The parable of the talent is a mind-bending distortion of Jesus’s previous teachings. The negative proof of a positive vision.
the curious parable of the talents
Proper 28A | Matthew 25:14-30
Today’s story is often referred to as the Parable of the Talents. Which sounds a bit like a tryout for the circus. Or perhaps like a new reality show Nazareth’s Got Talent.
The word talent is a real distraction here. Jesus is talking about money and we’re thinking about people balancing ten spinning plates on their bodies.
But in the church, this distinction is even more engrained. Because we know he’s talking about money but we also “know” that he’s really talking about giftedness, right? {wink, wink}
It’s as if Jesus has given us rakes and asked us to rake the yard and we’re all like yes “rake the yard” and then proceed to jump into the leaf piles because we totally know that’s what he really meant.
We want this to be a parable about the 21st century vision of talent so badly that we’re willing to shut our minds to everything else. Fingers firmly fixed in our ears. This is about not hiding our talents under a bushel basket, right?
Talents are units of money.
And even if Jesus were talking about giftedness, we’d still be using the term incorrectly. Because we think of talents as something separate from ourselves. As something that makes some people special and others mediocre. Talents are a means of evaluating and ranking; and a means of hiding from responsibility and refusing to do what God is calling us to do. Because, we argue, we don’t have the talent.
Which is totally false. A fake picture of ourselves and of what we are good at.
So either way, we’ve got the wrong idea of talent.
Let’s fix that.
Think of these talents as huge sums of money. These aren’t skills or aptitudes. Consider each talent as averaging about a year’s salary.
So when one slave risks five years worth of income, you know we’re talking about a potential level of debt that is unsurmountable. The second one, two years. The third one, one year.
And the point isn’t actually how high these numbers are in the abstract. It’s all to be related to the slaves’ poverty. So this isn’t getting loans based on good credit. For the slaves, this is a big gamble. What is being asked of them is literally life and death.
Speaking of which…
They expect their master to punish them.
He isn’t a good, faithful man. This isn’t a story of virtuous generosity. The slaves know that he is cruel. He reaps where he does not sow, which is a way of saying that he steals what doesn’t belong to him.
They know he is cruel.
So what do the slaves do?
Two of the slaves do what they think the master wants them to do.
And what exactly does the master do? [He reaps where he does not sow.]
In other words, they steal.
What does this actually imply? Well, they’re not robbing a bank.
The one takes the five talents the master left with him and made a profit of five talents. That’s a 200% return on investment. He doubled it. So he didn’t put in the bank and sit on 3% interest. There’s no Wall Street or internet, so he’s not firing up his computer and betting that a tech start up is going to hit it big.
In a pre-market-based economy, this slave was handed five people’s jobs and came back with five more. In other words, nine people are now out of work. And the master rewards him by letting him keep it all.
It’s important that we fully grasp the idea of the day’s wage and the year’s income. We are not only quantifying a sum of money abstractly. Or thinking of the individual’s experience with the economy. We are talking about people’s whole livelihoods being taken from them.
And there is no social safety net.
This is like The Wolf of Wall Street. This is theft.
And further, remember:
It is against Torah to charge interest.
So even if we try to defend these slaves as simply investing wisely, we have to deal with the fact that what they’ve done goes against Jewish Law.
Of course, in history, this all gets complicated. The idea of banking and charging interest becomes quite normal despite being forbidden.
But let’s not hang our hats on the history. Jesus is a Jewish rabbi telling a dark parable about exploitation. Otherwise, he’s a teacher encouraging them to break the Law for…what purpose exactly? You really have to stretch to make this one sound good.
So let’s dive into that last part.
The third slave stands up to his evil master.
As we go through this story, I hope you hear just how unsettling everything is. It feels wrong. This master is terrifying, the slaves stealing from their neighbors are rewarded. Jesus seems to be encouraging usury. This doesn’t make sense.
This is why we go to talents and giftedness. It all becomes metaphor and so it can just fit. And all that darkness can just disappear.
But people who know Jesus shouldn’t choose blissful ignorance. They must overcome what’s unsettling about this story.
It’s like when Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace enter the town in A Wrinkle in Time and the children are all bouncing their balls in unison. Super creepy! It looks normal, but obviously it isn’t. Something is wrong.
This parable, in its context is like that sense of being in a nightmare and realizing it. Everything about this is wrong. It isn’t real. This isn’t a picture of what Jesus believes the Kin-dom of God is supposed to be. It’s something else.
The disciples are surrounded by darkness.
Jesus has predicted the destruction of the Temple, warned them of their leaders, and showed the world how those leaders partnered with empire to steal and oppress their own people.
And then he tells his disciples a series of dark parables about a dark vision of the kin-dom. Of dark slaves of an evil master, stealing and oppressing for ill-gotten rewards. And the one who stands up is tossed out of town, into what approximates the dump.
In other words, the one who refuses to exploit his neighbors, who speaks up against the master’s cruelty, is redlined downriver.
We can wake from this nightmare.
Which comes in next week’s gospel. That one will help us come back to these parables with new eyes. To see what following Jesus in the midst of darkness looks like. When we don’t see Jesus present in the story.
That’s why these parables are so painful. We can’t see Jesus in them. Not as a knight on a warhorse coming to topple our enemies in battle. Or as a healer come to calm all division and soothe our pain.
And most importantly, we don’t see Jesus directing us to God. That’s his purpose after all; how he sees himself. As the one who helps reveal God’s presence. Because God is not that master. God is not keeping bridesmaids out in the cold.
We have trouble seeing Jesus in these parables. But he’s there.
We’re looking in the wrong place.
He’s not the master. Or the ones making money to protect themselves by enriching themselves.
He’s the one who stands up. Who is cast out and thrown away. Left to die amidst polluted rivers, choking smog, and rejected refuse. Not in the master’s backyard; out of sight and mind.
And we disciples, who have been taught that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first, cannot stand for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Which is an utter rejection of God’s dream for the beloved community.
We cannot stand for this distortion of human dignity. So we stand against the kingdoms of earth when they oppress and steal and cast our brothers and sisters into redlined districts to suffer. Just so we can feel safe. Like our souls aren’t hanging in the balance.
This, my friends, is what it is to struggle in the darkness, hiding the light of Christ in favor of comfort and poorly-formed unity. We lose our way. Forget what we were taught. And throw up our hands in fear and frustration.
And Jesus reminds us that he is here the whole time. Our lamps never run out of oil. We have everything we need. Just reach out.