Text: Luke 19: 11-27
Slanted and Enchanted III: The Parable of the Talents
The final lines of Shakespeare’s King Lear may well sum up the whole of the Christian Gospel. After all the misrecognitions, all the betrayals, all the bloodshed and heartache, it’s Edgar, the son of Gloucester, who brings the drama to a close: “The weight of these sad times we must obey,” Edgar says, “and speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
To speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. That’s as good a way of describing what happens when Jesus speaks throughout the gospels as any words I know. During the season of Lent, we’ve been concentrating on the things that Jesus says, especially his parables, the strange stories he tells as he roams about the countryside. Jesus knows, presumably, what he ought to say. But he doesn’t. He avoids platitudes. He stands the wisdom of his day on its head. His listeners go away baffled and confused, or disappointed, rather than enlightened. He consistently opts for something more challenging, provocative, and ultimately, freeing. He spins tales that slant the world just a little bit, making it both familiar but utterly strange. And he enchants the world by creating openings toward grace and mercy within those tales.
Two weeks ago we encountered the parable of the sower, and last week it was the parable of the Good Samaritan. This week we’ll spend time with the parable of the talents as the Gospel of Matthew calls it, or the parable of the ten pounds, as the Gospel of Luke has it. While both versions are clearly telling the same story, it’s Luke’s version that I find both more mysterious, or slanted, if you will, and also more revealing, which is to say, enchanted. The parable is a way of helping us all to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
Recall the basic details of the story. There’s the nobleman who goes on a long journey. He entrusts his wealth, or talents, to ten members of his household staff, and implies that they are to invest his money wisely. The currency they’re given is a pound, sometimes translated as a talent. In Greek, it’s mnas, not a small sum of money. Of the original ten slaves, the story only accounts for the activities of three servants. Two of them enlarge their investments. One does not. In Luke’s story, he simply wraps the money in a piece of cloth, and puts it away for safekeeping. But he doesn’t invest it, and he accrues no further wealth for his master. When the nobleman returns, he praises the servants who invested wisely. Perhaps they’ve paid attention to market fluctuations. Perhaps they’ve started their own business ventures. We simply know that their holdings grew. And so they’re given more – more money and more responsibility in the master’s household. Meanwhile, the third slave presents his share to his master, and explains that he did not bother to invest it. He then speaks forthrightly, and tells the nobleman that he, the slave, knew his master to be a harsh man, taking what was not his, reaping what he did not sow. The nobleman is offended. He hears the slave’s words as a pointed criticism, which of course they are. He then arranges to have the man slaughtered, along with others who were arrayed against him – perhaps the other seven servants. And that’s where the parable ends: in slaughter.
Now here’s a curious phenomenon: this parable has served as the backdrop for countless stewardship sermons across the years. But how is it that such a cruel story has provided the raw material for admonitions to pledge, or to invest wisely? How is it that preachers and commentators manage to ignore the slaughter, while extolling the virtues of wise investments? You know the sermons I’m talking about – though I trust you haven’t heard them here. These are the ones that spiritualize the parable, speaking about what has been entrusted to our care – money or some other ability, some talent, if you will – and the ways in which we’re expected to use and to grow that gift. The fatal flaw of the third servant, we’re led to understand, is that he doesn’t trust his master, thinking him cruel. And so he refuses to do anything with what has been given to him, fearing retribution. The lesson, we’re told, is that God wants us to use our gifts, to invest what has been entrusted to us, rather than burying it or setting it aside. The parable of the talents becomes a story of neglected opportunity, about a man so overcautious that he refused to even try to succeed. God entrusts us with talents. God wants us to use those talents. Bad things happen when we don’t. With that, the sermon ends, and we all go home. It falls into the category of what we think we ought to say, even as something feels wrong with the whole enterprise.
What if that uncomfortable part of us was right? What if the moral center of the story isn’t the nobleman at all? Notice, for example, the charge delivered against the nobleman, and how he responds. The third servant says that he’s greedy, taking what is not his. The servant says furthermore that the master is ruthless and cruel, an opinion evidently shared by others, who wish to free themselves from his rule while he is away. Evidently, the charge isn’t baseless. Upon hearing those words, instead of refuting them, the nobleman confirms his cruelty by calling for the servant to be slaughtered, along with all of those who wished to be free of him. Not only does he call for them to be slaughtered – the nobleman, we’re told, wants to watch it happen. He wants it to be done in his very presence, the story tells us. The nobleman going on a journey, in other words, is a sadistic and brutal fellow, more likely to be found in a tale by the Marquis de Sade than a children’s Bible or a stewardship sermon.
Now, riddle me this: How is it that generations of the faithful have found it possible to excuse and overlook those details of the nobleman’s behavior? Not only that, how have generations of good Christian folk come to identify with that same nobleman’s judgment upon his servants, working themselves into contortions to prove the first two servants virtuous, while siding with the nobleman in finding the third wicked? How did that come to be? And most perplexing of all, how, how, how have generations of thoughtful Christians found it possible not only to exonerate the nobleman, not only to identify with his judgments, but to understand him as a figure for God, judging human initiative, or lack of it? You don’t have to read deeply or widely to find commentators who will treat the parable as an allegory, where those arrayed against God will get their due recompense, while those who do as they are told, using their days wisely, will be given their fair share of the kingdom to rule – whether in this life or the afterlife. What those same commentators fail to notice is how very different the nobleman is from Jesus himself, who, according to Luke’s gospel, came preaching good news to the poor and release to the captives, who counsels mercy, and who seems to delight in the ne’er do wells of the world.
And so my riddle: Just how has that disjunct come about? Why have generations of the faithful instinctively failed to register the brutality of the nobleman and his order? I have my thoughts about that, but I leave it to you to puzzle through those questions. But I hope you do puzzle through them – they’re profoundly important for what they reveal about our unconscious assumptions about God, about Jesus, and about power.
So OK, we’ve hit a dead end. Let’s try a different path, reading the story slant, as Emily Dickinson might put it. Let’s do that by thinking about the world that Jesus lived within, and spoke to. It was a harsh world, organized in urban zones by the temple system, and by Rome. But in the countryside, where Jesus conducted his ministry, the region was controlled by elite households, who managed and controlled the local economy. Think here of a medieval fiefdom, or the plantation system in the antebellum south. The peasant population to whom Jesus spoke would have been subject to taxes, fees, and high interest loans, imposed by local households. Not only that, each of the households would have required a staff of retainers to manage the wealth of the estate – the larger the household, and the more managers would be required.
And so we come to the parable itself.[1] The ten servants entrusted with a pound each are likely the managers of the business ventures of an enormously profitable landowner. When he departs on his journey, he grants to ten advisors a sizeable sum of money, expecting them to turn a profit in his absence. The story doesn’t elaborate on how two of the servants made a profit, but given the economic structure of first century Palestine, we can guess. It likely had to do with lending money to struggling farmers at exorbitant interest rates, or it may have come about through an investment in acquiring and selling luxury goods. The particulars don’t much matter. Those listening to Jesus’s story would have known instinctively what it meant for one household retainer to increase his sum tenfold, and for another to increase it fivefold. Jesus’s listeners would have known the effects of such profit making, and could likely have spoken about how it affected their villages, or their families.
But what are we to make of the third servant? We’re told that he wraps his money in a piece of cloth, and that he simply stores it away. He takes the money out of circulation, so that it can’t be used to make usurious loans. He knows the system well, well enough that he refuses to participate in it. When called to account, he doesn’t cheat the nobleman. He doesn’t steal the money, or run off with it. He simply returns it to him. And then he speaks his mind, revealing what he has learned about the behavior of his master. He names the process of exploitation that he had been asked to participate in. The master takes what he does not deposit, and reaps what he does not sow, according to the third servant. As we have seen, the judgment upon him is swift, and merciless, for he has, evidently, struck a nerve.
What if the hero of the story wasn’t the nobleman, but the third servant, who refused to participate in the legal graft he was charged to administer? What if the story is actually about a principled man who had come to his senses, and who was unwilling to take part in such schemes anymore? What if the story was about a man who was, slowly but surely, becoming conscious of the world around him, a man who decided to speak up about what he saw? Perhaps the parable is really about a truth teller, and the consequences he is forced to endure as a result of speaking his conscience. Perhaps the story has to do not with stewardship or wise investments, but with finding the courage to tell the truth, to name what needs to be named, to say what no one else will say. In other words, what if the parable of the talents isn’t about the talents at all, but about the whistleblower, the one who finds within himself the resolve to “speak what he feels, not what he ought to say?”
Read slantways, the third servant would be the figure most akin to Jesus, who was himself on his way toward Jerusalem, where he would meet a fate akin to the third servant. Read slantways, the parable indicates that, contrary to all those stewardship sermons, God, and Jesus, are far more akin to the third servant than to the nobleman. Read slantways, the parable shakes us loose from our unconscious and instinctive understanding of God as the ultimate authority figure. Read slantways, the parable suggests that God is found when individuals find the courage to do as the third servant did. Read slantways, might Jesus be telling his listeners, telling us, that God is there whenever they find the courage to do the right thing, to speak up, to insist that something is out of whack? Might we find God whenever we speak what we feel, and not what we ought to say?
In our time, it’s young people who are finding the courage to speak their minds, speaking the truth even when their voice shakes. There are many examples, but I’ll offer just one example. After the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, it was the students in that school who exhibited moral clarity and moral courage, far beyond most of their adult counterparts. The parable allows us to see that all those young people are latter day variants of that courageous third servant, who opted out, who found his voice, and who spoke the truth, consequences be damned. Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas High, may be one of the best examples of courageous third servant. She had a stinging indictment of the system. Here’s what she said:
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S. Companies, trying to make caricatures of teenagers nowadays, saying that all we are are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission: we are prepared to call B.S. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA, telling us nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S. They say that no laws would have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that occur: we call B.S. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call B.S.”[2]
Emma Gonzalez and all of her fellow students may well be a latter day version of the third servant, who was, after all, calling B.S. on his master. If Jesus’s parable is any indication, this is where the voice of God is to be found here, now, today. Jesus can be seen and heard among those like Emma Gonzalez, crying foul on an exploitative system that willfully privileges slaughter above mercy. Is that what the parable of the talents means for today’s world?
Perhaps. But it might mean this as well. It might have to do not only with crying foul on this or that. God only knows but that we need such voices right now. But there’s another truth lurking within the parable. Could it also be about something smaller, about listening to the truths within our own hearts, and finding the courage to name that which needs to be addressed, that within us which doesn’t feel just right, that within us which is crying out for mercy and grace, rather than judgment or exploitation? Could it be about discovering the courage within our work to say: something here doesn’t feel right, and I need to make a change. Could it be about something within our families that needs to be addressed, where we’re asked to name a troubling pattern, even if it risks destabilizing relationships for a little while? Could it be about finding the courage to speak as Edgar speaks at the end of King Lear: “The weight of these sad times we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” We all know what we ought to say. The first two servants did. Might the parable of the talents be counseling us to speak what we feel, and not what we ought to say?
[1] In the following paragraphs, I depend upon a reading of the parable provided by William Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994). See chapter 9, pgs. 150-168.
[2] “Calling B.S. in Parkland, Florida,” by Emily Witt. From “The New Yorker,” February 17, 2018.
