The Parable of the Talents, the
gospel reading for this Sunday (Matthew 25:14-30), is too long for me to read
it here. But that is only the first of
its problems. You recall… a wealthy man
called three of his servants; gave one five talents, another one two, and the
third just one talent. Now this in
itself stretches belief. A talent was
actually a measure of weight, and a talent of gold roughly equalled 6000
denarii in the coinage of the day. One
denarius was one day’s pay for a labourer.
So the first servant got the equivalent of 30,000 days’ pay. The master then went away, it says, and the
servants were expected to invest these talents and make a profit. The master returns. The first servant has doubled the investment,
and so has the second. The third servant,
being timid, had buried his talent in the ground, and now he can hand it back entire
and safe. He gets fired and cast into
outer darkness, while the other two are put in charge of many things.
Now if this were a church parade
of the Chamber of Commerce, I expect they would be quite happy and on familiar
ground. I always thought, when this
parable came around in the lectionary, I should get the church treasurer to
preach. Anyone but me… You don’t have to be a Christian to know you
should use and develop your talents, not bury them in the ground.
But is that what Jesus is
saying? We have a clue in the fact that
the talents entrusted to servants were ridiculously valuable. The servants would never have handled such
wealth. There is another clue in the
fact that each servant received a different quantity of talents – the talents
were not equally or equitably allocated.
We have a third clue in the fact that the master goes away, and returns
for a reckoning. So there is to be
accountability.
But I think St Paul gives us the
most convincing way of looking at this parable.
In Paul’s First Letter to the church at Corinth he finds it necessary to
make some pungent comments. They had
been dividing into parties, some for Paul, some for Apollos, and so on, as
though life and faith were a game with winners and losers. That may sound familiar, in this political
and populist time… Our conversation and
news reporting, you may have noticed, have become full of sporting metaphors,
some of them quite violent and uncompromising.
Paul will have none of this among Jesus’s followers. Some of their leaders had been getting, in
Paul’s word, puffed up[1]…
and Paul rapidly deflates them: What
makes you different? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you
received it, why do you boast…? What
does any of us have that we did not receive… the beating heart, the blood
circulation, the bodily senses, the versatile brain, the capacity for love, the
ability to reflect, the possibility of wisdom, the grace of gratitude, of
reverence, of stepping aside or of fronting up… did we create any of these
things…? These are talents we were given,
in varying degrees indeed, but in greater magnitude than we realise… to use and
to develop. I am not so sure what to say
about eventual accountability… except that along the road we have discovered
grace and mercy. In the end, at any
accounting, it will be love that is the winner.
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