                                         Matthew 25:24–30

The parables of Christ, being works of divine genius, are always deceptively simple while in fact they are complex.  The lines above, quoted from the Parable of the Talents, presuppose two principles important to the life of the soul.   The first is that we live in a moral  world that is always in motion; our souls are always either growing in grace, closer day by day to Jesus, or they are diminishing in spiritual strength, falling  away, however subtly, from their divine destiny.  To him that hath, more will be added.  From those who lack, what little they have will be taken away (Matthew 13:2).   This is a rule of the life of the soul that every Christian will verify.  Christianity is a religion, a way that binds and forms, and as a religion it must be practiced day by day.  When Satan, ever active, manages to introduce the tiniest bit of spiritual lethargy, when our prayers seem dry and pointless, when he cajoles us into giving them up for just one day,  he inaugurates a process that if not with the help of grace arrested will lead to destruction.  On the other hand, when our hearts are full of the charity that binds us to Christ, prayer and good works seem easy and fulfilling and we long to be drawn closer to Jesus.   

The spiritual world we inhabit is always in motion; we are moving closer to the Presence and the Vision or away from that divinely appointed destiny.    There is no pleasant plateau: failure to grow, if not amended, means death to the soul.  This is illustrated by the story of the third servant.  The first two servants had taken custody of the master’s money and put it at interest, making increase for the Master.   The unfortunate who had received but one talent and who being fearful had hidden it, was called by his Lord, “You wicked, lazy servant,” and was bound and cast into prison. And when he tried to return the one talent  to his master, it was refused, with the command that it be given to the more provident first servant.   

The second great premise of the Parable of the Talents is the truth that the successful life is an adventure in all its aspects, spiritually fundamentally, but also in the other aspects of life on earth.  Spiritually, as a Christian one places his life in the hands of a Lord whose perfect divine sonship is often not affirmed, not only by secularists, but sometimes even within the Church; the believer hopes for the return of Jesus from the sky, like the lightning flashing from East to West (Matthew 24:27, Luke 17:24), to bring this age of grace to a perfection and a close even when great scholars such as Schweitzer proclaim this a false hope; you give your time, time that always seems in short supply, to liturgy, the worship and work of Christian people, prayer and good works.   On any grounds other than grace-given faith this is to adventure into an illusion.  

And this gift of self to the truth the world calls illusion has an analogy in the management of the goods of this world.  It was with good reason that Jesus chose the management of money as the activity illustrative of the adventure of faith.  In this adventure the third servant, the one given only one talent, failed miserably.  He should have invested his money at interest so that on the Master’s return the Master should have found an increase.  But the third servant buried the money he had been given in the ground because he was afraid, knowing that his Lord was a  hard master.  His fate was to lose even the one talent he had been given and to be cast into outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.   The good life, the Christian life, is an adventure, and to prescind from the adventure in favor of security either in things spiritual or things material and economic is to court ruin.  

In this regard the spiritual and the worldly are so closely interlinked that one will not flourish without the other.  The third servant having chosen security rather than the adventure of life is open to the political fact called socialism, the system in which the adventure of life, as well as its pains, are subsumed into a blanket of community security.  There is no mystery in the fact that, granting the necessity that the political community help those who cannot help themselves, where universal material security prevails, Christianity dies, for one cannot have the habit of choosing the security that guaranteed comfort encourages over the adventure of life without cutting the root of the spiritual life, itself rooted in wonder and faith,.   Where your treasure is, there your heart will be; where your security is, there your heart will be (Matthew 6:21).   

Finally the character of the good Lord as displayed in this parable should be noted.  He is a hard man, reaping where he did not sow and gathering where he did not plant.  His justice is not the reciprocal justice between individuals, not what moral philosophers call commutative justice, not a reciprocal exchange of goods, but  justice that is as high, as holy, and as hidden as His mercy is unfathomably, to us unreasonably, great yet never disparaging of His just character.  This is a side of the divine nature as it is revealed to us that is now not often canvassed.   It illustrates the truth that life is a gift too great to be wasted without consequence, a morally dangerous game in which no provision is made for sitting it out on the sidelines.  Having given us one good life, the Lord wants it back not merely as it was received but with interest, the flaws with which it was necessarily born amended, its weaknesses turned into strengths, its moral ignorance turned into spiritual knowledge, our love of self transformed into love for Him and for those others He also loves with a deep and indefeasible love, our fellow pilgrims.   

Painting by Alexander Clemens

His Spirit Dwelling In You

Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh;
on the contrary, you are in the spirit,
if only the Spirit of God dwells in you.
Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
But if Christ is in you,
although the body is dead because of sin,
the spirit is alive because of righteousness.
If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also,
through His Spirit dwelling in you.
Romans 8:8–11

This text on first reading is about the persistent warfare between the desires that seem to dwell in our flesh and the higher and better life in the Spirit that the Gospel promises.   And it is that, but this text also enshrines Paul’s Gospel of the resurrection. The body/soul disjunction, the split between spirit and soul and mind, variously conceived as eternal and undying, on one hand, and on the other the corruptible body, flesh and matter is among the oldest practical commonplaces in the history of mankind.   It lay at the center of Orphism and was assumed with varying interpretations and images by the majority of philosophers, excepting a few like Lucretius, who solved the problem by assuring his followers that death ended consciousness, thereby obviating the problem or promise or opportunity, or perhaps threat, posited by the seeming transcendence or eternity of the soul.    

In a general way, the theology of the early Church did not argue the natural eternality of the soul as separable from the body.  Judaism assumed the persistence of personal identity when, “taking into account the resurrection.” Judas Maccabeus ordered prayers for the idolaters who had fallen in battle and sent two thousand drachmas to the temple in Jerusalem “to provide for a sin offering” (II Maccabees 12:39-45).   Judas commended prayers for the dead in language that did not suggest that they were disembodied spirits. Jesus teaches that the redeemed will sit down with the saints at the messianic banquet and the prophet John looks forward to the day when Jesus will wipe every tear from the eyes of those who have suffered for the sake of Christ; He also teaches that because of sin the whole person, body and soul, might be cast into hell.  

When the assumptions of Judaism ran head on into the dualism of Hellenism, the question of the bodiliness of the Savior and of the resurrection of the bodies of the saints became pressing.  There was an entire anti-church dedicated to the proposition that although Christ had indeed come, He had not come in the flesh. Thus the Gospel writers were quick to include those memories that demonstrated the fact of the resurrection of Jesus in His fleshly body of glory, and it was these, the encounters of the apostles with the risen Lord, confirmed by the Pentecostal gift, that set the apostolic mission on the road.    It was Paul, who carried the Gospel into the intellectual terrain of Hellenism, into Athens, Ephesus and Rome, who encountered the anti-resurrection dualism of those to whom he had been sent. And it was that encounter that caused Paul to develop his theology of the resurrection of the body, a fact that Jesus had demonstrated but regarding which He had left only clues, principally the teaching that in the resurrection the righteous will share in the glory of the angels, which, it might be added, does not mean that Christians will become angels, but rather that we will share in the glory of life in the presence of the Father.  

Paul was given the task of explaining this to the Greek world.

This he did first of all  by rejecting decisively the doctrine of the bodyless, ‘spiritual’ resurrection  proposed by some at Corinth (I Corinthians 15:12–28, I Timothy 1:20, II Timothy 2:17). He was not the only apostle who spoke to the dualism that during their lifetimes was  developing into another religion. John was careful to remind the readers of his Gospel that the crucified Christ was human, one from whose side water and blood flowed (John 19:34) , one who appeared “in the flesh” to Thomas (John 20:28).  

  But the principal advantage Paul enjoyed in the argument with the “spirituals’ or gnostics was the fact that he had a reason for the undeniable tendency of the flesh toward corruption and death and at the same time  a rationale for the resurrection of the body of flesh. Our bodies must die because of sin; we will be resurrected because of righteousness, that righteousness not our own but the work of the Spirit of God in us. Thus was God’s warning made effective. “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you will die.”  The body bore the punishment of the rebellious will, so that through the long ages from Eden to Paul, there was good reason to assume the death of the body.   

           As for the soul, it was assumed throughout the Mediterranean world in a variety of proposals and images, unsystematic but held almost universally, that the soul did not die.   There was an underworld, sheol to the Jews, the underworld over which Hades and Persephone presided for the Greeks. There were embellishments. For great civic saviors there was life among the living stars, described by Cicero in the last chapter of his Republic, an image shared by Daniel (12:3).  For brave soldiers there were Elysian fields or Isles of the Blessed envisioned by Homer and Hesiod.   Egyptians might enter a perpetual cycle of re-birth. Taken together these doctrines tended to offer hope that the best things in life, beginning with life itself, might continue, overlaid upon the insight that there must somehow be cosmic justice, that the good would be rewarded and the wicked punished.   And there were philosophic footnotes. The Stoics taught that individual souls might be taken up into a world-soul. Plato hinted that good men might survive death because goodness must survive; Aristotle that the soul did not die.  

              Paul saw clearly that the resurrection of Jesus did not mean merely the survival of the soul but the resurrection of those in Christ with Him to life in glory.  And it was Peter who saw that Jesus gathered up and redeemed the past by calling the righteous from the place of departed spirts into the light of the resurrection (I Peter 3:8–19).    Thus the affirmation of the Creed that in the Spirit, before His resurrection on the third day, Christ went to those who had been disobedient and preached to them the eternal Gospel that they might be saved.  To the typical philosophic Roman death was a part of life to be borne as best one could, a shadow cast across all of existence.   

In Paul’s account there is a reason for this shadow.   The reason for death is not the natural corruptibility of the body or the flesh, the cause  of death is sin and the ultimate work of God is the undoing of the curse of Eden. Saint Athanasius in his timeless treatise  On the Incarnation deals with the difficulties God seems (as we humans might say) to face in redeeming fallen mankind.    His punishment laid upon the family of man was just, God could not simply forgive, for this would violate His eternal character and nothing would be accomplished, man would still be in rebellion.  Therefore it was necessary that one who owed no debt should pay our debt. The Savior came to teach, but more , that having proved His godhead by His works, “He might offer the sacrifice on behalf of all, His own temple to death in place of all, to settle man’s account with death and  free mankind from the primal transgression” And not only to free us but to recreate in us the image of man as God intended us to become by the gift of the Spirit, which, working in us and with us is the first fruits of a glorious redemption leading us toward eternal life.          

We die not because the flesh is evil, but because of sin.  We live and will live because the Spirit that raised Christ dwells in us, ever working the righteousness that means life.  That same Spirit will raise us to life with Him forever. “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like Him and we shall see Him as he is” (I John  3:2). And for the present, “We ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).  

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