Matthew 25:14-30
November 13, 2011
Time for Truth-Telling
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
|First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
One of my favorite teachers of the art of preaching is Anna Carter Florence. I heard Prof. Florence lecture and preach a number of years ago at a national preaching conference. She said something that rang like a bell when I first heard it and has greatly influenced my reading and preaching of the Bible ever since. She said, “The truth of a text depends on where you are willing to stand and what you are willing to see.”
If that is so, then the decision about where to stand as we read a text is the most important decision we can make. She also implies that this decision can be made with degrees of courage or cowardice. Reading the Bible is an ethical act that reveals as much about the reader as it does about the text of the Bible.
This may be why so few of us actually read the Bible. Unless, that is, we come fortified with a reading tradition. A reading tradition is the collection of habits of reading and deciding what things are supposed to mean that is passed to us by our community. A reading tradition automatically gives us a place to stand and things to see in the text without exposing us to the risk of being unpleasantly surprised.
A reading tradition works something like pearl-making in an oyster. A pearl, we know, starts as a grain of sand, an irritant, inside the oyster shell. The oyster responds to the presence of this irritating speck of foreign matter by secreting a substance to cover the grain and to make it smooth and less irritating. A reading tradition takes a passage from the Bible that makes us uncomfortable and does something very similar. Layers of tradition cover over the passage until it’s not so irritating.
This parable is a case in point. We know the story. A rich man was going on a journey and entrusted his property or at least his money to three of his slaves. He had a diversified portfolio. Each of three slaves was put in charge of some of his money. Each had a substantial amount to manage, but he made his assignments based on how clever he thought each of those slaves was.
So, the man left and the slaves went about their business. The first took his five talents and doubled the investment. The second took his two talents and doubled the investment. The third hid his one talent for safe-keeping.
Then, when the man returned after a “long time” he called a shareholders’ meeting. The shareholder called for a report from each of his slaves. The first reported that five talents had become ten. The master commended him. The second reported that two talents had become four. The master commended him also. The third began his report by observing that the master was a “harsh man, reaping where [he] did not sow, gathering where [he] did not scatter.” He presented the master with one talent, that is, what belonged to his master. No less, certainly, but no more, either. The master was furious, upbraided him for not having at least deposited the money with the bankers so that he would get his money with interest. He ended his tirade by sacking the slave.
We can easily see that, whatever else this parable is about, it is about judgment. Judgment is not a very comfortable topic. Worse yet, it’s about money and no one wants to talk about money in church. So the tradition has gone to work to help us to read this parable so that at least it isn’t as uncomfortable as it might be. It changed a story about money into a story about “talents.” In fact, our word “talent” comes from the this text. The very idea of a talent was invented because of this text. The idea that we have certain abilities or might have them if we developed them got invented by the reading tradition around this very parable. The thrust of the story then becomes something like this: Each of us has certain potential, we have gifts, or native abilities, or whatever you want to call them. These come to us from God. We’re born with them. And, suggests the story, God expects something from us. God expects that we will make good use of these gifts. We are supposed to identify and train and use our hidden potential so that it becomes a set of abilities. Woe be to us who “bury our talent.”
The irritant piece of sand is on its way to becoming a pearl. It’s still uncomfortable, but not nearly so much so. The message that results fits pretty easily alongside our ideas about self-development and self-cultivation, elements of what I will simply call the cult of the self that so dominates our culture. And there is even the observation that goes along with taking the one talent away from the “wicked and lazy” slave: “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those whom have nothing, even they have will be taken away.”
This reading is tenacious. It’s very hard to break through the layers of comfort that surround an irritating text. For all that I admire her, Anna Carter Florence is not able to do it. But in spite of how hard it is I’m asking you to do it. I’m asking you to be willing to see the irritating grain of sand at the center of this parable. It’s not going to be easy. But I think you’re good and wise and brave enough to try. So let’s try.
The first problem with the way the tradition has handled this parable is in explaining how the talent will be taken from the man who buried it and given to the man who had turned five talents into ten. A musical gift, for example, can be neglected. But how can it be transferred to someone else?
A bigger problem comes from the assumptions that the tradition asks us to make about God. One of the tradition’s little reading tricks is to assume that any powerful man in the story—a king, master, judge, or landowner—is to be read as God. Weaker characters in the story—widows, slaves, day laborers, or beggars—are supposed to be read as us. What frequently happens when this trick is used is that God emerges as a bully. And we are supposed to put up with it. This is very convenient for the real bullies in the world, since we are conditioned by the way we read these stories to put up with being bullied. We can see that the tradition doesn’t make these stories more comfortable for everyone equally. The richer or more powerful are comforted quite a bit more than the poorer and weaker.
What if we stand in a different place and look at something else? What then? What if we read this story about a rich man and his slaves and his money and assume that it is a story about a rich man and his slaves and his money? What if we read this story as Jesus’ way of showing his listeners something true about the relationship between a wealthy man and his very high-level flunkies? What if Jesus is telling his listeners (and us) something true about the way the world works, so that we can make our choices with a clear head? Well, let’s try it, anyway, and see what happens.
There was a rich man. He entrusted three servants with investment accounts totaling nine talents. It is notoriously hard to translate ancient money into modern purchasing power, but just for the sake of scale, let’s give it a try. A talent was a gold coin that was worth about 5,000 denarii. And a denarius was the standard wage of the day laborer. A rough equivalent to a denarius today would be about $60, eight hours at minimum wage. That would make a talent worth about $300,000 and the nine talents together worth about $2,700,000. This was cash, mind you, the rich man’s liquid assets (less, of course, what he was going to take on his trip with him—no ATM’s, remember!).
To say that this was a wealthy man would be a gross understatement. His wealth in the ancient world would have been stratospheric. Forget one percent—he would have been among the one percent of the one percent.
People like this in the ancient world were insulated from the real world by layers of lackeys. They had people. Their people had people. At the very top of a vast system of slaves, employees, and clients were these three slaves.
Entrusted with this kind of wealth, the slaves responded differently. Two of them took the usual and expected route: they invested it. How, we don’t know. All we know is that after “a long time” they had each doubled the amount they started with. If they had simply handed it over to the bankers their investment would have taken about seven years to double. Of course, any investment carried a lot of risk. The banker could simply run away with the money. Or he could go bankrupt by making bad loans. There was no FDIC and there was no derivatives market so that a banker could pawn off his risk onto someone else. No wonder the Roman goddess Fortuna was so popular among the merchant class!
After “a long time” the wealthy man returned and called his slaves settle their accounts. The first two reported that the master’s investment had been doubled. The master instantly praised them for the profit they had turned for him. No questions were asked about how they might have made the money. Ethics was not at issue, only profits. The first two slaves had done what they were supposed to do, what their master wanted them to do. Who might have been harmed or exploited in the process didn’t matter. They weren’t going to rock the boat. They did what they were expected to do.
The third slave did the unexpected. It started with his burying the gold in his backyard. On the face of it, this is good strategy. The master’s investments were in a diversified portfolio and one ninth was in a rock-solid safe place.
But we really see what’s going on here when he reported to his master. “Master,” he said, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed.” In others words his master was someone who lived off the toil of others. Others worked, bore the hot sun during the day, sweat off pounds of fluid every day, and nursed aching muscles at night while his master enjoyed the life of ease. The master told himself that he had a right to this life, but the truth, his slave knew, was different. And in spite of the life of privilege that he led, the master was harsh, or, literally, hard.
We can only speculate about his motives, but the third slave refused to participate in the systematic exploitation of his neighbors any longer. Was he tired of being caught between the master’s insatiable desire for more and more money and the anguish of peasants being dispossessed of their legacies, of families being split up and sold into slavery, of people sentenced to slow deaths because a denarius a day just wasn’t quite enough to live on. Maybe for once he decided that he had more in common with his master’s victims than with his master. Maybe the moral cost of the life that he led was just too high. We don’t know. All we know is that he was no longer willing to play along, no longer willing to do what was expected.
Halfway measures were not enough. If he turned the money over to the money-lenders he knew what that money would do. It would be loaned to peasants to pay their taxes or their rents, until they were overwhelmed by debts, and forced off their land. No, he would preserve the $300,000 and his master would get it back, but he would not extract his neighbors’ meager wealth to enrich his master. He would not do it. He had had enough.
He faced a great risk, far greater than his two colleagues. As a slave he was completely without rights. His master could kill him on the spot, or have him flogged to death, or sold to work in the mines or on a slave galley. Whatever happened to him he would go with his humanity intact. He had made his decision. He would stand for telling truth to power at whatever cost.
There is a story told of two servants to a king, one named Robert and the other William. In theory they were advisors, but in fact their job was to tell the king what he wanted to hear. This service was valuable to the king and they were paid well.
William had been having more and more trouble looking himself in the mirror, and one day he snapped. When the king asked his opinion he actually gave it, knowing full well that the king would not like to hear it. Sure enough, he was fired and escorted from the palace with only the clothes on his back. Robert felt badly for his friend and colleague, but knew better than to say anything about it to the king.
Months went by and he wondered what had become of his friend, so he went in search of him. He followed the rumors and eventually found him living in a single room in a tenement in the worst part of town. He knocked at the door and was greeted and welcomed by his friend. “William,” he said, “I have been worried about you, so I came to see how you were.”
“Robert, it’s good to see you. Won’t you come in? I was just about sit down to my dinner,” William replied. So Robert joined William at his table. William placed two bowls of the thinnest soup that Robert had ever seen on the table and sat down.
Robert looked at the soup and then at his friend who had lost a good deal of weight and he said, “William, my friend, if you would learn to please the king, you wouldn’t have to eat thin soup.”
William looked up and with a smile replied, “Robert, my friend, if you would learn to eat thin soup, you wouldn’t have to please the king.”
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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