The Parable of the Talents
Ana Levy-Lyons
February 8, 2015
First Unitarian, Brooklyn
As modern day religious liberals, I think we’ve been finding that some of the parables of Jesus go down a little easier than others. Today’s parable I warn you might be a little hard to swallow. Here’s the text from the book of Matthew:
“For it is as if a man…” (I’m going to stop right away with a question: ‘It is as if…?” What is as if? The paragraph before this doesn’t actually give any context for the “it” here. Keep this question in mind as we go along.) “It is as if a man going on a journey, summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability.” (Another side note: a “talent” was a unit of currency that was a huge amount of money. Notice that he’s not giving them all the same amount.) “Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward … saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’” (The same thing happened with the servant who had received the two talents.) “Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy servant! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless servant, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
Wow. Sending a poor servant into the outer darkness. I don’t know what that is, but it does not sound good. What ever happened to Jesus, the peace-loving hippie? How can a story like this be reconciled with a tradition that has come down to us as being primarily about love?
First let’s look at how a modern-day Christian might interpret this story. A Christian might say that Jesus was preparing his followers for his own departure – actually his death. He was the man who was about to leave for a journey and he was entrusting his followers with the all teachings and spiritual goodness that he had given them. He expected them, in his absence to do the work of the new church – to spread the word, to grow the movement, so that when he returned, they could show him all the good they had done with what he had given them. Those who had taken risks (because being a follower of Jesus was considered seditious at that time) would be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who had just kept it to themselves and literally buried it because they were afraid of the consequences with the worldly authorities, they would not be welcomed in.
In Christian teachings about this, they also love to pun on the English word “talent,” to say that God gives us talents in the sense of both wealth and abilities and we are expected to use those talents to do good work in the world – to not be miserly with them and hold them back and keep them to ourselves. If we do this, things will go well for us, and if we don’t, they won’t.
To my way of thinking, this would all make perfect sense and be pretty unproblematic if the three servants had been given the same number of talents to start out with. But they’re not. One is given 5, one is given 2, and one is given only 1, the text says, “according to their abilities.” So the boss has assessed the abilities of these three servants and is going to apportion his money according to what he thinks in advance they will do with it. He is prejudiced, in the sense of “pre-judging” each of them. And lo and behold, they perform exactly to his expectations.
You can imagine the psychological profile of each of these men. The one who got the 5 talents was a classic type-A success story. He was ambitious, maybe good looking and talented, and it was only a matter of time before someone took a chance on him and he could show the world what he was made of. His life experience had already taught him that risk-taking pays off. He was bolstered by his boss’s confidence in him, and he immediately started trading with this huge amount of money. It was a big risk, but this was his big audition. What chutzpah.
The servant who got two talents was a slightly stepped down version of the same thing. Maybe he has no flashy ambitions, but he was taught as a child that he was capable and that if he worked hard, he could do okay. He intuited that he wasn’t supposed to just hold on to the money, but to invest it and give the boss a good ROI when he returned. Both he and the five-talent guy gauged correctly what was required in the situation and they were rewarded.
The servant who got only one talent, on the other hand, was the kid who was always getting thrown in his locker at school. He was the kid who didn’t have a lot of friends, who got picked on, who was accident-prone. Things seemed to always go wrong for him. He may have gotten some negative messages from his family about his lack of talent and maybe he got punished for taking risks. He was afraid of the boss, for good reason. And so in this situation, where the boss had just handed him this terrifyingly huge amount of money (because remember, one talent was still a lot) he just couldn’t deal. He did what he always did: he literally buried his wealth. And predictably, just like always happens to him, turns out he had done the wrong thing and he was punished for it. Again. And, as usual, his money went to the guy who already had it all.
Everybody in this story played out his script. Predictably. Tragically. Was Jesus saying that this was a good thing? I don’t think so. I think he was warning that this is how things tend to go. How things work. Not always, not inevitably, but often. When we look back at the first phrase of the story, “For it is as if,” the “it” is life! “Life is as if…!” You can anthropomorphize it or not as you choose, call it God or call it natural law or social injustice. But this and so many of the stories in the Bible are really saying, “Hey, this is just how the world operates. What are you going to do about it?”
And it’s undeniably true. People who start out with greater advantages, greater talents, tend to get more invested in them, and they perform better, and then get rewarded even more. Those who start out with less tend to receive less, take fewer risks, and wind up even worse off than when they started. In the words of the text, “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If you have any doubt that this is true, take a look at Oxfam’s study from last month about global income inequality – 1% of the world’s population controls almost half of the world’s wealth and that share is growing every year.
I said earlier that I don’t know what the “outer darkness” is. But I do. And so do you. We all know what it is. It’s that place of utter despair, when we feel unloved and alone and cut off from everyone and everything. It’s the place where we feel like God or whatever is our source of ultimate comfort has abandoned us. Life has cast us out.
The one-talent guy knows this place all too well. And so, when he gives that speech to his boss, saying, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow…” he is speaking from personal experience saying, “I knew that life is harsh and it’s not fair and I was scared. So I buried the little that I had.” And the boss, speaking as a mouthpiece for life, answers him and tells him what he could have done differently. “You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers.” Notice that this is different from what the two other servants did. They “traded” with the money. They were in there doing the equivalent of day trading Asian tech stocks. And the boss wasn’t saying that the one-talent guy had to do this. But he could have done something. He could have taken what he had, brought it to the bank, and made a little interest. And that would have been enough – a thread to connect him to life and save him from the outer darkness.
Even if life has trampled you and beaten you down; even if you’re the kid who got thrown in her locker every day; even if you don’t think you have much “talent;” even if the world has been harsh and unfair; and even if you’re scared, the message is that you have been given something. You have something to work with. Just one small step. One gesture. One effort. One good faith attempt to use what you have been given is all it takes. Every one of us has something that can be planted as a seed to grow.
The message of this story is that you always have a choice, no matter how small. The problem is often not with our actual selves, our actual lives. The problem is often in the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and the stories that others tell us – the story that we’re not good enough, not capable enough, not worthy enough. When we believe that story, we’re paralyzed. But when we see that story as the fiction it is, we can then embark on the work of writing a newer, truer, story – one in which we have many more gifts, and much more agency in our lives than we thought possible. Then, and only then, we can act. We can uncover our buried talent and put it to work for ourselves and for our world.
There’s a version of this teaching in just about every religion – that if we can just open ourselves just a crack, the blessings will rush in. If we can take even a small risk, we will be rewarded a hundredfold. We don’t need to be as bold and aggressive as our co-workers, but just stretch ourselves relative to our own comfort zone. It’s a lifelong spiritual challenge to recognize our own fear at the unfairness of life, and instead of withdrawing continue to engage with the world anyway.
We are all servants of God or life itself. We are here, we are each given what we are given, and we are asked to make the most of it in the short time we have on this earth. And even in the face of life’s cruelty and corruption, we have the choice to get up every morning, have a cup of coffee, and get to work. We have the choice to risk trying, even though we might fail; to risk loving, even though we might be hurt; to risk helping another, even though we don’t feel like we have enough. May we all find within ourselves the strength to do this, knowing that even one talent is a lot. And let’s all, in the words of one of our dharma statements printed in the order of service, “use our God given gifts to joyfully help and serve others.”