Jesus spoke about relatable situations, so that he didn’t talk over the heads of those around him. They connected.
He translated his understanding of God contextually to connect with others.
His parables uses farming, shepherding, being in debt, doing hard labor, banquets, being excluded from banquets, rich homes, and poor people. Perhaps as we don’t immediately relate to that culture we may find the parables difficult to grasp at times. Are we too much in tune with capitalism?
Our parable today is all about talents. STOP. It’s about economics.
We have a man going on a foreign trip, who entrusts his money to his three servants. He is investing his fortune with these 3 merchants. To one he gives 5 bags of silver, one 2 bags of silver and the remaining servant, a single bag of silver. Maybe the latter servant doesn’t have much economic understanding?
Upon the man’s return the first servant, with probable beaming smile, offers the master the invested sum of 5 bags of silver, plus 5 bags more. Excellent, 100% bonus! The second servant does likewise: hands back the initial 2 bags, but then passes over 2 bags more. The same 100% yield on that investment.
The last servant is quite blunt, grounded in realism you might say, and explains to the man exactly what he is like. “You harvest what you don’t plant, gather crops you don’t cultivate“. Recall that this is a parable about the kingdom of heaven. The servant explains that he was afraid of what he might do to him if he lost the money so he buried it, and so returns the silver, with the bag slightly muddy.
Typically, we are to take this as an explanation to use our talents wisely, make money for the church; but is God that who “harvests what they do not plant, gathers what they did not cultivate“?
Vast sums of money
The bag of silver is also recorded as a talent. A “talent” was one of the largest values of money in the Greek world of that time. It was a silver coin, weighing in between fifty-seven and seventy-four pounds. One talent was equal to 6,000 denarii. If a worker received a denarii for a day’s labour, then given that they worked 6 days a week, to amass such a sum would ate between 16-17 years of labour. This is mythical story telling to make a point.
The perspective then
The local Jewish audience would have scoffed at such a profit form the investment. There is a something known as the rule of 72, in which you can quickly estimate how many years it might take to double your initial investment. You calculate 72 divided by the interest rate. So for an interest rate of 6%, 72/6 would suggest that it would take 12 years for such a feat of financial return. There is thought that the rate of interest back then was around 12% (*1); this would suggest a period of 6 years that the rich man was absent.
The locals would have been aghast. Such incredible returns would mean only that they were akin to the imperial economy, that of driving the locals out of existence. If the landowners could be absent but still earn such incredible sums, the servants were benefactors of the Imperial way of operation. Make specific individuals rich, and let the locals lose the ground they originally owned so they could still live in that area.
The third servant is one that doesn’t wish to play any part of the Imperial exploitation of the masses. The master is aggrieved – I am being polite – that the third servant hasn’t even doubled the investment. If the ‘Master’ is one with money and land, they may well have power at their disposal. I wonder whether, if we don’t jump to conclusions that “the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” refers to ‘Hell’, the last servant is actually discarded with and killed? The place where it often refers to weeping and gnashing of teeth is known as Gehenna, the smouldering rubbish heap of Jerusalem. But this doesn’t give us an answer to what the Kingdom of God is like…
The problem with paragraphs in the Bible
Recall that verses, paragraphs and chapters were never initially present in the Scriptures.
In the next passage we might read that “when I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me a drink; when I was a stranger, you invited me into your home” Matthew 25:31-46. It would seem that the third servant was cast out of the rich man’s realm, but found the kingdom of heaven, the kin_dom of heaven, that community who cared and sought after the lost ones. Yes, the first servant did receive even more money, well an extra bag of silver, but what did he really gain?
And today?
Where do we see the kingdom of heaven today? Is it in the financial markets of today, where the rich continue to gain additional benefits to make more money in that hope that “trickle down economics” will result in the poorer becoming very little slightly richer? If anything, this passage speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven being an inverted state of today’s market system. Where the marginalised does receive sufficient to live, where they may flourish.
What are your thoughts?
*1 Richard Rohrbaugh, “A Peasant Reading of the Parable of the Talents/Pounds,” Biblical Theology Bulletin, 23:1, Spring 1993, pp 32ff; cited by Ched Myers, op cit.
I found the dialogue interesting and I enjoyed it