On Good Friday, I gave a devotional at my creative worship night. The theme for April is on cultivating the mind of Christ. When I was preparing what to say, this question hit me: what does it mean to cultivate the imagination of Christ? Imagination isn’t really something we talk about in church. Other than relating it to childlike innocence, I think we church people are afraid of associating it with faith because we’re afraid of going off the deep end and becoming heretics. While that does happen to some people, having the imagination of Christ, where the Holy Spirit is the source, is the ability to cast a vision for what the kingdom of God is really like.
And that’s why Jesus used parables to illustrate his points. Every parable began with, “The kingdom of God is like…” Something I saw in Israel is how every parable related to ordinary, everyday life in that time period. If Jesus did his ministry in the 21st century, in the United States, parables would’ve been about driving your kids to school, doing your taxes, and Memorial Day weekend barbecues. That is how ordinary these stories were. Jesus showed people how the Kingdom of God isn’t a lofty, heavenly concept outside of our reach; it’s right in front of us.
In my personal study, the parable that’s been resonating with me lately is the one about the talents. To summarize, a man who who was going on a trip left each of his 3 servants a number of talents (1 talent is the current equivalent of over 2 million dollars). Two of them went out, invested the talents, and got significant returns. The third one, with 2 million dollars, hid the money in the ground and didn’t get any returns. When he had to answer to his master, he said, “I knew you to be a hard man…” (See Matthew 25:14-30).
What struck me in a new way was this: the third servant’s imagination about who the master was (a “hard man”) made him afraid of spending and losing what the master gave him. So all he did was stick it in the ground. Maybe he got a second job and lived extremely frugally while thinking of the 2 million dollars as an “emergency fund.” (I read [here] about how, in that time period, it took about 6,000 work days for the average person to make 1 talent.)
The other two likely had confidence in their master. (A boss who gives you no less than 6,000 days’ worth of pay to invest is excessively generous.) That drove them to discover possible ways to earn returns on what he gave them. So they took some risks, started (or invested in) businesses, found some mentors, formed partnerships, hired the right people, marketed their products strategically, etc. There were probably times when it looked like they were about to lose everything (because risk is the life of business). But they persevered and were richly rewarded.
While we all have different bank balances, there are so many other resources we have at our disposal: 24 hours in a day, our health, energy, natural abilities, desires, motivations, relationships, location, and even free tools (like social media). All of us are given a creative capacity to use these resources to reveal the kingdom of God on earth. That parable doesn’t just apply to business. It’s basically about how our view of who God is affects how we live our lives–passively or proactively. If we choose to see Him as excessively generous, we can set out to translate the Bible in Nepal, start a family in Lancaster, or be an actor in Hollywood, all while trusting that God will or already has equipped us with all we need to live a life that reveals His kingdom on earth.
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