Matthew 25:14-30
(For text with exegetical and translation notes, click here)
(For text with exegetical and translation notes, click here)
Today
I'm more and more inclined to think that it actually has very little to do with
"talents" as we know them (singing, dancing, selfie-taking, etc.) and
much more to do with money and banking and oppression and power, and also one
poor, faithful, schlep who stood up to it all and took a hit for it. That may
sound a little strong, but given the First Century transactions by wealthy
people with real "Talents" (that is, with money), I think it may be a
lot closer to the original intent of Jesus.
Let's
start with the money. (This is complicated but I think you’re up to it.) Most
of what we would think of today as commercial trade or "investing" in
Palestine was done by the wealthy one percent--meaning rich people, royalty and
the priests. Including priests sounds odd, but they took in and spent the investments
held in the temple, and then traded with them for foreign goods and currency.
So, they were often quite wealthy.
The
second form of investment was in making mortgage loans or bridge loans to small
farmer families struggling to stay afloat in the difficult first-century
Palestinian economy. Most loans made huge returns on their investment because
interest rates were so astronomically high by today's standards--anywhere
between twenty-five to fifty percent.
It's
worth noting here that one of the causes of the "lost decade" of the
1980s, for poor and developing countries of the global south, was that the
interest charged by banks in the "First World" on loans to countries
in the "Third World" rose sometimes to as high as twenty-seven
percent. To pay those banks back, most countries attempted draconian cut backs
in domestic spending that starved their poor and destroyed their economies.
Millions of families around the world, lost their jobs, their farms, and their
homes in the disaster. The ancient and contemporary stories sound uncomfortably
similar.
The
purpose, then, for loans to Palestine farmers, was primarily for the purpose of
getting borrowers in over their heads, and then foreclosing on them and taking
their property. They would then either become tenants on what had been their
own property, or homeless, or join the ranks of the growing number of bandits
or revolutionary militias.
You
noticed a similar thing happening in southern Mexico (and elsewhere) during the
mid-1990s, when the rules of NAFTA allowed the government to stop issuing
credit to poor coffee farmers at just the same time that the prices for coffee had
collapsed to an all-time low. The result was hundreds of thousands of families
losing their homes and their farms and becoming beggars, or fighters, or
sweatshop workers, or immigrants into the US, fueling the immigration issue
decades later that continues to enflame Congress today.
Much
of the income from the first century loans was deposited in the Temple to keep
the rich from having to pay a Roman tax on it, and to keep them from officially
being the holders of the debt when the Sabbath and Jubilee-debt-cancellation
years rolled around. The Sabbath year provision said that every seven years all
illicit debts were dropped. However, a later law (probably written by
lobbyists), called the "Prosbul" allowed them put their money in the
Temple bank just before the seventh year, so that they could claim they no
longer had the money and were, therefore, unable to cancel the debt. And while
it was in their care, the priests-- the financial overseers of the
"bank's" holdings--were able to invest the money elsewhere for a
profit. There are a number of ancient inscriptions that show Priests investing in
trade and commodities using this "tax-sheltered" money drawn from
mortgages taken out by poor families in rural Palestine. That's probably one of
the reasons why Jesus decided to occupy the Temple and set up a temporary
boycott of currency trading there as his first official act in Jerusalem. And it’s
also probably why, when the revolution finally came, the angry
99 percenters stormed the temple and burned the mortgage papers that
had been held there.[1][1]
It
was also common, as this parable indicates, for wealthy lenders to assign the
dirty tasks of originating the loans, collecting on them, and then
repossessing the properties, to their servants. It was considered dishonorable
for nobility to expand their wealth, and since servants were a class without honor,
they were given the job. That gave the lenders the ability to deny any
knowledge of wrong-doing if an evicted family's misery became too public.[2]
The story of the widow and the unjust judge is something similar to this (Luke
18:1-8, Proper 24 C).
It's
also important to add here that the servants who were entrusted with inflicting
this pain on people didn't do it necessarily for monetary gain (because they
usually were “slaves” and weren't paid anything), but instead they did it for
the power and prestige they received for successfully managing the company. As
the parable says, if they were successful in little, they would be given power
and responsibility over much. The lead character in the parable of the
Dishonest Steward plays a similar role. Also reflected here is that interest
rates were huge, and often as high as fifty percent, so it would not be at all
unlikely for a steward of a powerful finance family to double or even triple an
investment.[3]
In
this story, servants one and two clearly went along with this insidious system
and were rewarded handily for their efforts. The first put his money into
trading (ergázomai, probably
commodities, because they were the most frequently traded products at the
time), and the second used interest-bearing investments (kerdainō, like the loans and currency-trading mentioned above),
but both made a healthy profit.
But
the third person (often considered the hero in three-part tales), following the
Torah that forbade lending money at interest (Exodus 22.20-30), believed that
the system was corrupt, that the leader was evil, that money should not be used
as a weapon against homes and farms and families, and he refused to
participate. He accused the wealthy one percenter of being a sklēros, someone who is violent, rough,
offensive, and thoroughly intolerable. He accuses him of not actually doing
anything to get his wealth: he doesn't plant, he doesn't distribute (diaskorpízō) his wealth. He just
collects interest on it from the misery of people who were sucked into the
downwardly spiraling system.
So,
he denounces the crime, buries the money, and in the end is thrown into “outer
Darkness” for his actions. That place that is dark and removed from all oher
people and from all that is righteous. It might be important to point out that
“Hell” was sometimes described as the “outer
darkness.”[4] It is
telling that he put the money in the ground, because according to Hebrew law
and theology the land is ultimately owned by God (Leviticus 25:23-28). Is Jesus
saying that he gave the money back to God, the ultimate owner?[5]
* * * * * *
So, what are the preaching themes and
possibilities in this story? There are two traditional readings of this story.
The first is that the (evil, greedy, wicked) Master is Jesus, who left us for a
while and will come again at the end of time for an ominous reckoning of how we
have used or misused our "talents" (usually mis-interpreted as skills and
gifts). That's an odd role for Jesus, but it seems to have survived relatively
unscathed, though thousands of years of puzzled looks during children's
sermons. A second traditional reading is that God is the (evil, greedy, wicked)
Master who does the judging, and who is just as nasty in the end. Making God
the "heavy" somehow doesn't feel any better than making it Jesus, but
there you are. The way that my pastors as a child got around this was to just ignore
that the third servant got tossed under the bus, and give heroic examples of
the non-squandering of our "talents."
Perhaps,
instead, this is not an allegory. Perhaps Jesus was simply saying that if you
stand up and denounce an immoral, evil, system, you may have to pay for it.
Perhaps Jesus was saying that sometimes--like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
in the fiery furnace (Daniel 1-3)--the right thing to do is to offer up your
life as a bulwark against injustice, even if it means losing that life.
Perhaps
the message of the story is simply that is a true story, and that if you don't
like this brutal corrupt system, then what are you going to do about it?
[1] The
Wars of The Jews, Flavius Josephus, tr. William Whiston
Book 2, Chapter 17, par. 6
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2850/2850-h/2850-h.htm#link22HCH0017).
[2] Bruce J. Malina and Richard
L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary
on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 149.
[3] William Herzog, "The
Vulnerability of the Whistleblower," Parables
as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Westminster/John
Knox: 1994), p.157-8.
[4] Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible
Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
[5] Some have noted that the
ground is also where Judas hid his "blood money" when he realized
that it had just caused his friend's death. But the significance of that is not
clear.
