The Parable of the Talents 1

We are studying about the time of the end—the signs of the end, the parables, the expectations, the anticipation. The Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24 and 25 contains four parables about the end of time as part of Jesus’s answer to the disciples’ question: “What shall be the sign of Your coming and the end of the age?” (Matthew 24:3). 

This question, of course, is the question on everyone’s mind, especially given the natural disasters we’ve had in the last couple of weeks—Hurricanes Ian and Fiona. Such events  serve (as the fig tree parable implies) to remind us of the certainty that Jesus will come again, but they don’t give us a timeline. 

What does one of those four parables—the parable of the talents—teach us about how to wait for the return of the master?…

 “For it is just like a man about to go on a journey, who called his own slaves and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents, to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own ability; and he went on his journey. The one who had received the five talents immediately went and did business with them, and earned five more talents. In the same way the one who had received the two talents earned two more. But he who received the one talent went away and dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master’s money. 

“Now after a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. The one who had received the five talents came up and brought five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you entrusted five talents to me. See, I have earned five more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter the joy of your master.’ 

“Also the one who had received the two talents came up and said, ‘Master, you entrusted two talents to me. See, I have earned two more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter the joy of your master.’ 

“Now the one who had received the one talent also came up and said, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed. And I was afraid, so I went away and hid your talent in the ground. See, you still have what is yours.’ 

“But his master answered and said to him, ‘You worthless, lazy slave! Did you know that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter seed? Then you ought to have put my money in the bank, and on my arrival I would have received my money back with interest. Therefore: take the talent away from him, and give it to the one who has the ten talents.’ 

“For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. And throw the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 25:14-30) 

Note here several points: The master is giving, it says, of his own goods, and there is a sense that he is dispossessing himself of everything. This gift is not a token gift but a lavish and expensive one. We don’t know from the story whether the talents are of silver or of gold, but a talent of silver is equivalent to 6000 denarii and a denarius is the equivalent of one day’s wage. Five silver talents thus equals 30,000 denarii (5×6000) which, divided by 365 days, is about 82 years of wages. A person today making $50,000 a year would get over $4 million by that arithmetic. If the talents were gold, they would be worth about 100 times more. 

Average life expectancy at that time was about 40 years, so a gift of five talents of silver would be the equivalent of two lifetimes of income. Even the slave who received a single talent was given the equivalent of 18 years of wages, or nearly half a lifetime—again, assuming it was a silver talent, not gold. 

The gift is extravagant, lavish, generous, and free. It can be none other than the gift of grace, the spirit of grace, and each one received just what was right for him. Notice too that the master knows his servants: Each one gets according to his ability. We are known by God. He knows our ability. At the conclusion of the Ten Virgins parable, the bridegroom turns away the five foolish virgins with the words: “I don’t know who you are,” but in this parable, we see that God knows his servants. He knows their ability; and to whom much is given, much is required. The shepherd knows his sheep by name (John 10:3). And Paul wrote: 

“…we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes one conceited, but love edifies people. If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; but if anyone loves God, he is known by Him. (1 Corinthians 8:1-3) 

So the criteria to be known by God is simply to love him. What then are we to do with all this grace? What are we to do with this lavish gift of a lifetime, even multiple lifetimes, of grace? You and I have been the recipients of God’s wonderful eternal grace, enough even for a lifetime. What are we to do with it? What are we to do as we wait for the master to return? 

Like the parable of the Ten Virgins, this parable too teaches us how to wait for the Parousia, the Second Coming. Several points I think are made: First we must recognize that the gift is so large, so lavish, so generous, that we will never run out of grace. We have grace enough for a lifetime. We can never run dry. The oil of the Holy Spirit, which is God’s eternal grace (as we discussed two weeks ago) is an endless supply of energy, an endless supply of grace. We see this theme emphasized in Zechariah:

Then the angel who had been speaking with me returned and woke me, like a person who is awakened from his sleep. And he said to me, “What do you see?” And I said, “I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on the top of it; also two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side.” Then I said to the angel who was speaking with me, saying, “What are these, my lord?” So the angel who was speaking with me answered and said to me, “Do you not know what these are?” And I said, “No, my lord.” Then he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel, saying, ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord of armies. ‘What are you, you great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain; and he will bring out the top stone with shouts of “Grace, grace to it!”’” 

Also the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house, and his hands will finish it. Then you will know that the Lord of armies has sent me to you. (Zechariah 4:1-9)

The metaphor of two olive trees, not just one, hardwired with spigots to the lampstand is a picture of eternal, endless, boundless, forever-flowing grace. You have grace for a lifetime. You’ll never run out of grace. When it comes to grace, you’re not living as you might otherwise be—that is, paycheck to paycheck. Your worries are over. 

But this generous supply of grace requires investment, and investment requires risk. Note that the one-talent chap is afraid of investment because he is afraid of risk. And he fears risk because he fears the master. His bold claim, in his defense, is that he knows the Master well. “I know,” he says, “that you are a hard man. You reap where you don’t sow and you gather where you don’t scatter.” Claiming to know God, claiming to know God’s ways, speaking for God, and being afraid of God amount to foolish and fatal religion. That is what the parable teaches. 

The very thing that God seeks for us to do with the grace that he has given us is what the single-talent slave fails to do. Grace is to be invested, even with risk, because we have an abundant supply. The one-talent slave hoards the grace. As we wait for the return of our Master, we’re to be investing the grace with generosity, with risk, with abandon, and with endless effort. Hoarding grace is flawed and fatal. It occurs when we are confident that we know how God will do things and how God works and we’re always eager to speak for God. But God’s ways are not our ways, says Isaiah 55.

God apparently doesn’t recognize those who hoard grace. It turns out that a faulty view of God can lead us astray and can even be fatal. God gives to everyone the grace that they need. It is in endless supply. It can be used indiscriminately. Like the parable of the sower, you can sow your grace anywhere. You can throw it wherever you want—bad soil or good soil, rocky soil or thorny soil. You can give your grace wherever you want. Don’t be stingy with your grace. There’s more where it came from.

Each of us carries a toolbox of opportunity. You might call it the toolbox of grace. But some tools (such as time and money and emotional energy) are sometimes missing from our toolbox. All of these are helpful and may even be necessary in playing the role of the Good Samaritan. God knows this. Of course, he does not expect us to do the right thing by everybody all the time. On the Day of Judgment, when essentially we’re asked “What did you do on the road of life?” God will take into account whether we had tools to respond in various situations that demanded a response. 

Some people need things that we just cannot give. Some things people need, we don’t have the provision for in our toolbox, even though we may wish to and want to and feel like we ought to. So to live a life of grace continually and humbly dispensing justice and mercy is tempered by our ability to respond based on what we have in our grace toolbox, but we all have been given some grace to share. 

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 18) Jesus’ immediate response to the question “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” was: “Love God and treat your neighbor as you would wish to be treated yourself.” But also the parable answered the question: “Who is my neighbor?” 

The road between Jerusalem and Jericho, where the parable played out, is a metaphor for the road of life. On our road of life, we too will meet good Samaritans and robbers and victims and people who are indifferent to the plight of victims. But also, and not without some irony, we ourselves will play all of the various roles. At some point in our life we will be robbed, we will be robbers ourselves, we will be indifferent, and (hopefully) we will be good Samaritans. 

The parable of the talents teaches us several things about what to do with grace while we wait for the master’s return:

1. We all have different talents to use. We have different quantitative talents and different qualitative talents. We don’t all have the same grace. 

2. To whom more is given, more is required. 

3. There is risk in inherent risk in investing and sharing in grace. But there’s always more grace to be had. There’s always an extra supply. You can be reckless with your grace because God is. 

4. Thinking that you know how God would use grace and acting on that is a foolish and dangerous thing. This is making God in our own image, which is strictly prohibited in the second commandment. 

5. Hoarding grace is fatal. The earth, you see, is where dead things are buried. Grace is alive. Grace is made to share and to invest, and it will expand if that is done. 

6. This is the judgment: That those who share the grace will see it grow, but hoarding grace is fatal religion and leads us into the darkness. 

7. What we do while we wait for the return of the master has everything to do with what we do with grace. Do we share it, do we invest it, or do we hoard it? That is the question. 

What does it mean to hoard grace? Why is hoarding such a fatal disease? Are you risk averse to sharing grace? 

And finally, something to think about which is not the direct topic today but I’d like you to think about as we continue our study: In the parable of the ten virgins, the five who come late to the party are turned away because the bridegroom says “I don’t know you.” They seem to know God, but God doesn’t seem to know them. In the parable of the talents, the servants seemed to know the master, even though they may have a faulty view of the master, and the master seems to know them (each one was given talents based on their own ability). But in the third parable, which we haven’t studied yet but will be part of our discussion on the time of the end, about the sheep and the goats. God knows who they are, but they don’t seem to know God. 

David: I wonder if everyone’s having the same problem I have with this parable. It’s very difficult to understand. We’re calling the talents a gift but really they are not. They are a responsibility. He doesn’t give them the talents to keep, merely to look after for him while he’s away. He wants them back when he returns, and he’s expecting the slaves to deliver interest too. 

Don: In the parable of the virgins, they know God but God doesn’t know them; in the parable of the talents, they know God and God knows them; and in the parable of the sheep and the goats God knows them but they don’t seem to know God. What we need to know about God or what God needs to know about us is very perplexing. 

David: As well, it’s very hard to see exactly what exactly the guy with one talent did so wrong that he deserved consignment to the outer darkness. What he did seems at worst a very minor misdemeanor, hardly an unforgivable sin. 

This is a really troubling parable to me. I wonder if that’s why everyone is so quiet this morning!

Bryan: I think the idea is you put what you have, whatever it is, to work, with the intent or the hope that what you get in return is more than what you were given. That might be the point of it. The poor guy who buried his talent thought he was doing the right thing. So how can you be faulted for doing what you think is the right thing?

David: The ones who invested their talents risked losing them entirely. They could have lost everything. The master could have come back to find himself seven talents poorer, but at least he still had the one talent that was buried. Who would have been sent to the outer darkness then? It’s very troubling. 

Anonymous: Don said that in the second parable, the servant seemed to know God, even though it was faulty knowledge. But God also knew him. How is that? 

Don: He knew them because he gave to them each their talents according to their abilities, so he knew them fairly well.

Anonymous: Each of the three parables seem to have a group of people who are afraid of doing wrong, and they want to get it right all the time. So they judge themselves to be unworthy, just because they’re afraid of God, of God’s response. Their misunderstanding of God led them to be faulty. I think. They’re afraid of God.

David: I agree. But again, where is the sin in that? What is wrong with that?

Bryan: It almost points to degrees of acceptance—those who have much are given much, those who don’t have much are given less. In the case of the virgins, admittance to the wedding feast was an all-or-nothing judgment, not a degree of acceptance. They were either in or out.

I appreciate that the virgins parable is not about the oil. So is it really not about the talents in this one? They are both about doing what you have with what you’ve got, and trying to make the best of it, and everybody getting in to the wedding feast no matter how much or little oil, or talents, they have.

Michael: It seems like the two who took risks won. I invest in stocks and the bull market we had is going downhill. Investing as we think of it is highly risky—you might lose more than you win. But these two slaves made money. The master told the one-talent guy that if he had put it in the bank it would have earned interest, but even that can be risky—if the inflation rate is more than the interest rate, then you lose money anyway. 

Maybe it’s actually risk free. Even though it’s risky you end up winning all the time.

C-J: I wonder if it’s more about that relationship. I get stuck with “and God did not know them.” I ask myself: “But God knows everything.” And this whole free will thing…. I’m wondering if it was that they were limited by how they defined God. It wasn’t that the divine God didn’t know them, it’s their limitation in how they saw their God. I don’t know. It makes no sense to me either. I agree it is very confusing. 

When I was growing up, it was not framed with inclusion of all three. They chose the one that said “to whom much is given, much is required.” We should trust God in all things to prosper us. And the tools that God gave us are clearly in Scripture, beginning with faith and forgiveness and grace and we should exercise it like a muscle. The more we do it, the more God is glorified unless my ego gets in the way. 

But I don’t catch this. I go back to taking out what doesn’t make sense to me in my own relationship with God—my God or the god or…? How do I know? I hope it’s a healthy relationship the way the Divine is growing me.

David: Maybe the one-talent guy actually did know God. He says, “I know you. You reap what you don’t sow.” And God said, “You’re right. You do know me. And yet you did this stupid thing.” Maybe that’s the point: If you know God, then you should take the risk because you know that he will reap where he didn’t sow anyway, so you’re not actually risking anything if you go with a God who can do that. Maybe the sin is knowing God but not trusting him. 

Jay: I think the proclamation that “I know you.” is more significant than the burying of the talent. When we put God in a box, when we say we know how God should act, we know what he should do, then we end up in a bad place. That’s how I see the foolish virgins. They believe that they know how God will recognize them (namely, by having oil in their lamps) and so they go and do very foolish things (like going in the middle of the night to try to find oil) so that they can fulfill their definition of how God should recognize them and know them. 

The one-talent slave starts his proclamation with: “I know you. I know how you act.” This harks back to Jesus’ talk about the unpardonable sin after a miraculous healing of a blind man when the Pharisees and Sadducees were basically saying that the blind man shouldn’t have been healed, shouldn’t have been forgiven. They were trying to define how God should react to the sinner. Jesus said the unpardonable sin is to put God in a box, to dictate how God should act, to judge who deserves God’s grace and love and mercy (or not). That’s the road to outer darkness. 

I think Michael’s point that there really is no risk here is right. There is zero risk in investing it or even in giving it away because you’re always going to get it back. If you lose it, you’re still going to get it back. The master is still going to give you more. There is really zero risk here and yet the one-talent servant thinks there might be, so he chooses to do nothing.

Michael: Maybe he judged God. Maybe the principle of “Judge not, least ye be judged” applies here—the slave judged God and was judged in turn by God. 

David: He did know God. The Master said: “You got me right. That is indeed who I am. But knowing me, you didn’t trust me. You didn’t invest the talent even though you know I can reap even where I don’t sow. You didn’t trust me.”

Sharon: I wonder if part of the issue is fear and paralysis—being so conservative that we can’t just use all the grace that we’ve been given to maximize all the potential in life, because we want to be safe. We’re afraid of stepping into the Red Sea, afraid that the waters won’t part.

Bryan: One of the great things about this class is you get to think about things in new ways. Jason’s point about risk and reward is something I’ve never really looked at in that way before. But if we’re equating the talents with grace, then there is no risk in spreading the grace you’re given, and maybe that was the point, which the poor guy with the one talent missed completely. The other two got the point and were greatly rewarded for it. 

I’d never really thought about normal risk–reward being inapplicable to the parable of the talents, which teaches that when we invest what God gives us, there is no risk of not getting it back with interest. I really appreciate this new perspective.

Don: What is “hoarding” grace?

Bryan: Is that the guy with the single talent? Is that what he did?

Don: Looks like it to me.

C-J: If you look at people who have that thought process of hoarding, it’s self-protective: “I might need this later” or “I’ll have enough to share with others that I love.” Mostly it’s self-protective. I like what Jason said and Brian enlarged upon. I think that’s probably the thing I was missing—the idea that grace doesn’t run out; our relationship with God never runs dry.

Don: In what way do the five foolish virgins and the guy with a single talent, who all end up in outer darkness,  share similarities? What is similar about them, if anything?

Jay: One similarity I see, though I admit I may be stretching the Virgin parable, is that their reaction is to assert: “We are not prepared.” It’s a self-judgment. It’s their understanding that they have to be a certain way when the bridegroom comes—they have to be prepared to be recognized. Yet the parable ends with: “I don’t know you.” 

They all erred in trying to define how God should know and recognize them. They judged God’s judgment of what was right. They judged that one could run out of God’s eternal gift so they buried it to conserve it or went out at midnight to stock up on it. They thought they had figured out what it took for God to recognize them. 

C-J: But if we look it out through the lens of what Sharon said—that it’s self-limiting, we did it, we limit it. It isn’t that we’ve hedged in God. God is boundless. So self-limiting thinking and behavior makes us look like we’ve been excluded. But really, it’s by our own hand.

Jay: I like the idea that hoarding behavior is really about self-preservation. It’s not about others; it’s really about me. I hoard things because I’m fearful that it will run out. I’m fearful I won’t have it in the future. I’m fearful that my loved ones will need it. But really, hoarding behavior is about me, and that’s very different (I think we would all agree) from the behavior that God wants us to have.

Sharon: I had the boredom and so the opportunity to watch a couple sessions of Hoarding last Sunday, so I’m quite fascinated by this idea of hoarding grace. Hoarding is about pathology, typically; and at the root, there obviously are broken relationships. So from my perspective, when we start to think about hoarding grace that was given to us so abundantly but we’re so afraid to share it, it means that something is truly broken in our own heart, and we’ve got to get back to focusing on the love relationship and the atonement of Christ which is given freely to each of us. 

So it’s about healing and about being wholesome, and about being open and transparent instead of closed systems and pathology and “I need this for me and I don’t really know why I need it but I can’t give it because I’m so broken myself.”

Carolyn: I feel the same way and I was trying to think of how to relate it to the personality and tendencies that each of us was born with and to the hurts that accumulate in the human heart. 

Michael: But Jesus wasn’t fine with just sharing things with your loved ones. It seems you have to share with  outsiders because if you’re only sharing with your loved ones then how are you different from the Pharisees?

Kiran: I’m struggling with it. The problem with the foolish Virgins is that they thought they needed to do something in order to be recognized by God so that he would take them in, and they focused on their own efforts instead of being present when he came. The one-talent slave received an exceptionally abundant gift yet still felt he needed to protect it, instead of simply letting it flow through him and sharing it. 

So I think that when grace comes to us, it has to change us in a way that we become unselfish in sharing it with others. But if we’re still focusing on our own effort to do something with it, instead of letting the grace do its job, I think that’s where this person lost it.

Reinhard: As for similarities between the foolish virgins and the one-talent slave: Both defied the directions. They didn’t follow orders. The virgins neglected to do what they were supposed to do. The slave knew exactly what was required but he intentionally defied the master. 

We can double the gifts of love and grace God gave us. That’s what God wants us to do, to return to him to live a good Christian life, to share the grace and love other people. 

In defying authority, the slave didn’t give honor to God. There are people, including some Christians, who know about God but don’t do what they are supposed to do. The big problem with the slave was that despite knowing God, he didn’t glorify him, he didn’t honor God. It was a direct confrontation with the Creator, which is worse than the neglect of the foolish virgins. 

I think Jesus gave all these parables to show the issue from several perspectives, so Christians know what they are supposed to do. Some have to keep watching the signs, some have to use their talents, and some have to do the kinds of service performed by the sheep in the parable of the sheep and the goats—visiting people in prison, clothing the naked, and so on. Every parable has its purpose. There’s a moral to each of them. 

Don: We will continue next week with more discussion of the parable of the talents and what it teaches us about waiting for the return of the master. 

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