THE FIRST POSTMODERNIST?

Remember the parable of the three servants and the talents? This morning, I awoke reflecting on the details of the third servant. That third dude is the world's first postmodern Christian, in that he brings up the first insight that all of us have faced who have gone through the postmodern angst.

After Mr. Five Talents and Mr. Two Talents have worked hard and received their rewards, this guy comes to his master with a complaint as his excuse. He says something like:

"I was afraid, because You are a harsh Man. You harvest where You didn't plant. You gather crops You didn't cultivate. If I may, let me say that You aren't fair.

"So instead of working as Your steward, I buried Your stuff and lived my own life for the last year. Because I can't trust You, here's what's Yours, no more and no less."

He nailed it on the head, I think. My postmodern friend might have gone on to say: "Someone who doesn't smoke a day of her life gets lung cancer. Good people die young. Evil prospers. I pray for healing, and it's a crap shoot as to whether or not it will work. I share the Gospel until I'm blue in the face, but never get a result, and somebody else comes to a program and responds immediately. And by the way, can't You stop terrorism? or tornadoes? or Democrats, for crying out loud?! There simply is no justice, or at least not enough. If You are so good, how come there is so much evil? Either You don't care, or You can't do anything about it. And so I conclude You to be harsh. I can't devote myself to work for You when I can't predict whether or not it will do me any good. That's all I got, but I don't think it's my fault."

What especially then blows me away is the master's response. He never contradicts the servant! In effect, He answers, "So you knew that I take other people's stuff, that I am not fair, and that I allow a certain randomness to the world that makes you afraid so that you can't trust Me? I won't deny it. But if your tiny little postmodern faith won't allow you to work with your whole heart, at least you could have put the money in the bank and let other people do the work.

"You know what that makes you? Wicked. And lazy. Stop hiding behind the timid and doubting mask, and let me call it straight. You use your doubt of My character as an excuse for living a selfish life. You despised My generous gift to you (or do you forget that a talent of silver is worth many thousands of dollars? Did you think I owed you that gift?), and you pursued your own little goals."

"So now, take that valuable gift from this wicked, lazy man whom I trusted, and give it to the one who was faithful. Because faith is what gets rewarded. And faith is in things you can't see and prove. The first servant chose to see Me as someone worth serving, and he has found that he gets to keep everything that he thought he was earning for Me! Now we see who is generous, and who is harsh!"

A modernist believes God is good by ignoring the obvious evidence that the world sucks (pardon my strong word here). A postmodernist sees clearly that the world sucks. But the faithful postmodernist chooses to plunge into the abyss of doubt and act as if God is good, anyway.

As someone has said, maybe it's faith when you just don't know for sure.