Reading Parables Otherwise: Whistle-Blower (12th Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 25:14-30; August 27, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: Whistle-Blower

12th Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 25:14-30
August 27, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It's been a while since we've a crack at a parable, hasn't it? I came back from two week’s vacation ready to dive into this Parable of the Whistle-Blower, as I call it, when I realized that last Sunday would feature the Vacation Bible School celebration. Even if there were time, it would have been pretty jarring to go from VBS to "valuable coins" in the same service, especially since I always read the parables strangely.

But here we are, back on track. Next week we'll have the Parable of the Peasant Revolt and we'll finish the series on September 10th with the Parable of the Merciless Widow. The parables give us glimpses into God's Dream, what the Bible otherwise calls the Kingdom or Reign of God. I like "God's Dream" better because it doesn't distract us with all that talk about kings and kingdoms which are not part of our experience.

So let’s see what we have today.

The Parable of the Whistle-blower, as I call it, begins with a social situation that was certainly not unheard-of: A man wishes to go on a trip. He will be unable to supervise his own wealth while away from home and so he entrusts it to three servants--slaves, literally. In point of fact the rich seldom handled money themselves: it was unseemly. The whole point of being rich was not to have to work. Even at home, a rich person's wealth was managed for them by a slave or employee.

The wealth involved was large. A talent, you may remember (and if you do, you have a better memory than I do) was worth 6,000 denarii, the denarius in turn being the coin that was used to pay a day laborer for a day's work. If we figured this at the current minimum wage, a denarius would be worth about $58 and a talent about $348,000. Call it $350,000.

So the rich man entrusted one slave with $1,750,000, a second slave with $700,000, and the third slave with $350,000. These are unusually large amounts of money, especially when we consider that the wealth of the wealthy was typically invested in land rather than held as cash or even in the kind of investments we take for granted in our day.

But a master tasking a servant or slave with overseeing an investment was not unusual. Nor was it rare for a servant to ask for that investment in exchange for a share of the profits of a side business that the servant would run.

So far, there is nothing really strange about the arrangements.

The rich man left home; the servants invested their master's money. The first two doubled his investment. How they did this, the parable does not say, but we can make a pretty good guess. Increasing wealth was usually done in one of two ways: it was loaned at interest (a violation of the Torah) and/or used to buy out the small holdings of peasants (also a violation of the Torah). The most common and easiest way was to combine the two: lending money to peasants and then, when they are unable to pay, foreclosing on them and taking their land. This is most likely how the first two servants doubled their master's investment and most likely how the master had acquired this investment capital in the first place.

For whatever reason, the third servant opted for an investment strategy virtually guaranteed at least not to lose any money: he buried it in the ground.

The rich man was gone for a long time. When he came back, he called his slaves together and demanded an accounting. The first two servants reported that they had doubled his money. He was pleased and promised them promotions.

It didn't go so well with the third slave who had to confess that he had simply buried the talent and was only able to return the original money, but it was safe and sound and fully accounted for. The master was furious, took the third man's talent, gave it to the first servant, and threw the lazy slave out of the household.

In the traditional reading the master is taken as referring to God who has entrusted his servants--us, that is--with various resources. God seems to be absent but nonetheless expects us to put those resources to good use so that when God returns, we will be able to give a good accounting of what we have done with them. For most of us through history these resources have not been financial. But all of us, no matter how poor, have resources in the form of abilities that we can develop and use faithfully. In fact, the English word "talent" that comes directly from the Greek of this parable is the word that we use to name these resources. We must not bury our abilities, our talents, but make full use of them. Otherwise it’s the "outer darkness" for us.

This, then, in the traditional reading, is a stewardship text. I've used it myself that way, sometimes on Consecration Sunday itself.

But in the last few years, I must confess, I have come to have my doubts.

I understand the part about using our God-given abilities. There are certainly those who do and those who don't. But what am I to make of the part where the master tells the third slave that he should have turned his coin over to the bankers so that he could get it back with interest? How do I turn over a gift for languages to the bankers? How does that work with anything other than money?

That's one question. Another is how do I explain the description of the master that the third slave utters: "You are a hard man. You let other people do all the work and you take the profits"? Does he say this because he is an "evil and lazy servant"? Or is this charge--unanswered in the parable--basically true?

And in what way can we say that the power figure in the parable, the rich man, resembles what we know of God? Is it fair to say that we know God to be "hard"? Is it fair to say that God contributes nothing to the production of wealth but keeps it all? Isn't it just the opposite? Hasn't God placed the world in our hands, sustaining and upholding it, while we--humanity as a whole, that is--enjoy the result not only of our work but of God's? And doesn't God have a tendency to forgive a little too easily for our tastes?

Once again, I have been forced to read this parable about a rich man who turned over various sums of money to his slaves as a story about a rich man who turned over sums of money to his slaves. The parable is about money, money in motion, specifically. The parable is about economics, about how money moves, about who controls its movements,
and about who benefits from that motion.

In Jesus' world and in ours the fact that there is a rich man seems natural enough. No one questions how he became rich; he is just rich. He takes some of his money and turns it over to three servants for them to invest and oversee. This, too, seems natural. It's his money; he can do whatever he wants with it. It seems natural, too, for someone with money to seek to become even richer. The first two slaves invest the money. That, too, seems quite natural.

But this is the weak point in every economy, a place where people must see what is not there and fail to see what plainly is. Economies are human constructions but they have to appear to be natural. Arrangements of power and wealth have to appear natural. They have to appear right. If someone is rich, people must look at them and say that this is right and proper. If someone is poor, people must also see that as right and proper. People have to be seen to have what they deserve. When things in an economy seem strange or even unfair, people must respond with, "Well, that's just how it is." They cannot be allowed to imagine that it is only arbitrarily what it is and could just as easily be something else. If an economy does not appear to be a fact of nature, like gravity or the rotation of the earth, then the losers in the economy will stop thinking of themselves as losers and start thinking of themselves as oppressed and aggrieved victims. They will stop thinking of that economy's winners as deserving their reward and start thinking of them as exploiters who have rigged the system.

What keeps the rich and powerful awake at night is the knowledge that they are vastly outnumbered. Their greatest fear is that the poor and powerless will figure this out. They devote a great deal of effort to keeping this from happening. They dangle promises of promotion. They distract with entertainments. They shift the blame to convenient scapegoats. They maintain careful control over the the pageantry of power. They use monuments and memorials--propaganda in marble and concrete--to celebrate the naturalness of their power. And they hope no one sees through it all.

And along comes our third servant, the one who refused to invest the coin. When the time for an accounting came, he turned the tables on his master. He, the slave, rendered judgment on his rich master: "You are a hard man. You don't do the work, but you take the wealth." You give your work to other people and you take the profits they make as your own. You are lazy and yet you are rich. Here is your money, safe and sound.

The rich man did what anyone does who is caught out with no defense. He made a counter-accusation. He accused his servant of being lazy and wicked. The rich always accuse the poor of being lazy. If anything they are the ones guilty of this, but they say this to restore the naturalness of the economy from which they benefit. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," they insist.

The third slave has unmasked the system. He has shown it for the unjust arrangement that it is. He told the truth. He blew the whistle. He was afraid, of course. He knew that his master could destroy him. And in the end that is what happened. But he told the truth anyway.

So what is God's dream like? Jesus tells us it is like this parable. Now we could certainly say that the parable teaches us that it is a bad idea to tell the truth about powerful people. They have ways of making our lives miserable and do not take kindly to being called out. We could say that the parable teaches us that smart people go along to get along and that bucking the system is no way to get ahead.

Certainly the greatest rewards seem to go to the people who are willing to turn a blind eye to the Torah demands of justice and look for the biggest profits they can find. On the basis of what I know about the God of the covenant, the God of the Torah, the God of Jesus, I don't think that this everyone-for-themselves pursuit of profit is God's dream for us. That rules out the behavior rich man and the actions of the first two servants.

That leaves us with the third servant. He shook in his sandals, but he told the truth and he refused to go along. So that must be God's dream.

An economy like the economy of Roman Palestine or an economy like ours, where those who produce the real wealth share less and less of it and the powerful use their power to become rich and their wealth to become more powerful, can come to seem like a fact of nature that can be neither questioned nor challenged. An economy can come to feel like an "iron cage" with no way out and no hope of a more humane life. But God's dream is still at work, still "at hand" as Mark's Jesus has it. A third servant sees through the lies, sees the man behind the curtain in spite of all the distraction. A third servant refuses to do what he is supposed to do. A third servant tells the truth. And the spell is broken.

And when we awaken from the spell we will discover that the master's house was in fact a kind of prison. The "outer darkness" we feared so much only seemed to be dark because of the spell we were under. It isn't dark at all and it is filled with good people like our friend the third servant and other whistle-blowers: the prophets who saw and spoke the truth and Jesus the most notorious whistle-blower of them all. And best of all, this place at the margins, outside of the good graces of the rich and powerful of this world, is the place where God has made a home and we are welcome there.

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