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So it does no good at all to scold and scare the goats, to command them to get out there and do more sheep things, to drive the goats through some sort of elaborately tortured scheme of sheep discipleship! Bah! Nor does it do any good…as is so often done these days…to say that it doesn’t matter…that goat and sheep…well, to each his own, different strokes for different folks. But hey, Jesus loves everyone, so if you’re a goat be faithful to the goat and if you’re a sheep be faithful to the sheep…after all, there are many ways to God. Bah, and double Bah!
It is the crucible of life that quickly reveals the folly of both of those tactics. When push comes to shove, when God bears down mightily with His hand, “sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat”…well…life soon enough reveals that we are who we are. We have met the goat, and he is us.
And yet…yet, we have seen the end of this sheep-goat conflict. It doesn’t come by forcing the goats to be more sheep-like. They can’t! Nor by telling the goats that it doesn’t matter whether one is sheep or goat. It does matter to God! The sheep are told, “Come you blessed.” And the goats, “Depart you cursed.” So the only way for a goat to enter the kingdom prepared for the sheep is for the goat to die and be reborn a sheep!

It was Mark Twain who once admitted, “Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture that they do not understand. But the passages that bother me are those I do understand!”
The Parable of the Talents is not hard to understand. What is hard is massaging the parable enough to make it say something other than what it says, so it won’t bother us. Ah, but then that seems to be the theological task these days…making God’s Word say something other than what it says…making sin not sin…so it won’t bother us anymore.

You can get busy and sing “Lord, Lord” while swaying to the strains of “Kumbaya”…but that doesn’t get you into the marriage feast. You can run around piling up good works faster than celebrities change spouses…but that doesn’t get you into the feast either.
It’s the Bridegroom who gets you in. The crucial Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. Crucial. Which means…there is a cross to bear, there is time that must pass before the Easter feast…before the Bridegroom’s big day. And foolish are the bridesmaids…foolish are we…who underestimate the weight of that cross…who misjudge the length of the waiting.

So…to change the metaphor…Jesus Christ is like a skydiving instructor who hands us the parachute, tells us to hang on to it, and then tosses us out the door of the plane! “If you hold to My teaching…you will be free.” Sure, we can, in freedom, toss aside that chute. No one needs a parachute to go skydiving, if…you don’t plan to do it a second time. But for those who hold tight to that chute, oh, they speak of a freedom unlike any other. “Lord, keep us…captive…in Your Word.”