“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
-Jesus
PARADIGM SHIFT
Easter Reflections: Jesus Teaches on Risk and Return
As we celebrate this Easter weekend, we remember a truly remarkable person from a remote village in Israel whose words have been repeated, studied and revered for more than two thousand years.
While Jesus wasn’t a man of business, money or other material pursuits, he possessed a deep revelation of the power of seedtime and harvest. Growing up in the small town of Nazareth, he made his early living through carpentry and (as some scholars have suggested) possible masonry.
From his largely agricultural setting, he illustrated his later teachings around two main word pictures: sowing and reaping, and home and building construction.
His grasp on sowing and reaping led him to teach a very powerful short story about investing.
The story, found in Matthew 25, recounts a rich man who goes on a long journey, leaving his money to three of his trusted servants for stewardship. Two of these servants use the money for productive purposes, earning him double what he gave them. But the one to whom he gave the least was afraid, afraid to fail, afraid to do something his master didn’t approve of, and decided to simply bury the money so that he could return it to the master upon his return.
The problem was that the master was not concerned about risking money. He wanted them to take risks in a positive direction. So when he returned, he praised and gave more to those who had risked to earn him a reward.
But the one that did nothing made excuses: “I was afraid,” he said. And the rich man called him “wicked” and “slothful.”
At least, he said, you could have invested the money with the bankers to gain interest! You couldn’t even do that! And so he took from the one who had nothing to show for the gift he was entrusted with, and he gave to the servants that had been productive and taken risks.
Do we often think of fear and slothfulness as being wicked traits? Jesus certainly seemed to see it that way.
If nothing else, fear and slothfulness (or might we say, even procrastination) not only costs us dearly in terms of what “might have been,” but it also robs the world around us of our own talents and positive influence that can exponentially echo without limit geographically and throughout time.