Faithful Stewardship and the Risk of Love: A Reflection on 2 Thessalonians 3:6-18 and Luke 19:12-28
Paul’s command sounds harsh to modern ears: If any one will not work, let him not eat. You hear this and imagine condemnation of the poor, justification for withholding compassion, a cruel meritocracy where only the productive deserve to live. But Paul is writing to a specific community with a specific problem—some believers, convinced that Christ’s return was imminent, had stopped working altogether and become “busybodies,” living off others’ labor while contributing nothing. This isn’t a blanket condemnation of those unable to work; it’s a confrontation of those who refuse to participate in the work of being human.
The parable in Luke intensifies this theme. A nobleman entrusts his servants with money—one mina each—and commands: Trade with these till I come. Two servants trade, risk, invest, and double what they were given. But one servant, terrified of his master, buries the mina and returns only the original. The master’s response is devastating: I will condemn you out of your own mouth, you wicked servant. Not because the servant lost money—he didn’t—but because he refused to participate, refused to risk, refused to do anything with what he’d been given.
What Fear Reveals
Here’s the inner work this passage demands: What are you avoiding by staying busy with nothing? What gifts have you buried because you’re afraid of what using them might cost? The “disorderly” believers in Thessalonica weren’t lazy in the sense of lying around doing nothing—they were busybodies, meddling in others’ affairs, generating activity without productivity. This is avoidance disguised as engagement. When you’re terrified of your actual calling, it’s easier to stay frantically busy with everyone else’s business than to face the work that’s yours to do.
The servant who buried his mina reveals the psychology: I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man. His fear wasn’t reverence; it was terror that distorted his perception of the master. He saw someone who takes up what you did not lay down, and reaps what you did not sow—a harsh taskmaster who extracts value without investing relationship. This is projection: the servant’s own refusal to invest gets projected onto the master as if the master were the extractive one. When you’re gripped by fear, you rewrite reality to justify your paralysis. You tell yourself the risk isn’t worth it, that trying and failing would be worse than never trying, that the one who gave you gifts is actually a tyrant who will punish you for using them.
But notice what the master actually says: Why then did you not put my money into the bank, and at my coming I should have collected it with interest? Even minimal engagement would have been acceptable. The sin isn’t failing to achieve spectacular results—it’s refusing to participate at all. The issue is whether you’re willing to risk what you’ve been given in service of something beyond self-preservation.
The Pattern for Transformation
Paul’s own example illuminates this. We were not idle when we were with you, we did not eat any one’s bread without paying, but with toil and labor we worked night and day. Paul had every right to be supported by the communities he served—he says as much—but he worked anyway, making tents, earning his keep, modeling what faithful participation looks like. Not to prove his worth (his worth was already infinite as God’s image-bearer), but because work is how you participate in God’s ongoing creativity, how you offer creation back to its source transformed by your labor.
This is cosmic reality: when you work—genuinely work, not just perform busyness—you’re joining what the universe is already doing. All creation is engaged in continuous becoming, matter unfolding its potential, life diversifying and complexifying, beauty manifesting through endless variations. Human work is the place where creation becomes conscious of itself, where matter gains the capacity to offer itself back to God deliberately. When you tend a garden, craft furniture, write code, teach a child, prepare a meal—you’re acting as priest of creation, mediating between what is and what could be, participating in the divine work of bringing order from chaos, beauty from raw material.
But this requires risk. The servants who doubled their minas didn’t play it safe—they traded, which means they could have lost everything. Investment is inherently vulnerable. You put something valuable into the world not knowing if it will bear fruit, trusting that the attempt itself matters even if outcomes aren’t guaranteed. The servant who buried his mina refused this vulnerability. He chose the certainty of no loss over the possibility of gain, and in doing so, he lost everything anyway.
Participation, Not Performance
Paul’s instruction to do your work in quietness and earn your own living isn’t about self-sufficiency as an ultimate value—it’s about dignity. When you refuse to work, you reduce yourself to a dependent, a child who must be fed by others. There’s no shame in genuine need; children, the elderly, the sick—these deserve care without question. But when you’re capable of contributing and refuse, you’re rejecting your calling as a human being made in God’s image. You were created to be a co-creator, a royal priest offering the world back to God more beautiful than you found it. Refusing to work is refusing your humanity.
The harsh ending of the parable—bring them here and slay them before me—disturbs us, and rightly so. But this is Christ speaking in character as the nobleman in the story, and the violence reveals something crucial: refusal to participate in the kingdom is self-destructive. The citizens who rejected the nobleman’s reign aren’t innocent bystanders; they’re actively opposing the one who would bring flourishing. This isn’t about God being vengeful; it’s about the reality that those who refuse divine love ultimately destroy themselves. You cannot thrive while rejecting the source of your being.
This reveals divine nature: God invites, offers, makes possible—but respects your freedom absolutely, even when that freedom leads to self-destruction. Divine power works through invitation to participate, not coercion to perform.
The Ancient Calling Restored
The ancient pattern here connects to the royal priesthood humans were given from the beginning. Adam was placed in the garden to till it and keep it—not as punishment but as calling. Work predates the fall. The curse wasn’t work itself but the frustration of work, the thorns and thistles, the sweat and toil required to coax food from resistant soil. But the call to cultivate, to bring order, to make things grow—that’s original to human nature. You’re made to work because God works, and you’re made in His image.
The First Temple preserved this pattern: priests didn’t just perform rituals; they maintained the sacred space, prepared offerings, tended the eternal flame. Their work was prayer, their labor was worship. There was no separation between making and meaning. When Solomon’s craftsmen carved pomegranates and lilies into the Temple walls, when they hammered gold into cherubim wings, when they wove blue and purple threads into the veil—this was divine service. Beauty made by human hands offered back to the God who creates all beauty.
Christ restores this unified vision. When He works as a carpenter, shaping wood into useful forms, He’s doing the same work He’ll do in resurrection—taking what exists and transfiguring it into what it was meant to be. The Incarnation vindicates matter, validates labor, reveals that every honest work participates in cosmic redemption. Your daily tasks aren’t distractions from spiritual life; they’re the arena where you’re becoming who God created you to be.
Paul’s confidence is striking: We have confidence in the Lord about you, that you are doing and will do the things which we command. This isn’t naive optimism; it’s recognition that when your heart is directed toward God, when you’ve done the inner work of facing your fears and integrating what you’ve denied, obedience becomes natural. You no longer need to be coerced because you’re aligned with your own deepest truth.
May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ. This is the prayer that holds everything together—that your heart, the center of your being where you actually make choices, would be directed into divine love. Not your willpower. Not your determination. Your heart. When your heart is directed toward God, work becomes worship. Risk becomes faith. Ordinary labor becomes participation in eternal creativity. And the mina you’ve been given—whatever gifts, capacities, opportunities are yours—stops being a burden to bury and becomes an invitation to join the most important work there is: offering creation back to its Creator, transformed by love.
The Greater Horizon 