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| A small business owner in an office with a bunch of yarn and sewing machines. Image source. |
Continuing our series on the book of Matthew, let's look at Matthew 25:14-30, which is typically referred to as "The Parable of the Talents."
Go over and read it.
So, we have here a parable about the kingdom of heaven, which uses a metaphor related to business/ investment/ being an entrepreneur. These servants who received the "bags of gold" or "talents" were instructed to put that money to work to earn more money. (The footnote says "a talent was worth about 20 years of a day laborer’s wage"- we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here.)
The thing that strikes me about this story is that when you make an investment, or use capital to start a business, there is always risk. There is always the risk that you will lose the money you invested. There is always the risk that your business will fail. And inevitably you will make mistakes when you're just starting out- maybe you will realize in hindsight that some of the things you spent money on were actually not worth it. And there's an element of luck involved- maybe people you hire turn out to be better or worse than expected, maybe some celebrity tweets about your product and suddenly you have tons of customers but then they all forget about you a week later, maybe new government regulations suddenly mess up your whole business strategy.
There's always risk. There will definitely be things that go wrong.
So the first servant, with his 5 bags of gold (hundreds of thousands of dollars) earned 5 more. And the second servant, with his 2 bags of gold (hundreds of thousands of dollars) earned 2 more. And both are rewarded by the master. Their businesses are successful. They did what the master wanted them to do. However, this isn't the whole story. You only see the result- 5 talents earned 5 more- but you don't see all the steps, all the little decisions, the mistakes, the things that would have worked better if they had been done differently (though perhaps no one could have known that- hindsight is 20/20).
I feel like, for me, thinking about how to make the world better and build the kingdom of heaven, it's easy to get stuck on those details. What if I donate to a charity, but then they don't use the money well? What if I look up their financial records and the percentage they spend on "administrative costs" seems high- does that mean it's an ineffective charity? What if I help organize some event, but then it has problems? What if I try to help people but it actually makes things worse?
On the one hand, those are valid concerns. We should definitely be honest and realistic about how good intentions aren't enough, and sometimes charity projects do more harm than good. We should learn from their mistakes. We should do our research. We should listen to the people we want to help and find out what they actually need, rather than forcing our own ideas on them.
But we shouldn't become paralyzed by this fear of taking risks. Nothing you do will ever be perfect, but don't let that stop you. You can still make the world better and participate in bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth.
The third servant was too afraid to even try. He hid the money in the ground, and simply gave it back to the master when the master returned. This servant took no risks at all, and the master was angry at him for it- calling him "You wicked, lazy servant!" The master said he should have at least put the money in the bank to earn interest.
My interpretation of this bit is, if you have high enough income that you are able to donate to charity, but you feel like you have to analyze everything and pick the number one magical most effective charity, and you worry about it and never actually end up doing anything... no, don't do that. At least pick a charity and set up automatic monthly donations. It feels inadequate to just do that- I mean, yes, it is inadequate- but at least it's better than nothing.
(I realize I've given several examples about "building the kingdom of heaven" in terms of donating to charity, but there are lots of things you can do to build the kingdom of heaven. Anything that helps people who need help, makes the world better, etc. Supporting your friends, taking care of your family. Actually, the next parable we'll look at is the parable of the sheep and the goats, which does indeed give practical instructions for what we should do.)
So overall, my point is, if you want to make the world better, don't be so worried about taking risks and making mistakes that you just take no action at all. Inevitably you will make mistakes and mess things up and be inefficient sometimes. That's just the way it is. The master in the parable has no problem with that, because the first and second servants were very successful when you look at the big picture.
A few more things I want to mention about this parable:
The third servant tells the master he was afraid because "I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed." (The master seems to agree with this description.) Back when I was evangelical, I always got stuck on this verse- Is it saying the master is cheating and stealing? Isn't the master supposed to be God? What on earth is happening here??? I would get stuck because I viewed bible study as, like, I am going to read this and understand the whole thing and get the message that the author "meant" when they wrote it. So if overall the passage made sense to me, and I had an understanding of "what it meant", but there was one weird verse that didn't seem to fit at all, well that would be a huge problem.
That's not how I view the bible now, as an ex-evangelical Christian feminist. I think people can interpret the bible a lot of different ways. I am not here to tell you what it "actually" means or what the author "really meant" by this passage- I am just telling you my opinion on it from a Christian feminist perspective. I totally recognize that my ideas are not "what the author meant"- really, it's not important to me to discover "what the author meant." (I think I need to make this clear here on my blog.) So I find a part that is meaningful to me, and I blog about that, and if there are some other parts of the passage that I kind of ignore, well, it's okay. I don't fool myself into believing that I really understand the whole thing and know what the author meant by every single part. And therefore, it doesn't bother me if some parts are weird and don't make sense to me.
For what it's worth, though, here's my interpretation of the "you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed": Things that happen in the real world don't really follow a simple cause-and-effect like "good person does good thing for good reasons and the result is good, bad person does bad thing for bad reasons and the result is bad." Sometimes you do something, but someone else gets the credit for it. Sometimes something bad happens, but a few people happen to benefit from it (innocently- I don't mean they purposely caused the bad thing to happen). In the real world, all these good and bad intentions and results are woven together, inseparable. And I don't really think that's a good thing- I think it's an example of how the world is flawed- but it just is what it is. And the kingdom of heaven is also like that, because it's built by us in this flawed reality.
Take the life of Jesus, for example. The genealogy in Matthew 1 points out a few key women who were in Jesus' family line; one of them was "Uriah's wife" (Bathsheba). Yes, remember that whole thing, where David raped Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, then married her, their baby died... and then later they had a baby named Solomon, who is an ancestor of Jesus?
So if David had never raped Bathsheba and murdered Uriah, Jesus would have turned out different. (In some small way.) It was still a really bad thing that David did. (I don't want to hear any "But it was actually a good thing/ had a silver lining because look at these good things that happened later as an indirect result.") But what is supposed to happen- anyone whose ancestors got together because of rape and/or murder shouldn't do anything good with their life, because then someone can say their success is a "result" of that historical rape/murder? Probably all of us have that in our family tree somewhere. It just is what it is. It's not a good thing, but that's just how the real world works.
And one more part in this parable I want to mention: "So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them." I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems to be stating the general principle of "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", which is indeed how the power structures of the real world work. But, that shouldn't be true in the kingdom of heaven, right? What about "the last will be first, and the first will be last"?
I know the parable of the talents is using money as a metaphor for building the kingdom of heaven- and the money actually belongs to the master, not the servants- so taking the money from the disobedient servant and giving it to the most successful servant isn't really the same thing as a literal rich person finding new ways to exploit literal poor people. Not sure what it is a metaphor for, though. A possible complicating factor is how, in the parable, the master (God, I guess) is the one who gives the money to the servants in the first place (and later gives the third servant's money to the first servant), but I don't conceptualize the real world as "God blessed you with this money/ resources/ abilities/ *cough* white privilege"- I think it's just luck. And if you start down that road of "God intentionally decided that I should have these things that other people don't have" then it only leads to bad places.
So I don't have a good interpretation to give you about the part where the master takes the gold away from the third servant. (Feel free to leave a comment about it if you have something to share!) But, like I said, it doesn't bother me, because I am not coming at the bible from a perspective of "I am going to understand what the author really meant in this passage."
So, in summary: The parable of the talents uses imagery about being an entrepreneur and making investments, as a metaphor for the way Jesus wants us to build the kingdom of heaven. If you have more money and resources, then you should contribute more. You have the opportunity to do more good- so use it. Also, there is always risk when someone starts a business or invests money- and there is also risk if you set out to take actions that actually make a difference in the world. Inevitably, you will make mistakes. But don't let that fear stop you, like it stopped the third servant. The master rewarded the servants for the big picture of how much good they did, and didn't pay any attention to the mistakes they made along the way.
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Related:
The Parable of the Living Wage
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This post is part of a series on the gospel of Matthew.
Previous post: I don't believe in a literal "Jesus coming back." But, be ready. (Matthew 25:1-13)
Click here to go to the beginning of the series.
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