Breaking the Vicious Circle: A Reflection on Matthew 25.14-30

I remember as a kid asking lots of big questions about the world’s injustices. Invariably, they’d be met with a shrug and a resigned “That’s just the way the world works.” True as that reply may have been, it’s also true that ‘the way the world works’ is killing us. And yet, far too many of us are simply too cynical and worn down by life to imagine anything different. The world is stacked against those who have little, or even those who have less than the most. It’s costly to stick your head out in a world dominated by predators. But in today’s Gospel, the famous Parable of the Talents, Jesus asks us to imagine something different: Even if the world works this way, what if God’s Kingdom doesn’t?

First, to remind ourselves, the parable starts with a wealthy man who goes on a trip and leaves some of his wealth in the hands of servants to manage in his absence. A servant receiving five talents (a talent being an ancient weight measurement; the exact weight of a talent varied from place to place and time to time, but a reasonable estimate suggests that in today’s money, one talent of silver in Jesus’ day would have been worth about $20,000, so the first servant is essentially given $100,000 to manage) invests it quickly and doubles it. Likewise, a second servant given two talents also doubles his investment. But a third servant, given only one talent to manage, hides it away, earning nothing. When the master comes back, he praises the first two and promotes them. But the third servant explains that, knowing the master’s hard reputation, he was too afraid to do anything with it. He gives it back in full, but with no growth. The master is furious and casts him out with the words, “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.”

Historically, this has been taken to mean that God rewards those who use what they’ve been given and punishes those who do not. So long has this parable been used in sermons that the word ‘talent’ in English has come to mean ‘aptitude’ or ‘natural ability’. The idea is that we have to use what God has given us in order to bear good fruit in our lives, and if we don’t, we’ve wasted the life and abilities we’ve been offered.

This is fine and good, but what do we do with the master’s harshness? Those who want to follow the general gist of the traditional interpretation, while not letting the story ‘off the hook’ for turning God into a tyrant at the end, generally take it to mean that we get the God we think we get. This interpretation, to which I’m quite sympathetic and used the last time I reflected on this parable (or, rather, Luke’s version of it), applies the ethic of Matthew 7.2 (”For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get”) to our judgements and assumptions about God as much as other people. If we think God is stingy and fearsome and behave accordingly in how we manage our lives and interact with our neighbours, God will act stingy and fearsome in relation to us. But, if we think that God is merciful, loving, and generous, and use this to motivate how we use our gifts and resources and how we treat those around us, God will be merciful, loving, and generous to us. This interpretation is supported by the almost identical parable in Luke 19, where the master explicitly says “I will judge you by your own words” before launching into his attack on the servant’s inaction.

But in recent years there’s been an increasingly loud voice among biblical scholars who aren’t comfortable equating the ruler/master figures with God in these parables towards the end of Matthew (not just this one, but also the parables of the wedding banquet and bridesmaids, which also end with characters cast out). They think these parables show how God’s Kingdom works by pointing out the injustice of the kingdoms of this world. They argue that God’s Kingdom is not a place where the rich get richer off the backs of the poor, so it makes no sense for this to be the last word of a Kingdom parable. If we look at the ending of the parable through this lens, the master does in fact prove himself to be just as hard, greedy, and predatory as the third servant feared. Again, the world has always been a dangerous place for those who have the least, and as ironic as it, being poor is more expensive than being rich. And so, of the three servants in Jesus’ parable, it’s the third to whom Jesus’ audience would likely have found most relatable and sympathetic. Sticking your head out is a good way to get bit, and it takes a level of vulnerability to stick your head out again that few who’ve been bit before are able to muster. Once bitten and twice shy, as they say. So many of us have learned through the conditioning of our own experiences that vulnerability only gets us hurt and effort is punished, so we might as well just try to make do with the little we have. And yet not trying leads only to living a small, wasted life, in which generosity is replaced by fear, resentment, suspicion, and eventually, to hoarding. In this way of reading the parable, Jesus’ goal is to break down this (very reasonable) wall of fear that is governing his audience’s behaviour, thereby releasing them to richer, fuller lives. (In the language of the just-completed series on the atonement, we might say the parable fits under the Christus Victor and nonviolent atonement models in being about revealing the lies of the powers of this world in order to free God’s people from them.) God’s Kingdom is after all not a kind of trickle-down economy, but an economy of love, generosity and compassion.

While I don’t love this approach to reading these parables — I’d rather have to talk around an incomplete portrayal of God in these ruler figures than risk making parables say the opposite of what they say — I think readings like this can help us to come at the parables from a different angle and open them up. In this case, it helps to focus our attention away from the third servant’s failure to put what he’d been given to good use and onto why he was inclined toward fear and caution in the first place. And I think this is helpful. The servant’s failure may indeed be one of imagination rather than one of yield (as James Alison put it in Raising Abel), but it’s good to be reminded that if people lack imagination, it’s normally because their imagination has been quashed.

The dating world (especially for those of us over thirty-five or so) can offer a good analogy here, I think. There’s a vicious circle at play where initial optimism and excitement is disappointed, leading to less optimism and excitement the next time around, and eventually to a cynicism that makes it hard to bother trying at all. It’ engenders a kind of learned helplessness in which it becomes natural and instinctive to hold back, go through the motions, and not truly show up as anywhere close to our full or best selves. (Heck, many don’t even bother showing up at all!) But of course, as much as this coping mechanism may keep us from getting hurt, it makes it practically impossible to actually connect to another person, only serving to compound the problem. Hence the vicious circle. And I think this is exactly what happens in ‘the kingdoms of this world,’ which reward those who are already wealthy, successful, and beautiful and punish those who aren’t. Unless you’re already among the victors, it becomes harder and harder to imagine winning.

But we always have to remember that this is not how God’s Kingdom works. The world may be stingy, greedy, and harsh, but God is generous, loving, and abundant, and wants all of creation to thrive. This isn’t a kind of ‘prosperity gospel’, but rather a matter of the heart. Turning once again to our working definition of faith, faithfulness is at its heart about showing up. And that’s what I think is going on in this parable. We may not be in a position to do the most or best with what we’ve been given in life, but we don’t need to do the most or best. We just need to do something, to get in the game, to show up for ourselves, for our neighbour, and for God.