Today’s reading: Joshua 6; Luke 19
Jesus’ parable of the minas in Luke 19 is a mixture of exciting and sobering.
Luke tells us that Jesus tells this parable specifically to set peoples’ expectations about the coming kingdom of Heaven. So on the one hand, this parable is exciting because the man’s servants are rewarded for what they did with his resources while he was away. But on the other hand it is sobering because not all the servants got the same reward, but their reward is based on how effectively they use what they were given.
I feel like the common conception of Heaven these days is a relatively static “good” experience, but that’s not what we get from Jesus’ words. According to Jesus’ parable, some will have greater reward in Heaven and others will have lesser (or no) reward. And while we don’t get it solely from this parable, we can know that this reward is not based on output but on faithfulness. I say that because while the servants in this parable are all given varying rewards in relation to how much they accomplished, they also all start with the same resources, while in the parallel parable Jesus tells of the talents, each of the servants is given a different amount of resources to start (10, 5, and 1 talent respectively) and the servants with 10 and 5 each double what they started with and are given the same reward as one another.
The fact of the matter is that while everyone in Heaven will be thrilled to be there, and nobody is going to be unrighteously jealous of anybody else’s rewards, our experience of Heaven will not be a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, and what we do or don’t get is based on how faithful we are in this life with the resources God gives us. The resources we are given may all be different in terms of ability, opportunity, money, time, etc., but the reward we receive will be based on how faithfully we used those resources in service to the Lord.
This is why this parable is also sobering. It is so easy to get caught up in this life because it is what we see, feel, and experience day in and day out, but the reality is that we have an eternity waiting for us on the other side of this life. So minute-by-minute and day-by-day I have to decide if I am going to invest my resources into this relatively short-term but very present life, or am I going to invest them into my eternal future in Heaven? And the extent to which I am willing, on faith, to use my resources faithfully for the Lord determines the extent to which I will be rewarded in eternity.
I suspect there are a lot of Christians who will find themselves, on the last day, in the position of the man who laid up the mina in a handkerchief; people who are not among those who hate the master and are destroyed, but who enter eternity with no reward because they squandered everything God gave them living for this life as though there was no eternity waiting for them. And while they will be glad to be in heaven, I suspect we will all look back on our lives with at least some regret that we didn’t eek out just a little bit more while we had the chance to reap rewards that would last for eternity…
I personally want as much as I can get on the other side.
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