Once upon a time there was a man, a very rich man, who almost everyone believed was God. All his business projects turned to gold; when he spoke, people listened; when he commanded, people responded. He was obeyed and feared and successful and that was all almost everyone thought they wanted from a god.
The man was to leave on a journey, so he summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them.
To one slave, who was quite attractive and had a deep, resonant voice, he gave 5% of his wealth.
To another slave, who was very smart and educated in the ways of business and commerce, he gave 10% of his wealth.
And to one slave, who seemed to hold promise if nothing else, he gave a single gold coin, the price of his freedom.
Then the man people thought was God went away.
The slave who had 5% of the wealth of his master went immediately, used some of the money to pay for a ghost writer, published a self-help book called A Flashlight for a Lawn Mower, and toured the country as an inspirational speaker, charging $200 a person to convince people that they were just the kind of charming, alluring genius they already thought they were. They bought T-shirts and coffee mugs and flashlights and little plastic lawn mowers made by children in factories in countries the purchasers never heard of. The slave worked four hours a week (once he got the tour going), travelled first class, ate at the best restaurants and slept in the best hotels. Even with those expenses, he still doubled the money his master gave him.
The slave who had 10% of the wealth of his master began buying up mortgages, selecting only those which were on high-priced property and for whom the owners owed four to six months worth of payments. He avoided property in areas where one might expect a disaster like an earthquake or a tornado or a hurricane. He bought the mortgages at pennies on the dollar, foreclosed on them, spent a carefully controlled sum on repairs and improvements (using the cheapest labor he could find) and then sold them at a huge profit. He gave high-interest loans to people who needed money desperately and had little choice but to pay for their present with their future. The slave lived in one of the mansions on which he foreclosed, drove a very nice sports car, and wore only the finest clothes. Even so, he easily doubled the money his master gave him.
The slave who had been given only a single gold coin did nothing immediately. He prayed for three days and nights, for he was deeply grieved at the situation he was in. At last, he decided to bury the coin in the ground, telling no one what he did, only digging the money up when his master called for him.
After a very long time, the master of those slaves returned. He summoned them and demanded a report on how they fared.
The slave who'd written the self-help book started to tell the master all he had done, but the master was a busy man. The slave cut to the bottom line: "I got you a 105% return on your investment."
The master said to him, "Well done, good and trustworthy slave. You have shown your allegiance to me in a few things, so I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master."
And the slave, who, like nearly everyone else, thought his master was God, and who had become used to the riches he believed he had earned, went his way rejoicing.
The slave who'd invested in real estate mortgages knew his master was a busy man, and so he simply reported: "Master, I have gotten you 123% return on your sizable investment."
The master said to him, "Well done, good and trustworthy slave. You have shown your allegiance to me in a few things, so I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master."
And the slave, who, like nearly everyone else, thought his master was God, and who had become used to the riches he believed he had earned, went his way rejoicing.
Then, the one who had received the one gold coin, the price of his freedom, came forward. He said, "Master, I know that you are not God. You are a harsh man who demands profits without doing work, who expects wealth without cost. You left us this long time and expected us to earn money for you while you did nothing.
"I fear you, master, but I must honor and obey God. I could not use the money you gave me to make myself rich, or to make you more rich, at the cost of the lives of my brothers and sisters."
"What did you do?" ask the master in anger.
The slave fell to his knees, for he knew the master could have him killed, and almost everyone would think it was just. "I thought of simply giving your gold piece away, or buying my freedom with it and leaving, but it is your coin, not mine, so I could not do anything like that. So, I buried your coin, and hid it so that it would not be stolen, and I dug it up, and I return it to you now. Here is what is yours. I want no part of it."
His master, who, like nearly everyone else, thought he was God, and who had become used to the riches he believed he had earned, became enraged.
"You are wicked and lazy," he said, even though the servant was neither. "You knew that I expect wealth without cost, did you? And you knew that I expect profits without work, did you? Well, then you should have at least gotten someone to lend the money for you at interest..."
"God forbids me lending money at interest to the poor," the servant interrupted, referring to Exodus 22:25.
"This is not religion!" the master screamed. "This is business!"
The master turned to his guard, "Take that gold coin from him, and give it to the one with the 123% ROI. For the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. That's the way the world works, and how it should work because the poor are stupid and lazy and the rich are ambitious and smart. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where he will be spend the rest of his miserable life."
And the master wondered why the man, who was no longer his servant, sang to himself as they led him away.
*******
This is a retelling of Mathew 25:14-30, with a very different interpretation than is normally given. Most of the time, the point of this story is said to be that we should all use our talents and not just bury them in the ground. God, it is said, demands this from us.
This unusual interpretation is not original to me, though the retelling is. I heard it from a pastor named John Shuck in a sermon called The Whistle-Blower which I first read more than two years ago and still sticks. (Good work, @johnandrewshuck!) He credits William Herzog and the book Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder which I have read. Rev. Shuck's current blog is here.
I don't really know if a single "talent" would have been the price of a slave's freedom in the Roman empire in the first century AD. I invoke irony and poetic justice.
I really can't see the Matthew story in the traditional sense anymore. There are too many glaring holes in that interpretation, primarily because if you want to believe that the servant acted wickedly in burying the talent given him, then you have to say that the master is analogous to God. And the master acts nothing like God. Even aside from what the servant says in the story above, he calls the servant "worthless," (Matthew 25:30) even though, very shortly, Christ is about to die for those society calls "worthless." He leaves all the servants to their own devices for "a long time." Far from the last being first and the first last, this master says that the first get, well, first-er. I can't imagine the master in the story is the God who scatters seed on rocky ground like a lunatic.
To be honest, the master in the story looks a lot more like Caesar than God.
I wrote this because we recently started a process at my church called "New Beginnings" where we looked to find where our church is going. The last meeting we had on that used the "Parable of the Talents" as the Bible text for a discussion on what our gifts were and why we might not use them. (There were other verses that could have been used for that purpose. The first one that comes to mind is Matthew 5:15.)
The first question was, "Why do you think the servant hid the talent in the ground?"
I did NOT answer, because I would have said, "Because he was a hero." And explaining myself would have led the discussion astray.
In other words, I'm not the same person I used to be...
This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
