Summary: A traditional interpretation of Jesus' story about a slave master who gave three of his slaves money shows that we don't always get it quite right. To understand the Bible more clearly, we must know more about when it was written, to whom and under what circumstances. Often knowing those things changes our understanding of what scripture is really trying to tell us.
It's no secret that one of the things that makes the four Gospels so engaging is that they often show the dim-witted disciples and other followers of Jesus failing to understand what he was saying.
The Lord had quite a time with his apostles and others who chose to pay attention to him.
We find Peter, for instance, telling Jesus not to wash his -- Peter's -- feet until Jesus explains why he must. Then Peter wants almost his whole body washed.
We read about literalistic Nicodemus imagining that when Jesus says he needs to be born again it means he somehow must make his way back into his mother's womb. It takes some time for Jesus to disabuse him of that notion.
And we find two of Christ's followers on the road to Emmaus walking with the risen Jesus himself for a long time but not even recognizing who he is until he breaks bread with them. They might have been looking but they were not seeing.
This failure to understand what Jesus was talking about or doing exists right into our present day.
For instance, time after time, preachers who try to explain the text we read today miss a big point. The story is about the enslaver who gave one slave five talents worth of money while another got two and another got one. In sermon after sermon, it's all about praising the first slave for doubling his five talents. That first slave is the winner, they say, and you should be, too, so work hard and invest.
I did a bit of hunting around the internet for sermons on this text and won't quote any directly, but in essence, many homilies say something along the lines of, "At the final judgment, the issue won't be how many talents we started with but how faithfully we used what we were given. Our reward will be based on our effort -- measured against our ability and our opportunities -- not on the size of the return we produced."
Clearly, then, in that view, the winner in the story is the servant who doubled the money he was given, while the loser was the servant who buried his money and, at the end, simply returned the money to the slave holder and then spoke truth to power.
Let's think a bit about why that may be an incomplete understanding of the story and about why the New Testament -- despite what preachers of the so-called Prosperity Gospel say -- isn't full of capitalistic economic strategies that could make us all rich.
So let's turn to two former seminary teachers, David M. May and Mike Graves, who have studied the passage we read today and have arrived at a completely different understanding of it.
In their book, Preaching Matthew: Interpretation and Proclamation, May and Graves write this: There is a "lack of understanding about the limited good society of first-century Mediterraneans. In their view of the world, all goods, tangible and intangible, existed in a finite limited amount. To be gaining more was always at the expense of someone else. Therefore, in this parable, for the two "good" servants to get more for their master, then someone -- most likely the original peasants gathered around hearing this parable -- would have to be losing."1
Somehow, May and Graves write, the slave who was given just one talent grasped this unfair economic system and refused to participate in it.
"It is not surprising," May and Graves write, "that preachers from many pulpits proclaim this third servant as bad and lazy since commentaries reinforce this servant as bad and lazy."2 Then they add this: "The third servant was fearful in the face of doing the right action (preserving the master's money) while also not exploiting and taking money from someone else by trading, investing or usury."3
Do you see their point? The one-talent slave knew he was being asked to participate in what he believed was an unfair, inequitable economic system of strict limits. He may not have had a Ph.D. in economics from the Wharton School of Business, but he refused to do what his master expected him to do because of how he understood economic matters.
And not only did he refuse, he also told his master the truth. He said this: "Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours."
Notice that his words are rooted in the agrarian economy of his time. How might we translate those words to an industrial/technology economy? That you used artificial intelligence to write your high school themes and pretended they were original? That you scammed people by sending them fake online payment notices? That you learned to buy or sell stocks based on inside information before it was made public?
Jesus didn't have those higher-tech options so he put the story in terms that people of his time could understand, people who believed, as May and Graves have pointed out, that they lived in a "limited goods society" in which someone winning financially, inevitably meant someone else losing.
Understood that way, this is a story that calls each of us to be as brave and clear-headed as the third servant, who is, as I say, the hero of the story.
What does that mean? It means we must be discerning about the systems at work in our world that are unfair and prejudicial. It means we must pay attention to the way Jesus asks us to live. He outlined that in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Beatitudes and in his own life, which had nothing to do with borrowing a few bucks from a slaveholder so he could turn it into double that amount and be praised by someone who thinks people are marketable commodities.
I hope this makes you wonder what other passages of scripture we might be misreading on a regular basis. Reading the Bible on its surface without understanding the time it was written, the meanings of the original languages and the societies and beliefs of the recipients, risks missing what scripture is trying to tell us.
Friends in Christ, the Bible is a library of books written over hundreds and hundreds of years by a wide collection of authors. And every translation from the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic is an act of interpretation. That's what translation always is. What's more, the Gospel writers each had agendas about how they framed and told the story of Jesus, and how they tied his sayings to various points the churches of the gospeleers were struggling with.
When we understand that and more, we realize that it's the biblical inerrantists, who insist that the Bible contains not a single error of any kind, at least in the original manuscripts, which have never been found, who want us to believe that the world was created in six literal days and that at one point the sun stood still so a battle would turn out this way instead of that way.
But those literalists have trouble explaining a lot of things, including why the Bible says in the book of 1 Samuel that David slew the giant Goliath, while 2 Samuel says it was a man named Elhanan who killed Goliath.
Christians have long believed that in some sense the Bible contains God's word for us. And that is true. But that doesn't relieve us of the duty to read it with care and with questions. It doesn't mean we can simply open the book to any page and point to a verse that will guide our life today.
You've probably heard the story of the man who believed in that Bible-pointing practice until one day he opened the Bible and his finger happened to point to Matthew 27:5, which says that Judas Iscariot threw the pieces of silver he got for betraying Jesus into the temple and then hanged himself.
Not thinking that committing suicide was a good idea, the man tried once more. This time he happened to point to Luke 10:37, where Jesus says this, "Go and do likewise."
And that pretty much cured him of his silly way of trying to make sense of the Bible.
If nothing else, this engaging story of the slaves and the talents they were given should be a reminder that if we believe that the God of love uses the Bible to reveal what we should know about ourselves, the divine and our world, we would do well not to immediately accept the easiest interpretation of what we read.
Rather, we should look for interpreters who root their work in their love of God's endless grace, generosity and love and not those who see in biblical words nothing but justifications for what they already believe and who support flawed systems of which they're already a part.
The Bible is one of God's many gifts to us. Let's not misuse it.