Woodcut illustration of the parable of the talents (1712)
I have to confess, Jesus’ parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30; for the extended cut see Lk 19:11-27) was one of my least favorite passages of scripture for a long time. The point seemed straightforward enough: if you waste your God-given potential, then bad things are going to happen to you.
That certainly didn’t feel like “good news.” The story came across as divine sanction of the ever-present cultural message to do more and be better, like a religious version of a Nike commercial. To continue the financial metaphor that gives the parable its shape, God is expecting a good return on his investment, so you had better produce. But sometimes our lives are a bear market, if not an outright depression – and, in any case, how do we know when we’re producing enough? The two good servants in the parable each posted 100% returns, after all, which is a tall order even in the best of times.
As I’ve been rereading this parable over the last few days, however, I’ve come to realize that Jesus’ story is a lot richer and more subtle than I had given it credit for. For starters, although the master harangues his third servant as “wicked and lazy” (25:26, NRSV), that servant had buried his talent not so much from simple laziness as from fear (25:25). Having sized up his master as a grasping sort of guy – reaping where he didn’t sow and gathering where he didn’t scatter – the servant had decided that investing for him just wasn’t worth it. If the investment were a failure (always a possibility), then he would presumably face his master’s wrath. And even if it were wildly successful, what good would that do the servant?
Fundamentally, the third servant is trying to claim independence from his master. He wants nothing to do with the master’s financial schemes – for they have nothing, so far as he can tell, to do with him. He refuses his role as steward because he does not trust his master.
The master, for his part, seems more upset by the servant’s attitude than lack of productivity. Apparently, he wasn’t expecting the servant to stay up all night researching promising tech start-ups; he would have been content if the servant had dropped the whole thing into treasury bonds and forgot about it (25:27).
“If you really think that I’m such a harsh and greedy man,” says the master, “then why didn’t you try something – however boring and low risk – out of a raw instinct for self-preservation?” Instead, the servant had done his level best to forget that the master even existed. It’s this passive declaration of independence that the latter cannot abide.
Read in this light, the parable is not so much a challenge to “maximize our God-given potential” as a call to consider our disposition towards the God who gave it to us. This doesn’t mean that the parable is not about laziness. A refusal to apply ourselves can certainly be symptomatic of a low view of God and his gifts.
But so can maximizing the heck out of our potential. Working hard at a calling or cultivating a skill can be another way of burying the talent. If we’re trying to build something of which we can say unequivocally, “This is mine,” without any reference to God, then we’re wasting the talent he’s given to us.
(I’m not talking about enjoying our gifts. If you’re a coder, for instance, it’s an unalloyed good to take pleasure in producing clean, effective code. The problem is when we point to anything we’ve done or made in an effort to justify our existence to others or to ourselves).
“Am I doing enough for God?” isn’t necessarily a bad question to ask ourselves, but in most cases a much better one is “Am I really doing this (whatever this is) for him?” And when the answer comes back as, “Well, sort of,” as it usually does, then it’s a good time to delve into our attitude towards God.
Namely, do we really trust that God intends our good (Hb 11:6)? Or are we acting on that persistent urge to carve out some joy or fulfillment or peace that’s independent of him? Jesus reminds us that the only lasting joy is that of the master, which cannot be earned but is a natural outgrowth of giving back to him what was never ours in the first place.
Let me know what you think!