The Parable of Talent and Talents
Reflections on the Lectionary for November 19th
I confess that I am not completely certain what the parable of the talents thinks it is doing. Whether we are talking about some (probably inaccessible to us today) historical parable that Jesus delivered to a crowd of people, or the version that circulated in a possible oral tradition, or the literary adaptation that Matthew included in his gospel, I am not sure what I am supposed to take away from this story. Is it a parable about good stewardship? (If it is, I am not sure what the moral of the stewardship story actually is). Is it a story about capricious masters? Is it a story about the perils of not mind-reading correctly? Is it a proto-capitalist tract about the specific kinds of exploitation inherent in the broadly exploitative practice of slavery? I cannot really tell.
I have heard a number of sermons on this passage, many of which fundamentally misunderstand one important aspect of the parable: the talent. I have heard so many sermons about how Jesus does not want us to waste our God-given talents—talents like musicianship, public speaking, financial management, or juggling (just to name a few). Whatever your talents are, these sermons insist, God does not want you to waste them—after all, God gave them to you to use. But that is not at all what Jesus is talking about; this parable is not talking about talents in the sense of an innate skill or ability. It is, instead, talking about talents as a unit of capital, or a category of value. I happen to be writing this blog post in Scotland, while leading a tour of (mostly) the Scottish Highlands. The legal currency here is the pound sterling. The parable translates better in the context of the UK, where the currency is the pound, than it translates in the United States for the dollars. “pound,” like “talent,” has multiple meanings. But nobody in the UK would hear Jesus say that someone invested a “pound” and think that they were talking about a pound of butter or a pound of garden mulch. They would know that Jesus was talking about money. In the same way, the “talent” to be invested in this story is not something that you are good at doing, but it is a unit of wealth. The master—the slave-owner, if we are being frank about it and translating honestly—is asking his slaves to invest his money, not their innate gifts, in the same way Scottish folks might earn or spend pounds as money, not bags of flour.
I sometimes wonder if the preacherly focus on “talents” as personal attributes is a way to dodge the uncomfortable socio-economics of this passage. In Matthew 25:13-30, Jesus is—once again—using well-known social structures as object lessons. This probably made Jesus an effective teacher in his own day, but it causes problems for us in our own day, because we don’t always accept as given about our society the same things Jesus seems to have accepted as given about his. Instead of facing those socio-economic conditions—like slavery—head-on, preachers transpose the whole thing over to “talents” in the colloquial sense, and we don’t have to talk about the economics of slavery anymore. It’s much easier to preach a sermon about maximizing your potential than it is to preach about an abusive slaveowner who punishes slaves for not producing enough passive income for him.
Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza coined a word a few decades ago to describe the intersecting and interlocking forms of oppression that we meet in the New Testament (and in other times and places too, including our own time and place): kyriarchy. Kyriarchy starts with the Greek word kyrios, which means “lord,” and which shows up a lot of times in the New Testament, including ten separate times in the eighteen verses of this passage. Kyriarchy is closely related to patriarchy, and it might even start from there, but it also includes other forms of domination: social or class-based domination, economic oppression, heteronormativity, ethnic or racial prejudice, imperial ideology, and other things too. Schüssler-Fiorenza was one of the first in the field of biblical studies to describe the ways all of these things work together and compound each other. The “master” in this story, the kyrios who owns these slaves, is oppressing them primarily socially and economically, and it’s a parable about economic extraction. But you can bet that there are other forms of oppression happening in this story too, both under the surface and above the surface. The same word, kyrios, can describe the head of a household, pointing to the kinds of gendered oppression that show up in family systems. A person who is wealthy enough to own slaves probably has other people under his thumb too—people who are not his slaves, but who are nevertheless subject to his capricious whims—pointing to economic oppression. The word kyrios itself, which is used hundreds of times to refer to Jesus in the gospels and elsewhere, implies class or status distinctions that elevate the master while relegating the servants or slaves. Kyriarchy helps us see the ways different forms of oppression and power are interconnected, in the way we might call intersectional, and the ways these interconnections influence and compound each other.
The intersections of slavery and commerce are hard for me to figure out in this passage, and even harder to turn into some kind of theological truth. The parable assumes as kyrios who wants to exercise control over his slaves even when he is away, and who gives them money—not because they deserve to be paid for their work—but because he wants them to make him even more money in his absence. He already seems to know how the scheme is going to go; the “each according to his ability” suggests that some of the slaves have proven themselves more profitable than others in the past. He places the heaviest bets on the most profitable slaves, but still gives the least profitable one a single talent to invest. The results are predictable; the returns match his expectations.
The logic of the parable holds that the kyrios had the right to expect a return from this kind of “investment,” which is one of the places where I’m not willing to follow the text. Today we think that slavery is wrong, so we might not think that the slave owner has a right to this kind of return through the use of slaves. But Jesus seems to think that the man did have the right to a good return from his slaves. We might not be willing to follow Jesus there. We might be more willing to follow the logic of capitalism in this passage, and we might see less of a problem with his expectation that someone with money should be entitled to some return on investment. (This parable needs one of this disclaimers that you sometimes see in investment brochures: “investments may lose value”). Capitalism is one of the ways that kyriarchy shows up clearly and often uncriticized in our own world, so it might be harder for us to see the problem with it. But that logic can be exploitative too; even if we take slavery out of the equation (which is impossible), the kyrios’s expectations of a good return don’t have any mention of a payment to the three men—just more work for the hardest and most productive workers, and entrance “into the joy of your master,” as if that is compensation enough. The whole parable looks shakier and shakier, the more you view it as a description of a set of financial transactions. The whole thing relies on exploitation.
That’s why I have a hard time seeing anything theologically fruitful that can come out of it. The third slave opts out of the arrangement entirely, burying the master’s money and then giving it back to him. No one had gained or lost anything. He was a trustworthy trustee, but not willing to exploit himself or put himself at risk any more than he had to. That seems to me to be an honorable position, within the web of oppressions in which this enslaved man found himself. He simply opted out, as much as he could. What’s the takeaway there, for a religious life, as Jesus presumably hoped we would read the parable? That we risk making God angry when we refuse to put ourselves on the line too much? That we ought to embrace the opportunity to work without compensation for God? Maybe. But the metaphor at the heart of the parable stumbles, for me, too weighed down by economics and exploitation.
I think that’s why people look for the clearest exit, and preach this about talents (in the sense of gifts or skills) rather than talents (in the sense of dollars and pounds sterling). The story just slides by as a parable about maximizing one’s own potential; as a tale of self-actualization, it’s hard for anyone to feel uncomfortable about it. But as a story about being willing to be exploited by God, the parable snags on our sense who God is, and on the kinds of bad experiences many of us have had under capitalism. So we pretend that it’s a story about our gifts, and not a story about God using people, so that we don’t have to argue with the text. We can just nod our heads in agreement. But sometimes, argument with the text is precisely what is required.