Got Talents?
Matthew 25:14-30
November 13, 2011
There are at least two ways to read this funky little story that comes near the end of Matthew’s gospel. These readings are, quite frankly, almost completely at odds with one another, but each has something to offer. So, this morning, dueling interpretations of the gospel.
The most common way of reading this story is to see the wealthy landholding master as God, and to judge ourselves according to the way we use what we have been given. Such a reading has much to offer, especially during the middle of our annual November stewardship season when we are talking about what we have been given and when many of us are making personal decisions about how much we will give to the mission of this congregation for the coming year.
Read this way, the parable urges us to account honestly the value of what we have been given. As one popular commentary puts it, “It is routine for Christians to excuse themselves by protesting that their gifts are too modest to be significant. This parable insists that the gifts are precious and are to be exploited to the full.”
Read this way, Jesus’ parable insists that we recognize a central truth of the psalmist: “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Put a bit differently, we belong to God, and so does all our stuff. In that light, this parable pushes us to recognize that everything we have is a gift.
That recognition is profoundly countercultural. We have, as Americans, been taught from the beginning of our lives to believe that we get what we merit in this life. We make our own way in the world. We earn our living from the sweat of our own brows, and all that we have we deserve, including absolute freedom in deciding what to do with it.
The parable says, “wait a minute; all that you have has been given to you by the one who created all that is, including you.” At best, we are tenants in this house of God caring for it for just a little while before passing it along to those who will come after us.
In this reading, we are challenged to be wise but also risky with the gift, and warned against the consequences of hoarding it or hiding it away. In other words, use the gifts you have been given. You have been given them freely, so use them expansively for the sake of the gospel.
This reading, as useful as it is, begins to break down for me right here, because, for me, responding to the invitation to use my gifts freely for the sake of the gospel depends upon faith. In other words, for me to take real risks with what has been given to me I have to trust the giver of the gifts.
If God is, as suggested by this reading of the parable, a “harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed,” then I’m not sure I trust that there is steadfast love enduring forever and for me as I take risks for the gospel.
But, if I let go of all my 21st century North American privileges and put myself in the place of the poor and landless peasants to whom Jesus told the story, another reading opens up new wisdom.
First, let’s clear up one common misconception about this parable: talents are not gifts or skills or things that you’re good at. Talents are money, and a lot of it.
One comment I read on this text said a talent would be worth about $6 million in our currency. We might conclude that this parable is actually about the one percent and not the 99 percent. Perhaps the target of Jesus’ anger is not a lazy servant but instead a capricious money manager.
From that point of view, reading the text from below, the slave who is cast into outer darkness looks quite different, perhaps even heroic.
Writer and activist Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, suggests an alternative reading:
“There is no theme more common to Jesus' storytelling than Sabbath economics,” Myers says. “[Jesus] promises poor sharecroppers abundance (Mark 4:3-8, 26-32), but threatens absentee landowners (Mark 12:1-12) and rich householders (Luke 16:19-31) with judgment. […]
“The notorious parable of the talents (pounds) shows how Sabbath perspective as an interpretive key can rescue us from a long tradition of both bad theology and bad economics (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-28). This story has, in capitalist religion, been interpreted allegorically from the perspective of the cruel master (= God!), requiring spiritualizing gymnastics to rescue the story from its own depressing conclusion that haves will always triumph over the have-nots (Matthew 25:29). But it reads much more coherently when turned on its head and read as a cautionary tale of realism about the mercenary selfishness of the debt system. This reading understands the servant who refused to play the greedy master's money-market games as the hero who pays a high price for speaking truth to power (Matthew 25:24-30)—just as Jesus himself did. “
Myers’ reading insists, further, that we take the parable as one part of the broader story through which Jesus paints God as the loving father welcoming home the prodigal, as the mother hen worrying over her chicks.
If we trust that God welcomes us always and holds us always in loving hands, then, though the risks of faith may entail a high price – our money most assuredly, and also perhaps our lives as well – we have already an ultimate assurance, sealed, as it were, by the unsealed tomb: God will be with us even when circumstance casts us into the outer darkness.
By either reading, then, Jesus invites us to lives of risky faith.
But when I read this parable of Jesus from below I also imagine a more personal parable.
Once upon a time there was a young man who thought that God was calling him to use his life in a particular way, for particular service. The young man, though, had his doubts. He wasn’t sure about God, and sometimes wondered if the still, small voice he heard in his heart late at night wasn’t just his own projection, or maybe indigestion. But sometimes other people would say to him, “you have real gifts; have you ever thought about using them for the sake of the gospel?”
And then the young man would wonder. He would wonder about the voice, and he would wonder about the gospel. Just what was that gospel? What did it mean? What was this good news?
He’d seen it in action since he was a child: how people who believed that they were really, truly loved could do remarkable things for others. He’d seen his own mother give her life to the families of school children who showed up at school in mid-winter without a coat, sometimes without shoes to cover their feet even though it was snowing outside. He knew she did this because she believed that God loved her, and that God loved those kids, too.
He’d seen his own father working with homeless men in the city’s streets. He’d seen his father brokenhearted when one of the men died on a cold January night and there was no family even to claim the body. And he knew that his father did this because he believed that God loved him, and that God loved those men who lived under the bridge, too.
But the young man had a good job. He had young children, too, and a wife with her own career and her own goals. What would it mean to them to quit his job, and to take a huge detour on their fairly clear path to the American Dream of hard-earned upward mobility? What would it mean for buying a house? What would it mean for the minivan?
But, after the family had already traded in about half its income in exchange for more time to raise young children, the young man began to hear that still, small voice speaking with more urgency. “Now is the time,” it seemed to say, “come, and follow me.”
So in the next year’s Christmas letter, the young man chose this way to tell their friends that he was going to follow the call he had discerned: “last year we cut our income in half and enjoyed it so much we decided to do it again.”
The young man had been given so much, but if he believed for a minute in a wrathful God that was about to throw him into outer darkness because he’d hoarded those gifts and used them mostly for the good of his own family and his own career and his own wants for a long time … well, if he believed that God was like that there was no way in the world that he would risk the radical changes required to respond to that still, small voice.
What is the still, small voice saying to you these days? Can you hear it? Do you trust God’s love enough to follow where it leads?
My little parable does not negate the traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but I hope I’ve complicated it a bit because our faith is a complicated and challenging journey. It cannot stand still, for, a faith that changes nothing is worth nothing. What are you willing to risk from what you have been given for the sake of the changes that the gospel demands?
No matter which way you read this parable, it asks a simple question and provides a simple answer: got talents? Then use them.
November 13, 2011
There are at least two ways to read this funky little story that comes near the end of Matthew’s gospel. These readings are, quite frankly, almost completely at odds with one another, but each has something to offer. So, this morning, dueling interpretations of the gospel.
The most common way of reading this story is to see the wealthy landholding master as God, and to judge ourselves according to the way we use what we have been given. Such a reading has much to offer, especially during the middle of our annual November stewardship season when we are talking about what we have been given and when many of us are making personal decisions about how much we will give to the mission of this congregation for the coming year.
Read this way, the parable urges us to account honestly the value of what we have been given. As one popular commentary puts it, “It is routine for Christians to excuse themselves by protesting that their gifts are too modest to be significant. This parable insists that the gifts are precious and are to be exploited to the full.”
Read this way, Jesus’ parable insists that we recognize a central truth of the psalmist: “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Put a bit differently, we belong to God, and so does all our stuff. In that light, this parable pushes us to recognize that everything we have is a gift.
That recognition is profoundly countercultural. We have, as Americans, been taught from the beginning of our lives to believe that we get what we merit in this life. We make our own way in the world. We earn our living from the sweat of our own brows, and all that we have we deserve, including absolute freedom in deciding what to do with it.
The parable says, “wait a minute; all that you have has been given to you by the one who created all that is, including you.” At best, we are tenants in this house of God caring for it for just a little while before passing it along to those who will come after us.
In this reading, we are challenged to be wise but also risky with the gift, and warned against the consequences of hoarding it or hiding it away. In other words, use the gifts you have been given. You have been given them freely, so use them expansively for the sake of the gospel.
This reading, as useful as it is, begins to break down for me right here, because, for me, responding to the invitation to use my gifts freely for the sake of the gospel depends upon faith. In other words, for me to take real risks with what has been given to me I have to trust the giver of the gifts.
If God is, as suggested by this reading of the parable, a “harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed,” then I’m not sure I trust that there is steadfast love enduring forever and for me as I take risks for the gospel.
But, if I let go of all my 21st century North American privileges and put myself in the place of the poor and landless peasants to whom Jesus told the story, another reading opens up new wisdom.
First, let’s clear up one common misconception about this parable: talents are not gifts or skills or things that you’re good at. Talents are money, and a lot of it.
One comment I read on this text said a talent would be worth about $6 million in our currency. We might conclude that this parable is actually about the one percent and not the 99 percent. Perhaps the target of Jesus’ anger is not a lazy servant but instead a capricious money manager.
From that point of view, reading the text from below, the slave who is cast into outer darkness looks quite different, perhaps even heroic.
Writer and activist Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, suggests an alternative reading:
“There is no theme more common to Jesus' storytelling than Sabbath economics,” Myers says. “[Jesus] promises poor sharecroppers abundance (Mark 4:3-8, 26-32), but threatens absentee landowners (Mark 12:1-12) and rich householders (Luke 16:19-31) with judgment. […]
“The notorious parable of the talents (pounds) shows how Sabbath perspective as an interpretive key can rescue us from a long tradition of both bad theology and bad economics (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-28). This story has, in capitalist religion, been interpreted allegorically from the perspective of the cruel master (= God!), requiring spiritualizing gymnastics to rescue the story from its own depressing conclusion that haves will always triumph over the have-nots (Matthew 25:29). But it reads much more coherently when turned on its head and read as a cautionary tale of realism about the mercenary selfishness of the debt system. This reading understands the servant who refused to play the greedy master's money-market games as the hero who pays a high price for speaking truth to power (Matthew 25:24-30)—just as Jesus himself did. “
Myers’ reading insists, further, that we take the parable as one part of the broader story through which Jesus paints God as the loving father welcoming home the prodigal, as the mother hen worrying over her chicks.
If we trust that God welcomes us always and holds us always in loving hands, then, though the risks of faith may entail a high price – our money most assuredly, and also perhaps our lives as well – we have already an ultimate assurance, sealed, as it were, by the unsealed tomb: God will be with us even when circumstance casts us into the outer darkness.
By either reading, then, Jesus invites us to lives of risky faith.
But when I read this parable of Jesus from below I also imagine a more personal parable.
Once upon a time there was a young man who thought that God was calling him to use his life in a particular way, for particular service. The young man, though, had his doubts. He wasn’t sure about God, and sometimes wondered if the still, small voice he heard in his heart late at night wasn’t just his own projection, or maybe indigestion. But sometimes other people would say to him, “you have real gifts; have you ever thought about using them for the sake of the gospel?”
And then the young man would wonder. He would wonder about the voice, and he would wonder about the gospel. Just what was that gospel? What did it mean? What was this good news?
He’d seen it in action since he was a child: how people who believed that they were really, truly loved could do remarkable things for others. He’d seen his own mother give her life to the families of school children who showed up at school in mid-winter without a coat, sometimes without shoes to cover their feet even though it was snowing outside. He knew she did this because she believed that God loved her, and that God loved those kids, too.
He’d seen his own father working with homeless men in the city’s streets. He’d seen his father brokenhearted when one of the men died on a cold January night and there was no family even to claim the body. And he knew that his father did this because he believed that God loved him, and that God loved those men who lived under the bridge, too.
But the young man had a good job. He had young children, too, and a wife with her own career and her own goals. What would it mean to them to quit his job, and to take a huge detour on their fairly clear path to the American Dream of hard-earned upward mobility? What would it mean for buying a house? What would it mean for the minivan?
But, after the family had already traded in about half its income in exchange for more time to raise young children, the young man began to hear that still, small voice speaking with more urgency. “Now is the time,” it seemed to say, “come, and follow me.”
So in the next year’s Christmas letter, the young man chose this way to tell their friends that he was going to follow the call he had discerned: “last year we cut our income in half and enjoyed it so much we decided to do it again.”
The young man had been given so much, but if he believed for a minute in a wrathful God that was about to throw him into outer darkness because he’d hoarded those gifts and used them mostly for the good of his own family and his own career and his own wants for a long time … well, if he believed that God was like that there was no way in the world that he would risk the radical changes required to respond to that still, small voice.
What is the still, small voice saying to you these days? Can you hear it? Do you trust God’s love enough to follow where it leads?
My little parable does not negate the traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but I hope I’ve complicated it a bit because our faith is a complicated and challenging journey. It cannot stand still, for, a faith that changes nothing is worth nothing. What are you willing to risk from what you have been given for the sake of the changes that the gospel demands?
No matter which way you read this parable, it asks a simple question and provides a simple answer: got talents? Then use them.
posted by David Ensign at
7:37 AM
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