Fr. James Martin’s Flawed View of the Parable of the Talents

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I actually had an episode prepared for this Thursday, meaning today, replying to some of the questions I’d gotten about purgatory based on an episode we did a couple weeks ago. But then two things happened both related to the gospel of this past Sunday, the Parable of the Talents. One was Father James Martin, the controversial Catholic priest, had a post where he proposed another way of reading the parable and he doesn’t go and say this is the right way, but he sort of holds it up as an interesting perspective and I think it gets it profoundly wrong in a way that’s spiritually dangerous. I’ll explain why.

And then second, more positively, I went to mass at Holy Name of Jesus in Kansas City, Kansas, and Father Anthony Ouellette preached a beautiful, just incredible moving homily on this parable. And as I ruminated on these two experiences that here was this political take on the parable that I think doesn’t do it justice. And then here’s this profound take where even as someone who loves the parable, who’s written about the parable, who’s studied it and all of this, there were aspects of it that I found just coming to life when Father Ouellette was preaching. I thought it might be helpful to say, here’s how not to read the parable and here’s maybe a better way. Here’s a liturgical and contextual key that can make sense of the parable of the talents in a new light that maybe you’ve never encountered before.

So before I get there, if you don’t remember the gospel from Sunday, or if you want a quick refresher, I’m not going to go deep here, but I want to give just a brief recap. This is Matthew 25 beginning in verse 14, going to about verse 30. And so Jesus is comparing something, and that something will become really important later. Contextually, I think I can tell you now. He’s talking about the second coming and He says it will be as when a man goes on a journey, he calls his servants and entrusted them his property. So he’s got three servants. Some translations say slave, the Greek word means both. The first one, he gives five talents of his property. The second he gives two talents, and the third he gives one to each according to his ability. Then he goes away.

So then the one with the five talents, he goes and he trades it and he doubles it. Same thing with the one with two talents. But the one who only has one talent, he goes and digs in the ground and he hides his master’s money. Now after a long time, we’re told, that’s an important detail because we’re kind of told people keep thinking the second coming is about to happen any minute, after a long time, the master of these servants came and settled accounts with them. So the one who has five talents goes forward and says, “Master, you delivered to me five talents. Here, I’ve made five talents more.” And then the master replies, “Well done, good and faithful servant, you have been faithful over a little. I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”

Same thing happens with the one who has two. He doubles it. He’s told, “Well done, good and faithful servant, you’ve been faithful over a little. I will set you over much, enter into the joy of your master.” But then the one who receive only one talent comes forward and says, “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, gathering where you did not winnow. I was afraid and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.” And the master is not thrilled with this. He replies, “You wicked and slothful servant. You knew where I have not sowed and gathered, where I have not winnowed, then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers and at my coming, I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him. Who has the 10 talents. For to everyone who has, will more be given and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away and cast a worthless servant into the outer darkness. There, men will weep and gnash their teeth.”

So at the outset, I’d say, okay, what does it sound like this parable is saying? It sounds like it’s saying you’ve been given some kind of gift from God and you can use it well or you can fail to use it. And if you fail to use it, you’ll be held accountable and cast out of the kingdom. And that’s the pretty standard take that Christians have had for 2000 years. The third servant, pretty clearly, he gets called worthless and slothful, not being held up as an exemplar of virtue. This is not the Christian example, right? Well, enter Father James Martin and Sister Barbara Reid. Now, I want to say again here kind of at the outset, Father Martin holds this up. He does not say this is the right way. He, instead, says that there’s a majority and a minority interpretation of the parable.

The majority interpretation is exactly what you would expect. God’s given us each talents and then the story’s focusing on how the third servant doesn’t use his talents. But Father Martin says there’s a problem with this and that’s that the word talent doesn’t mean skill or ability. In the original Greek, talent then means a huge sum of money. It’s 6,000 denarii, so about 15 to 20 years worth of wages if you’re a day laborer.

So yeah, if your interpretation, if the reason you thought this was about using your gifts and talents wisely was because you thought the word talent here means skill, well, it means money. And so Father Martin’s right about that. I think that’s a very flimsy kind of argument because I don’t think that’s why people take the majority view, but nevertheless, this is why he says there’s a problem with the majority view. And he says, in fact, this is the origin of that meaning. No, we’re going to come back to this point that the reason we have the English word talent is because of this parable, that everyone reading this parable got that this was about using everything God has given you, that it wasn’t just literally about money. And so that’s where our word talent comes from in English. Whatever talent you have, natural, supernatural, et cetera, we recognize that’s a gift.

Saying talented and saying gifted literally, contextually mean the same thing. It’s something you’ve been given by God. In Jesus’s time, it really stood for a colossal amount of money like saying a million dollars. So it’s like saying he gave one, $5 million, one, $2 million and then another, $1 million. Fine, good. The minority interpretation is provocative, Father Martin says. He said that the third man believes the owner is unjust. He harvests where he did not plant and gathers where he did not scatter. Now, I want to actually give credit where it’s due. The third man does present the master as unjust. Now, I think he does this unjustly and I think you were supposed to take that away from the parable, but that’s not how some people read it. So the New Testament scholar, Barbara Reid, in America Magazine, where Martin is editor-at-large in 2011 writes, “One who’s amassed for himself large amounts of money would be seen as greedy and wicked.” She, his Sister Reid, believes the third servant is the honorable one because he refuses to participate in a system where the master accrues wealth while others remain poor.

Now, we’ll actually unpack Reid in her own words in a minute here, but I want to give Martin’s take on her. Reid sees the parables, Jesus’s warning, about the ease of which people can be co-opted by an unjust system while also encouraging his disciples to expose unfettered greed. Now, did you get any of that from that parable? That this was about systemic oppression and economic inequality or is that maybe modern political biases coming in and skewing how we’re reading the passage? She, Reid, believes that the last verse shows what happens to those who blow the whistle on the rich and powerful. So in other words, when the servant is cast into outer darkness, this isn’t a reference to being cast out of the kingdom as it appears to be in context. It’s a reference to rich people doing something to poor people, casting them out into outer darkness.

I don’t even know what that would mean in a political economic context, but nevertheless, the disciples therefore are not to take the man going on the journey as a stand-in for God. This is really critical. If Reid is right, then 2000 years of Christians have been wrong and seen this as an obvious stand-in for God. The master is God, as is usually the case, nor should they take the parable’s encouragement to use their God-given talents. So the whole English word, talent, was a translation mistake. We misinterpreted the passage. Instead, Reid sees this parable is about the need for the disciples to be faithful during the time between Jesus’s departure and His return and to go against prevailing attitudes. And then Martin says, “Isn’t that fascinating?” Well, to this I’d say I’m all for reading, competing, and even innovative interpretations of parables because of a few things.

Number one, different people, different perspectives can sometimes expose a dimension of a parable you hadn’t thought of. Number two, parables often have more than one meaning in the same way that a story has more than one meaning. It’s not like just a, this is a law. It’s a very simple black and white. There’s often a multitude of implications to a story. There’s a multitude of implications to a parable, and so it’s good to explore that. But having said that, it’s possible to have a misinterpretation of a parable. You can misunderstand a parable just as much as you can misunderstand a law. So the fact that there can be multiple right answers doesn’t mean that all answers are right or that all answers are equally valid or anything of the sort. That’s not a valid way of understanding parables.

People misunderstood Jesus’s parables and His figures of speech just as much as they misunderstood or disobeyed the law of Moses say. When Jesus says in John two, destroy this temple, and in three days, I’ll rebuild it, they take Him to mean very literally the temple in Jerusalem. That’s not the correct interpretation and we’re told that explicitly in John two that there are ways of misunderstanding a parable. And so yeah, it’s interesting, I suppose, but as we’re going to see it’s radically wrong because it presents God as the bad guy and the wicked servant as the hero of the story, and that is about as profoundly off the mark as an interpretation can get.

So I want to give Sister Barbara Reid’s kind of own words. I think Father Martin does a good job of summarizing her take, but just out of an abundance of fairness. So if you aren’t familiar with her, she’s the seventh president of Catholic Theological Union, and as her bio explains, she’s the general editor for the Wisdom Commentary Series, A 58-volume Feminist Commentary on the Bible. So you can kind of imagine, I think, the angle from which she approaches biblical matters. And as Martin says, she has this 2011 article called Unmasking Greed and she begins it by this prompt. “What can be done when one lives where the economic system is marked by deep inequity?” So it’s equity, not equality, it’s different people have different amounts of money. What can we do about an economic system where some people have more money than others?

Because as you can imagine, the parable of the talents really does not sit neatly with that. One has five talents, another has two, another has one. This inequity or inequality seems baked in. We’ll get into whether that’s actually God being unjust in a minute here, but that’s an interesting way to start the kind of exploration of this parable. Well, she answers one kind of response is Occupy Wall Street. Remember this is 2011, so that was still a relevant political kind of reference. Today’s parable offers another image of how an individual can take measures to undermine a system that allows the rich to become richer while the poor become poorer. I want to flag this and say, that’s not happening in this parable at all, that we don’t see the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.

As we’re going to see, the rich master is being generous without any apparent expectation of return. But even if you read it as him getting all the money and all the profit back and him becoming richer and richer, it’s pretty clear the poor are not becoming poorer. He’s got three servants and he gives the equivalent of a million dollars to the least of them, $2 million to another one, and $5 million to a third one. So if your idea of an economic system in which the poor get poorer is employees occasionally getting bonuses in the seven figures, sign me up for that kind of economic inequality. I would be happy to be one of the poor getting poorer, if by poorer you mean becoming a millionaire. But nevertheless, that’s her kind of read. And so she says, “An important key to understanding the parable is to keep in mind that Jesus did not live in a capitalist system in which it has thought that wealth can be increased by investment. Instead, people had a notion of limited good. There’s only so much wealth and any increase to one person takes away from another.

So Reid’s reading requires you to imagine that Jesus doesn’t understand that wealth isn’t zero sum, that people can actually become more prosperous without it impoverishing someone else. That’s one of the assumptions baked into this. A typical peasant would aim to have only enough to care for his family. One who had amassed large amounts for himself would be seen as greedy and wicked. In the parable, then, the third servant is the honorable one, right? The one Jesus calls wicked and slothful, Sister Barbara Reid calls honorable. Only he has refused to cooperate in the system by which his master continues to accrue huge amounts of money while others go wanting.

Reading the parable from this perspective, one sees that the man going on a journey is not a figure for God and the parable is not an exhortation for people to use their God-given talents to the full. So again, these are assumptions that have to be true for her to be right. Because if the man going on a journey is God, then she is celebrating a guy who resists God and is cast out for doing so. That kind of non-serviam, that’s not a good Catholic interpretation to say, wouldn’t the right interpretation of this parable be we should fight against Jesus? Like, no, no. That’s not a good take. It just isn’t a good take.

So she has to be right, that the man going on a journey is not a figure for God, and she has to be right, that the talents are not about the gifts and talents you’ve been given from God in order to defend the idea that this guy is honorable. Now notice, even if you are inclined to her view that this is all just about economic inequity and that it’s really just a critique of the economic system of the day from a limited perspective because they didn’t understand the way wealth accrual works. Even if you’re inclined to believe that, even in that scenario, it’s baffling to call the third servant honorable because he doesn’t go and take the money he’s been given by the master with no apparent strings attached and go and invest it in the poor. He doesn’t create a new social program or food kitchen or even just handed out on the street.

No, he buries it in a hole and gives it back to the rich guy who, according to Sister Reid, already has too much money. So even on that reading, it’s baffling that she’s read him as the honorable one because he’s so clearly presented as dishonorable and cowardly and is described that way both by himself and by the master. Nevertheless, this is her reading. And so she says, “While the latter, meaning using your gifts and talents, is an important thing for Christians to do, it was not likely to be the way Jesus’s first hearers understood the parables since talented did not have this metaphorical connotation in Greek.” I want to say three things in response to this.

First, the idea that the best way of interpreting Jesus’s parables is just what did His earliest listeners understand it to be, literally, the people in the room or on the hill listening to Him. It’s not a good hermeneutic because they regularly misunderstand Him, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear. Second, yeah, the idea that the only reason people don’t read it Sister Reid’s Way is because of the English word talent is a complete strawman of an argument. It’s clear from the passage, even if you’re not familiar with talent as a unit of currency, that he gives talents according to their ability. So if talent just means ability, he gives them abilities according to their ability, it doesn’t make sense and then it’s explicitly even in English mentioned as money, plus pretty much every Bible’s got a footnote explaining what this is. So the idea that everyone else is just reading it this way because of the English word, it strikes me as a very flimsy kind of argument.

But third, there is a wealth of early commentary on this passage, many times from people who speak Greek, sometimes natively, and don’t speak English where we have this word talent used in this way and they don’t interpret it the way Sister Reid claims that they would as just being, oh, this is obviously about money, very literally. Well, that’s not how the early Christian countries I’ve seen have interpreted it. Now, some of these are hundreds of years after Jesus, but nevertheless, they’re using the same language and interpreting the passage in the same way. And so for instance, St. John Chrysostom in his homily in Matthew says, “For the talents here, each person’s ability whether in the way of protection or in money or in teaching or in whatever thing of the kind.” Pretty straightforward. That’s exactly what everybody else reads it as today.

St. Jerome says, doubtless is human householder is none other than Christ.” In other words, the master, who Reid says isn’t Christ, he’s like, obviously, it is. When he’s about to ascend to the Father as a victor after the resurrection, he called the apostles and delivered to them the evangelical doctrine. So the gospel, those are the talents. And you might say, well, why do they get different amounts? Well, Jerome explains. Not because of Jesus’ lavishness or stinginess, but on account of the abilities of those who receive. And he gives an example of this. St. Paul talks about giving milk to those who are incapable of taking meat or solid food, that some people are more able to receive the gospel maybe because of their gifts and abilities, maybe just because of their openness to it. But some people are getting one talent’s worth, which is as we’re going to see a tremendous amount of the gospel, some get even more.

And that’s not based on God liking one more than the other, anything like that, but just based on how open are you to receiving the gospel. So that’s what Jerome takes it as. Obviously, the master isn’t literally a story about a guy who owns a business somewhere in Judea. It’s obviously representing Christ, and obviously, the talents aren’t literally about just money. This is about the spiritual good of the gospel. What are you doing with this gift of the gospel you’ve been given? St. Ambrose of Milan, the guy who helps to convert St. Augustine, similarly in the prologue to Book Five of Exposition of the Christian Faith, describes the five talents of the faith. We’ve been given this tremendous gift and he then says that he hopes to be able to say, Lord, you give me five talents, behold I’ve made another five talents, and then show the precious talents of your virtues, meaning by bringing other people into the life of virtue, into the life of grace, he can double by sharing this spiritual good.

This is a really important thing to note here. Remember earlier when Sister Reid talks about how people in the day didn’t understand economics very well, they didn’t realize that you could actually increase the overall amount of wealth in the world so that if one person got richer, it was just understood everybody else got poorer. That’s fair enough as an economic critique, there is a lot of that kind of thinking before capitalism because of just a misunderstanding of the way resources work. And for certain physical goods, it’s literally true. If I’ve got a dog and you say, I want to have your dog, I don’t know why just a dog, and I give you my dog, I don’t have my dog anymore. Or maybe we co-share the dog on Wednesdays and Thursdays. You could have the dog whatever. But whatever percent of ownership or possession of the dog you have, I lose that much.

So if you’ve got the dog a hundred percent of the time, I’ve got him 0%. It’s pretty simple. But now, that’s at a physical level. Any kind of physical good tends to work that way. But immaterial things, like grace, like ideas, like anything that isn’t like that, doesn’t work that way. And so that’s one of the reasons why these early Christians are interpreting it this way. If I’ve got an idea and I share that idea with you, I don’t have 50% of my idea, I still have a hundred percent of it. Now, you also have a hundred percent of it, so it’s doubled without any loss to me. It’s doubled. And the gospel works like this. If I’ve got a real and saving faith and through my encounter with you, bring you to a real and saving faith, I don’t lose my faith because now you’ve got it the way I would lose my dog once you got it. No, it’s not like that.

And so one of the reasons they’re reading the parable of the talents in this way, I would suggest, is because they realize that this isn’t looking like the economics of their day. This doesn’t look like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. There’s no depiction of that. That rather, they’ve received this thing and it’s flourished and it’s flourished through the encounter. It is described as trade in the parable. But through the back and forth, there’s been a flourishing. Well, that sometimes happens economically, but that’s much easier to see actually at the spiritual level. So hopefully that gives maybe a little insight perhaps into why they’re reading it this way rather than the way Sister Reid does.

But Saint Ambrose goes on to say that these are the talents which the Lord gives us spiritually to trade with. He’s very explicit that the virtues and the faith, that’s how we understand the parable of the talents. This is also true even in the acts of the Second Council of Constantinople, which says, “Our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, as we learn from the parable in the gospel, distributes talents to each man according to his ability and that the fitting time demands an account of the work done by every man.” It is about how are you using the gifts and talents God has given you?

Now, notice none of these writers speak English, because the English word talent doesn’t exist yet. And it doesn’t mean to. Let me give you an example in English. We have, in English, the parable of the coin, Luke 15. There’s a woman who has 10 coins. She loses one of it. She sweeps the house and seeks diligently until she finds it. And when she finds it, she throws a big party and says, “Rejoice with me, for I found the coin which I’d lost.” And no one reading that passage, I would venture, thinks that this is literally a story about a woman who lost some money and then found it and then throws a party about finding a coin. That doesn’t make any sense. You’d spend more money throwing the party than you would with the coin. You’d be losing money. No, pretty clearly this is a story about God seeking out the lost, and we get that even though in English the word coin refers to a certain amount of money, it doesn’t refer to a lost soul because we understand how metaphors work. We understand how parables work.

Well, I would suggest people in the first century, people who speak Greek also get those really basic ideas. And one of the things I would point to is the English word talent, because as Father Martin mentions, the word talent comes from this parable. This is much later, this is like the mid-15th century that people trying to describe a special natural ability, aptitude, or gift committed to one for use and improvement thought, oh, we’ve got a word for that from the Bible, talent. So in other words, they were already reading it in that way, and that’s where the English word comes from. Reid’s argument seems to be, and Martin seems even more explicitly to be saying, people just think that this is what it means because they get confused by the English word talent. But no, no, we don’t interpret scripture that way because of the word talent. The word talent exists in English because we interpret scripture this way and we did in Greek, we do in Latin, we do in every language under the sun because that’s what the biblical context is really clearly suggesting this passage is about.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s get the biblical context right. Because the parable begins by saying it is like this, and you might be saying, what is this it? And I already kind of alluded to that before, but this takes place in Matthew 25. In Matthew 24 and Matthew 25, Jesus talks about the end times. He talks about what’s going to happen after He ascends to heaven and then comes back at an unknown day or time. So in Matthew 24:43 to 44, He compares it to a thief coming in the night and says that you must also be ready for the son of man is coming in an hour you do not expect. Then in verse 45 to 47, He compares His return to a master encountering a wise and faithful servant whom the master has set over his household to give them their food at the proper time.

So we’re already using this language of Christ as the master encountering his servant. And then He says, “Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find so doing. Truly I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions.” Now remember that passage because that’s exactly what happens in the next chapter in the parable of the talents. But he’s just saying very clearly for those who may be unable to understand how parable works, let me just spell this out for you. Then, in Matthew 25, which happens right after this, He compares it to the 10 maidens waiting for the unexpected coming of the bridegroom. They don’t know when he’s going to come and then he arrives. This is very clearly talking about Jesus, the bridegroom of the church. And that goes from verse one to verse 13.

Verse 13 says, “Watch therefore for neither the day nor the hour, for it will be as when a man going on a journey called his servants …”, and then he begins the parable of the talents. So you can see contextually, it’s just end times, end times, end times, end times. And very clearly, He’s describing Himself as one who is going away and will come back at an unknown time, like a thief in the night, like a bridegroom coming at some point in the night, you don’t know when. Like the master who returns to see if his servants are being faithful and doing what they’re supposed to do. And then, He compares Himself to a man going on a journey who calls his servants and entrusted them his property and then he goes away and then he comes back at an unknown time.

And so when Sister Reid says that doesn’t represent Jesus, she has to ignore all of the foregoing context because it very clearly and very obviously does. When Saint Jerome says “Doubtless, this is Jesus,” how could you possibly miss that? And so the guy fighting against the master isn’t the hero of the story, he’s a lazy and worthless servant. He’s a terrible Christian. That’s not the guy we’re supposed to be rooting for, emulating, and the guy we’re supposed to be fighting isn’t the mean old master. The master is God. And if you imagine him as a mean old master, the point of this story is, you’re getting him wrong. That’s the biblical context.

As Catholics, we’re also blessed with what we might call the liturgical context. I want to give the liturgical key to the parable. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, on every Sunday, this is just a helpful thing to know. The cycle of readings is called the lectionary, has the gospels and it’s in a three-year cycle, but then there’s also the first reading, which is an Old Testament reading, is thematically linked in some way every Sunday to the gospel. So a really helpful thing you can do is to ask, what does this first reading have to do with the gospel? The second reading is on its own cycle, so it only sometimes intersects. But the first reading in the gospel, there’s always some thematic link. And so if you want to understand one or the other reading better, you can ask, how are they related? And that’s really helpful, I think, this time because the first reading seems completely unrelated at first.

I’ll use the lectionary version called the N-A-B-R-E. The first reading is Proverbs 31 about a worthy wife. And so it begins by saying, “When one finds a worthy wife, her value is far beyond pearls. Her husband entrusting his heart to her has an unfailing prize. She brings him good and not evil all the days of her life.” And then there’s a lengthy description about how she is. She’s got flax and she’s going to the marketplace. She’s doing all these things and she just seems amazing. And then it says, “Charm is deceptive and beauty, fleeting. The woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her a reward for her labors and let her works praise her at the city gates.”

So you might be saying, why that reading? What does that have to do with the gospel? Because the gospel, we already heard it, but the lectionary version, slightly different translation than the one I’ve been using, says a man going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. “To one he gave five talents, to another, two, to a third, one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.” So what do those two things have in common? Well, this is where I am greatly indebted to Father Anthony Ouellette, because he highlighted that you have this common theme and this common language of entrustment.

Proverbs 31 says, “Her husband entrusting his heart to her has an unfailing prize.” Matthew 25 says, “A man entrusted his possessions to his servants.” And so the point of Proverbs 31 is not, here’s a literal checklist of everything you need to be doing as a wife or everything to look for in a wife. If your wife doesn’t know how to trade in flax, you can cut her some flax. I’m not going to apologize for that pun. The point is, she’s received the love of her husband and the trust of her husband and it’s born great fruit. She knows she is loved, she knows she’s trusted, and she lives in that love and lives in that trust. And then, she’s faithful to it and then she’s to be celebrated and praised and rewarded for her faithfulness. That’s what Proverbs 31 is actually about.

And if you go back and read, it, pretty clearly, that’s what it’s about. Once you get past all of the details about the life in the times of Proverbs 31, which often looks very different than life in today, I mean, today if you were describing the worthy wife or the ideal wife, she might be doing very different things, but the point is still the same. She’s receiving this love, she’s living in it, she’s receiving this trust, she’s faithful to it and is bearing great fruit, and we should celebrate that. Well, likewise, the master has given a tremendous trust to his servants by giving them these talents, these huge sums of money. And this parable is about, how do they live in that? How do they receive the love of God? How do they receive the trust of God?

And how are we, the servants, being faithful or unfaithful to that trust? Because if we’re being faithful, we know, like the woman in Proverbs 31, we’ll be celebrated and praised for it. And we know, like the third servant in Matthew 25, that if we aren’t, we don’t belong in the kingdom of God. That’s what this parable is about. It’s about entrustment. And once you have that key, I would suggest it makes total sense to the parable and helps to answer it in a way that … Father Martin offers the majority of the minority interpretation and in neither of them does he talk about entrustment, neither of them does he talk about the real key, the real theme of what the parable is talking about. So even in all of the different kind of interpretations he proposes, he never gets to the heart of it. And Sister Reid’s interpretation is not just missing the market, it’s radically against trusting the Father. It’s radically against trusting the master because she views the master, he represents probably Jesus, as the bad guy.

So let’s ask the obvious question. Is the master unjust? Because the inequity that she highlights, I can see where someone would get that, right? He gives five talents to one, two to another, one talent to the third. But think about this in terms of entrustment, he gives to each according to his ability. He knows what you’re capable of and He gives you something tremendous. Now, the other thing to notice is something Father Martin says, A talent is something like a million bucks. And so Arland Hultgren talks about how a talent is 6,000 denarii. A denarius is a day’s wages for a common laborer. You work roughly 300 days a year. So 6,000 talents, you’re looking at about 20 years worth of money. So take whatever you make a year and multiply that by 20, and that’s what the least of the three is getting while the master goes on a trip.

So if you make 50,000, I’m taking that because it’s a nice round number, you get a million dollars, adjust accordingly. But imagine getting 20 years salary from your boss because he’s going to go out of town. And then imagine complaining that the guy next to you got five times that. That would sound ridiculous, right? Who cares if he got five times that? You didn’t deserve to get a denarius and you got 6,000. You’ve been given this tremendous thing and you’re going to complain that someone else got an even bigger bonus than you did? There’s something we’re supposed to receive in that. This third guy does probably deal with some jealousy. The jealousy is completely and wholly unfounded because he’s just jealous of the generosity of the master. This is a recurring theme you’ll notice in Jesus’s parables.

The older brother’s jealous of the younger brother in the parable of the prodigal son. You’ve got the workers who come at different times of the day and all of them get paid and then they get jealous because some of them worked longer than the others did. So this notion of jealousy over spiritual goods is something that Jesus is constantly dismissing and saying, you don’t have any right to be. As He says in one of the parables, that last one I mentioned, “Do I not have the right to be generous with my own money?” This is about the generosity of God, not about the selfishness of God or the injustice of God. But the point here is that if you are looking at what your neighbor has, in terms of gifts and talents, you are missing the fact that you’ve been given enormous and incredible gifts and talents.

The second thing to notice here is they’re given according to their ability and they’re judged according to what they’ve been given. So the first guy has five talents and he’s praised for coming in with five more, saves 10 talents. The second guy is praised in literally word for word, the exact same language for coming in with four talents because he doubled what he had from two to four. But if the guy who had five talents had come in with four talents, he wouldn’t be getting praised for that. He would’ve somehow lost one of the talents he’d been given, so they’re not judged on the same, they’re judged perfectly justly because God judges them, not based on what could your neighbor have done, but what could you have done with the gifts God gave to you? So when you’re feeling jealous about, oh, well my neighbor’s got all these gifts and talents, well, your neighbor will be judged for how well or how poorly he uses those gifts and talents. You will be judged for how well or poorly you use the gifts and talents God has given you.

So what gifts and talents has God given to you? Right? Hopefully that’s clear. This is perfectly and completely just. They’re both being judged on did you double the thing that I gave you, which is equally possible for each of the three of them. If the third servant had doubled the one talent he had, he would’ve gotten the same words of praise and entered into the joy of the master for coming back with two talents. That’s all he had to do. In Luke 12:48, Jesus says, “To whom much has been given, much will be expected. To whom more is given, more will be expected.” No one has little, everybody has a lot, some people have even more. There’s no rich and poor in the life of grace. There’s rich and richer. And so if you are spending your time, rather than using your riches, complaining that you’re a millionaire instead of a billionaire, you’re squandering it. And don’t squander it. That’s just the beginning. Is a master, then a greedy capitalist or a greedy proto pre-capitalist, whatever you want to say?

There’s something like that in the critique of the third servant that Sister Reid holds up. Matthew 25:24 to 25. The third servant says to the master, “I knew you to be a hard man reaping where you did not sow, gathering where you did not winnow. So I was afraid and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” That language is really intentional and really important because only the third servant is viewing the matter in this way. He is viewing the talent not as a gift, but as an investment that he doesn’t get to keep any of, that he has to return. And so he describes it as your talent. You will notice in comparison, the other two servants don’t describe it that way. And in fact, the master doesn’t describe it that way. He says your talent, and then he says, “Here you have what is yours.” He doesn’t take any ownership. He doesn’t accept. He does not receive the entrustment because he’s expecting, you just gave me this money to just give back to you. And that is a terrible way of understanding it.

How do we know it’s a terrible way? Well, one way, the response to the master. He takes the talent from him and doesn’t actually take it back. He gives it to the guy who has 10 talents. And I’m reminded here of Romans 11:29 where it says that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable, that God gives us these gifts as gifts. He doesn’t want you to just say, I reject this gift, it’s yours. He knows it’s His, but He’s giving it to you. And so the other way you can see this is by comparing the response of the two good servants. The one who had five talents says, “Master, you delivered to me five talents. Here, I’ve made five talents more.” He takes ownership. You gave this to me and I did something with it. He doesn’t say, it’s yours, take it. And I always thought this, here I’ve made five talents more, was like, here, take it all back.

And that’s certainly one way to read it, but his Father Ouellette pointed out, that doesn’t actually say that in the text. Instead in verse 21, master says, “Well done, good and faithful servant, you’ve been faithful over a little. I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” Now, in the parallel parable of the talents in Luke, which is slightly different, the one who is faithful has a coin and it multiplies fivefold and then he’s given authority over five cities. He just becomes a co-ruler with the master. He shares, once you see through the parable, he shares in the royal authority of Jesus Christ, that Christ is the ruler of the world and He promises some share in this governance of the cosmos to the saints. So for instance in Luke 22, when he tells the 12, they’ll sit on the 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.

He shares in His kingship with the faithful servants, that the master isn’t saying, I’m in this caste and you are in that caste. No, the generosity of the master is not just economic. He’s sharing. He’s inviting into the joy of your master. Come and share in being master with God. That is an astonishing generosity. That’s a generosity that almost sounds like blasphemous, to say the saints share in the divine life of Christ. We’d have to say something like St. Peter said, so we become partakers of the divine nature. We reign with Him. All of these very explicit promises about the glory of the saints are contained here in parable form. And this is not about, okay, you did some work for me, now give me my money back and you can go home. No, he’s sharing the wealth with the faithful servants.

This is the opposite of how the third servant understands him. This is the opposite about how Sister Barbara Reid understands Him and that is to fundamentally misunderstand this beauty of what Christ is actually inviting us into, that the gifts and talents we’ve been given are ours. They’re a gift, not just alone. They’re a gift and He wants us to flourish for our good as well as His own and to share in His joy. This then leads at the end of the parable to a line that I would suggest we misread. “For everyone who has, more will be given and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Now, that sounds like the inequity, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So we might read it as saying the haves versus the have nots in the sense of he who has a lot will get even more. He who has a little will lose even what he has. And I suggest that is not what those words actually said.

The two categories were not those who have a lot and those who have a little. The two categories were those who have. Have you received it or not? Do you realize this is a gift you’ve been given by God? Or are you like the third servant who doesn’t have it? He says, this is yours. He buries it. He doesn’t take any possession, doesn’t take any ownership, and so it’s taken away from him. That’s this strange paradox of the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. The third servant is the embodiment of that. He’s been given a talent, he goes and buries it. Even if he’d been given 10 talents so he had the most, if he goes and buries it, instead of saying, I’ve received this from you, you’ve delivered it to me, I’m going to do something with it, then he doesn’t really have them in the sense that we’re talking about here. He has not accepted that he’s been entrusted something by God.

Now, that language is really rich, that language of entrustment. So Father Simeon, formerly known as Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, has a brilliant, I believe, four volume series called Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, which is just a commentary on the gospel of Matthew and it’s well worth it, especially, I would say, volume one, The Infancy Narratives in Matthew one and two, would be great Advent reading if you’re looking for something. In any case, when he talks about this parable, he says the sentence he entrusted his possessions to them is reminiscent of the loving Father’s statement to his older child and the parable of the prodigal son. “Son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours.” I like this comparison a lot because I think that is the appropriate analogy.

In the parable of the prodigal son. You’ve got two sons. The younger son recognizes the father as father, demands the inheritance, goes off and squanderers it. Says he’s not worthy to be a son and so he wants to just be a servant, but he’s received as a son and he accepts what it is to be a son. The older brother never leaves home exactly, but he also doesn’t want to come inside the house. When we find him, he’s out in the fields working like a worker, not living like a son. And then when he hears the joyful celebration, he won’t enter into the joy of the master. He won’t enter into his father’s joy. He angrily stays outside. And so just as the father had run out to the younger son, now, the father runs out to the older son and the older son refuses to call him father, and instead, talks about how much he’s worked for him and hasn’t gotten any bonuses.

And meanwhile, this son of yours who he refuses to call brother, has come home and you’ve slaughtered from the fatted calf. And the father recognizes here that what’s happened is the older brother no longer sees the father as father. He sees him as a cruel taskmaster. And so he says, “Son, all that I have is yours.” And then he reminds him of being the brother to the brother who’s returned. He’s restoring that relationship. Well, the same thing in a similar way is going on here. The third servant is viewing without foundation. The father is this horrible task master, the master here, again, probably Christ not the father, but viewing the master as a horrible task master rather than as a loving Lord who wants to share his lordship with his servants. That’s, I would suggest, a key.

And Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis goes on to say that this sentence, he entrusted his possessions to them, is reminiscent also of Jesus’s own words of quiet joy to His heavenly Father. All mine are yours and yours are mine. Beautiful. That Jesus receives the entrustment of the whole world from the Father and He knows what it is to be loved and trusted by the Father, and He shares this love and trust with us and He’s the model for how do you respond fruitfully, faithfully to being loved and trusted in this way. And He shows this. He lives in it. All mine are yours and yours are mine. We want to be able to say that with God. As strange as that is. When the father says to the older son, all that I have is yours, that’s the same kind of language of all mine are yours and yours are mine, that do you take seriously that God wants to give you everything.

This is the incredible thing, right? So he says, enter into the joy of your master, but he also says you have been faithful over a little. I will set you over much. The little was $5 million. The little was an unspeakably large amount of money, it would take a hundred years to earn. And to the master, that’s nothing. That’s so small for the glory that awaits. This is what I think we don’t understand about the saints or even about our own destiny, if we’re faithful to God. That it’s so far beyond what we could possibly imagine. So that’s worth, I think, chewing on because otherwise we end up with this totally skewed vision where the master is somehow the bad guy for wanting to do this.

So with that, we can ask the obvious question, was the third servant righteous or was he a coward? Father James Martin, I wouldn’t give him credit here, because although he presents Barbara Reid’s interpretation, he acknowledges that Father John Donahue, another New Testament scholar, has an opposing view. He says that the servant misjudges the master as a hard man and there’s nothing to justify the charge. We’ve already seen that. And he says, to entrust such a large sum demonstrates an almost exorbitant level of trust and generosity. Additionally, the third servant names his motivation for hiding the talent as fear. So that’s the closest, I think, Father Martin gets to getting it right, that entrustment is actually the theme here, that the exorbitant level of trust and generosity is what we’re really supposed to be understanding here, that God trusts us tremendously.

And so Father Donahue is right on the money. And so in his book The Gospel’s Parable, Father Donahue says it was his timidity, the third servant’s, [inaudible 00:48:11] his downfall, which was not warranted by anything known directly about the master. There’s no reason we’re given in the text to believe that the master is the bad guy the third servant makes him out to be. Instead, the servant created a master of his own making, rather than letting the master be himself. And that’s very clear from the text itself. So remember the third servant’s words, he says, “I was afraid and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” He doesn’t say, I oppose the economic system in which we live in the first century and I long for the days of a proto socialist utopia. He doesn’t say anything like that. There’s none of this.

He’s just, I was afraid. I didn’t want to be judged for the talent you gave me, so I went and hid it in the ground. And in response to that, the master calls him a wicked and slothful servant, not, oh you dangerous revolutionary with your bold ideas. He’s like, no, no, you’re just wicked and slothful. Sloth here doesn’t just mean laziness, it’s not being the person God made you to be. And so he is wicked and slothful. He goes, “You knew that I reap where I have not sowed and gathered where I’ve not winnowed, then you ought to have invested my money at the bankers. And in my coming, I should have received what was my own with interest.”

Now, I was confused by this when I read this, not just the first time, repeatedly. And Father Anthony Ouellette pointed out that he’s basically accepting this. Like, fine, you want to view me as the bad guy. Even by those terms, you should have responded better than you did, because I could have put my own money in the ground. And what’s more I could have put my own money in the bank and gotten something for it. So if you say, well, this is your money and I don’t want to lose it, put it in the bank, do something with it. Don’t just bury it in the ground. And so another way to think about this is to ask, well, why did the master give this talent to me rather than putting it in the bank? If he gave me a million dollars, he could have easily put it in the bank and made interest. What’s he wanting me to do with it? And the clear answer is something other than burying it in the ground.

This should cause us to contemplate very seriously how we’ve been blessed by God. So if earlier you’re saying maybe you don’t have five talents, maybe you’ve got one, that’s still a tremendous richness. So the first step is what talents do I have from God? The second is, why did God give me those talents? How can I use them? Because he gave them to me for a reason, so am I making use of them or am I burying them? Now, how you use them is going to depend on a lot of things. Some talents take a longer time to cultivate or to use. They may be more situational. Fine. But how am I using or planning to use or trying to use the talents God has given to me? How am I cultivating them? How am I investing them? What am I doing with them?

And Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis talks about this. He says, “Our greatest talent, treasure is our ability to love. Really, the gift of charity is the highest one. And in this enterprise, the champion is the greatest risk-taker, which means the one most willing to invest himself where the odds appear most against him.” Once you think about it in that way, this is not just about money, this is about how well are we using the gifts we’ve been given, most especially, how well are we loving God and loving neighbor. Then it becomes clear that, yes, your love can grow. Your love grows in part by sharing it. And so if you’re not sharing it, but instead are burying it, that is surefire spiritual death. And that makes sense of why the third servant is treated as he is.

Now, when I was giving the biblical context before in Matthew 24 and 25, I looked at everything that led up to the parable of the talents. But it’s worth pondering what comes right after the parable of the talents. In the next verse, Jesus talks about how the son of man will come in glory and He will divide the nations, the sheep and the goats. The sheep, He will praise, the goats, He will curse. And it’s worth looking at the words He has for the goats. He says, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” And He doesn’t tell them all the bad things they did, He tells them all the good things they failed to do. Sobering words. “I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison, and you did not visit me.

And they will answer, “Lord, when did we see the hungry or thirsty or stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to thee?” And Jesus says, He’s going to reply, “Truly I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” Again, He’s only talking about the good they failed to do. And for that, they’ll go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. If we can’t see that the third servant is the goat, and not Sister Reid, greatest of all time, goat, like the bad goat, the one going to hell because he has not loved appropriately, then we’ve missed the whole point. God has given you something. The one thing I know you’re not meant to do with it is bury it.

So I want to give two words a warning here. Number one, we live in an age where it’s viewed as impolite to acknowledge the gifts God has given you. We are totally wrecked with the sin of false humility, which St. Augustine calls grievous pride. That pretending to be small when you’re great is not true humility. And the example I always give, and forgive me if you’ve heard this before, if you give your child a car on their 16th birthday, beautiful, new, shiny sports car, I don’t know why you’d do that, but you do. And your kid says, “It’s a piece of garbage”, that is not humility, that is ingratitude. Likewise, if God has given you $5 million and you say, “Eh, I don’t really have anything. My gifts and talents are garbage.” That is not humility, that is ingratitude to the giver of the gift. And so true humility involves recognizing that everything you have, as much as it is, came from God.

It’s not prideful to say God has given me many great gifts. That is thankful, which is virtually the opposite. Because thankfulness is upward looking and gratitude. Pride is downward looking and contempt. And so the danger we run into is the person with five talents buries four of them so no one else will feel jealous, and that is gravely sinful. So step one, what talents do I have? And be honest, don’t be falsely humble. Step two, how does God want me to use those talents? And I can’t answer that question for you, but I can tell you the one answer that Jesus makes very clear, it’s don’t bury it. Don’t do nothing. It’s easy to become paralyzed by the sheer number of choices we face in the modern world.

I hate Cheesecake Factory. And one of the things I hate is they have a phone book for a menu that is way too long, way too complicated. And since I haven’t really found a dish there that I’m crazy about, it’s been a long time since I’ve been there. Sorry, Cheesecake Factory. It just becomes overwhelming. And so you just sit there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what in the world to order. Where you go to a menu that has one page and you think, oh, okay, there’s three things on here. I know which one I want. In the modern world, we’re face of this. It’s called the paradox of choice. And in the face of the paradox of choice, we can become paralyzed. And Jesus warns against this.

Maybe you don’t find the single greatest thing you could have possibly done with your gift or talent, but you did something with it. You were open to whatever God had in store for you. You were looking for opportunities to use your talent and you did. God rewards that faithfulness, whereas the person who sits around and does nothing because they’re waiting for the perfect opportunity to come around and it never does, that person has been given very stern words of warning that they are risking damnation.

Okay, so in light of all this, what does Jesus want us to see here and here? I hope I haven’t been too hard on Father Martin. I think it was a bad idea for him to promote Sister Reid’s interpretation, but I think he’s got some good stuff that he is bringing in. And one of the things that he brings in is he asks the right question. What does Jesus mean for us to see here? And then he says, which interpretation is correct? Well, he gives the context, as I did, that this is the third so-called Parable of Watchfulness about a servant tending to his master’s house ,parable about bridesmaids who failed to be prepared. And then you’ve got this one. In a way, the emphasis is less on the servants and more on the return of the master. As such, it has an apocalyptic or end time focus.

Well, if you read it that way about the return of the master, then you have to say, Sister Reid is totally wrong in saying that the master isn’t Jesus because the whole point of the apocalypse is Jesus our Lord and master will return. So he just shrugs and says, whether you like the minority or majority reading, the parable is about being ready. God’s coming, for which we’re to prepare, happens in three ways, the end of our lives, the final coming of Christ, and also the ways that God enters our lives each day. I like this part a lot because those are absolutely three ways we should be discerning. How am I prepared for my death? How am I prepared for the return of Christ? And how am I prepared to meet Christ today? And the poor Eucharist, wherever that may be, where do I find Jesus Christ?

And then he says, so whether you want to focus on the interpretation of Barbara Reid or John Donahue, the main question is this. How do you want to live a life focused on Jesus, because one day He will return. And so again, this may sound like quibble. I don’t think it is, because Reid and Donahue are presenting not just different interpretations, but antithetical ones. Donahue, or at least the majority interpretation, I haven’t read Donahue’s, but from the brief bit that Father Martin mentions seems like he gets it. The master is Christ. The third servant is evil and wicked and slothful and we’re shown not to be like him. Reid says the opposite, the master isn’t Christ, the third servant is honorable and we should be like him. Those are not two equally acceptable interpretations of the parable. They’re just completely opposite. It’s like saying, well, there’s Jesus or there’s Barabbas, just choose one of them and follow. No, that’s not how that works. They’re actually bad interpretations. In viewing Jesus as the wicked guy in the parable is about interpretation.

So to conclude, number one, what talents have I been given by God? Don’t let false humility stop you from doing a good inventory. Number two, why did He give them to me instead of doing otherwise? He didn’t have to, right? And so number three, what are some concrete ways I can employ those talents today and through my life in the service of God and neighbor? So hopefully, this is a good tee-up for Thanksgiving. Hopefully you can see why I thought it was important to release this today so that those of you who are celebrating Thanksgiving here in the US can have new cause to be grateful to God, new cause to say, wow, God has given me so much and I’m grateful for it. I’m thankful for it, and I want to do something with it.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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