Whose Talents Are They?

Sermon preached by the Dean of Wells at the Cathedral Eucharist on the Second Sunday before Advent

1 Thessalonians 5 v 1 – 11 Matthew 25 v 14 – 30

Whose talents are they?

Once upon a time there was a girl, an only daughter much loved by her mother. The mother died and the father remarried and his new wife gave birth to two more children. They didn’t like their stepsister and used to make her do the most horrible jobs in the house. One day the prince of the kingdom invited everyone to a ball. The girl had no clothes to wear to the ball though her two sisters had beautiful dresses. How the girl longed to go to the ball; but she was left cleaning dishes and washing floors. And then a fairy godmother appears and miraculously provides a beautiful dress and transport to the ball. There she dances with the prince and he falls in love with her. But she has to be home by midnight and in her haste to leave drops her slipper. The prince takes the slipper and tries to find who it belongs to because he wants to marry the girl with whom he has been dancing. All the girls in the kingdom would like to marry the prince and especially the two stepsisters but their feet will not fit the slipper. Finally they turn to the girl in ragged clothes in the kitchen and to everyone’s surprise the shoe fits. She marries the prince and they live happily everafter.

I am sure that most of you will have realised that I am givingan outline of the story of Cinderella. Like all great stories it can be told in different ways and the joy is in the details of the way that it is told. Variants upon the Cinderella story have appeared in a wide range of cultures. If you want a really good modern retelling of it I can recommend Philip Pullman’s collection of many such stories in ‘Grimm Tales for young and old’.

Stories like Cinderella work at a variety of levels. It can be seen as a love story in which downtrodden Cinderella meets the man of her dreams. It can be read as a reversal of status in which the sisters who have been horrible to Cinderella get their come-uppance and have to cope with seeing their stepsister move from the kitchen hearth to the royal palace. Some therapists see the whole story as a profound study of the destructive power of envy, what it is to envy and what it is to be envied, and how that is played out in the life of a family.

The point that I am making is that stories have many interpretation and we should not think that only one of the interpretations is right. The more profoundly the story connects with the depth of the human condition – in this case with grief, poverty and wealth, love and envy – the more the number of interpretations that will be generated by the readers.

Now the same richness of reading is true of many of the stories in the Bible and especially of those stories of Jesus that we think of as parables. This morning I want to take the story we have just heard read by Juliette Hulme, the cathedral school chaplain, and offer two very different interpretations of it. But first let me remind you again of that story. It is usually known as the parable of the talents. In this story there is a rich man who is setting off on a journey and who entrusts his property to his slaves whilst he is away. To those whom he judges to be most able he gives five talents, to the least able one talent. He is away a long time and whilst he is away those with five talents and two talents do some trading and increase the amount of money that the rich man has. But the one who has only one talent buries it in the ground. When the rich man returns and does his accounts for the year the one with five talents has produced five new talents and the one given two talents has made two more. But the one given one talent has only the one talent to give back. So the rich man rewards and praises the two slaves who have used their talents to make more money and is furious with the one who has buried the talent in the ground, taking even that talent away from him and throwing him into outer darkness.

Now the usual moral taken from the story is that the rich man stands in the place of God. He commends those who have made good use of their talents and condemns the one who has failed to take any risks. So, the parable is an exhortation to make the most of your talents, whether you are an accountant or a musician, or a carer or a teacher or a student. Aspire to do more, to develop, stretch yourselves and take risks, see what you can achieve, not only for yourself but for the wider community.

It is a noble message but it does rest on conflating two meanings in English of the word talent. In this interpretation talent is thought of as some particular skill that you have been given or that you have developed through practice. In the gospel though, the word for talent (in Greek talanton – the plural is talanta) has a strictly economic meaning. A talent is money, a unit of value. In fact scholars suggest that a talent was worth a lot – about 5000 denarii when one denarius was the equivalent of a day’s wage for an unskilled labourer. So the rich man owns a lot of property. He is a successful businessman and he requires his slaves to ensure that his capital continues to grow.

So let me offer you now a second interpretation of the story that I came across recently in Bishop Peter Selby’s book ‘An idol unmasked – a faith perspective on money’. On this view the rich man is not associated with God, indeed the parable is not a moral tale at all. Instead it is a brutal description of the economic reality of life in first century Palestine. There are rich men who travel, perhaps to Rome the imperial capital, and there are slaves who are required to make money for them. The man who buried the talent in the ground was genuinely afraid that his master was a harsh man and would ‘reap where he did not sow’ and would ask of him far more than he could achieve.At least the slave thought I won’t lose any money for this powerful and ruthless entrepreneur. Surely he won’t punish me for prudence and caution.

But that is precisely what the rich man does, why he asks did you not give it to the bankers? Peter Selby’s point is that the fear of the poor and the exploitation by the rich are the same the world over. The poor fear most and become paralysed because they have the most to lose. If they make a mistake they will lose everything, job and home, not just a proportion of what they own. In Europe, in June 2014, 56% of young people in Greece and Spain, and 43% of young people in Italy under the age of 25, were unemployed. We see daily pictures of refugees camped in Calais fleeing poverty and seeking a better life; whilst the richest 1% of the population in Britain owns as much as the poorest 55%. And yet the temptation always remains for the rich and comfortable to think that poverty is a problem for the poor and that refugees are all potential benefit scroungers.

If we read the story in this way the point of the parable is to alert us to economic realities that we would rather forget. We are asked to attend to the world as it really is, not as we would prefer it to be. If God is involved in the action it is because he is a God of justice, a God who reads the world from below, a God who is on the side of the weak. It is no surprise that the story that follows this parable in the 25th chapter of St Matthew, the story that is next week’s gospel, the judgement story of the sheep and the goats, tells us that God is to be found amongst the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison.

Two different and contrasting interpretations of the one story – use your gifts and skills to the best of your ability; look honestly at the economic injustice of the world and embrace God’s desire to see change. The words that echo through this season that the church calls the kingdom season, are found in the collect and epistle for today - purify yourselves, keep awake, live in the light of the day of the Lord that is coming. Those who follow the way of Jesus and seek his kingdom should never hide from the truth, however disturbing it may be;they can never say I have done enough.

John Clarke – November 16th 2014