The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
It’s not easy to explain parables. It’s easier to say what they aren’t—not allegories, not fables, nor morality plays—than to get at what they are. The Gospels are filled with parables about the Kingdom of God. For instance…
The kingdom of God is like a wedding banquet. The Kingdom of God is like a pearl of great price. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, it’s like a woman pouring out flour to make bread, it’s like a bunch of bridesmaids, and, oh, it’s like this—it’s like a man giving huge sums of money to his servants and asking them to care for it well until he returns.
It’s not easy to explain parables. Apparently, it’s even harder to explain the Kingdom of God—even for Jesus.
Still, there are a few basic things we all need to know to make some sense of this particular parable. First, as I said, it’s not an allegory, so there are no simple one-to-one correlations between the characters in the story and real-life figures, including God. Also important to know: A “talent” in this context is not a skill or ability, but a large amount of money—nobody agrees on exactly how much, but perhaps as much as a servant would make over the course of a decade or even two. So: a lot of money. A whole lot.
You may remember that when we’ve talked about the Kingdom of God before, I’ve offered that it can be helpful to think of it in terms of the Beloved Community, something that is not only a future reality but also a present one. It is here and not here, already and not yet.
That is what we see in this parable. What matters is what the servants do with the time and the money they’ve been given during the in-between time. We tend to focus so much on what happens at the end that we may forget a major plot point: the master was gone a long time. Broadly speaking, this parable is asking us to pay attention to what we do with all that we have, all the gifts we’ve been given, and it makes clear that one of those gifts is time.
Now I know I just shifted into the language of gifts and that might seem a little off, a little different than what the parable is talking about. You might be thinking: The master doesn’t give his servants these huge sums of money as gifts. And that’s true. They’re more like loans, or investments. In the stewardship language we often use around here, they’re currency—holy currency. The one thing you don’t want to do with a currency is bottle it up, or bury it in the ground, or stick it under a mattress. A currency needs to flow. It needs to be used. It needs to be appreciated, valued, and even given away. Maybe especially given away. Because it is only when we give it away that it comes back to us bigger, better, and more valuable than it was before.
Everything we have been given is a gift—and none of it is ours. Think about that. None of what we have is ours to keep. What this parable is telling us, what Jesus is telling us, is that what we do with the great riches we have been given is what makes all the difference—not the difference in terms of what happens to us in the next life, but the difference in how we live right now.
All of that being said, I have to tell you that I have a lot of compassion for the third servant, the one who seems to always get the short end of the stick. There’s a good case to be made that the third servant was the most realistic of the three. Yes, he is timid, fearful, and pessimistic, but maybe he has good reason to be. Maybe he has been beaten down by life’s circumstances. We might even want to defend him by saying that the master’s harsh treatment at the end proves that he was right.
Okay, fair enough, but what about this? What if the point is that being realistic, being pragmatic, being “right” even, isn’t what Jesus wants for us—not if it means we’re ruled by fear.
The great Black theologian Howard Thurman had a lot to say about fear and how it works to dehumanize people—and how followers of Jesus need to fight it. Written in the years just before the Civil Rights era, his classic book Jesus and the Disinherited analyzes the ways that the fear of violence, founded on a vast imbalance of power, is one of the strongest forces at work in keeping the oppressed in place.
A certain amount of fear serves a purpose. But when the fear takes over, it becomes harmful, even deadly. It has a policing effect. It can take people who are despised and convince them to despise themselves. It is corrosive and dehumanizing. As he writes, “Fear, which served originally as a safety device, a kind of protective mechanism for the weak, finally becomes death for the self. The power that saves turns executioner.”
That is what happens to the third servant. His fear becomes his master, ruling all his decisions. The other two servants may have been afraid, may have had bad experiences with the rich man, themselves. But they didn’t let fear make their decisions for them. You can’t double your money without taking risks. You have to wonder if the trades they made weren’t a bit reckless, or at the least very bold. And what is their reward? Not more money, but something infinitely better: they are invited to enter into the joy of the kingdom, to become full citizens of the Beloved Community.
Maybe we’re not used to thinking of a life of faith this way—as a gamble that rewards risk-takers. But it’s not only the dispossessed or disinherited who have to be vigilant against letting their lives be ruled by fear. We all do. We all have to take stock of the currencies we possess, the gifts we’ve been given, the life loaned to us, and how we can make the most of it all. There’s a passage from Annie Dillard’s book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that puts it beautifully. She writes,
There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and itsy-bitsy meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.
The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. It is the same point that poet Mary Oliver makes when she asks, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” What will we do with the time and the gifts we’ve been given? What will we do with the holy currencies that flow through us and sustain us? Will we hold tight and let them wither, or will we give them away and watch them grow? Will ours turn out to be an itsy-bitsy religion, or an extravagant, liberating, and joyful faith in God?
