This coming Sunday is the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Our gospel is the Parable of the Talents. Warren Carter has a different take on the parable. He views the parable as criticism of “the perspective of the wealthy elite” who punishes “the one who subverts the system:”  He writes “On the basis of Jesus’ teaching in 19:16–22 [the Rich Young Man], the master and the first two servants could rightly be rebuked for their greedy and acquisitive actions. The third servant should be commended for not adding to the master’s wealth by not depriving others!” Similarly, Barbara Reid (CBQ 66) notes: “The third servant is the honorable one because he unmasks the wickedness of the master”—though Reid herself mentions this exegesis only as a “possibility” which she does not in fact adopt. 

Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh (Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels) suggest that there was a “limited good” understanding in the first-century Mediterranean world. This is quite a different perspective than our western, 20th century, capitalistic world, where we operated with a sense that goods are in an “unlimited supply.” They write concerning this parable: “Because the pie was “limited” and already distributed, an increase in the share of one person automatically meant a loss for someone else. Honorable people, therefore, did not try to get more, and those who did were automatically considered thieves. Noblemen avoided such accusations of getting rich at the expense of others by having their affairs handled by slaves. Such behavior could be condoned in slaves, since slaves were without honor anyway.” The third servant buried his master’s money to ensure that it remained intact. This, of course, was the honorable thing for a freeman to do; was it honorable behavior for a servant? They have further thoughts on the “limited good” in an earlier section: “An honorable man would thus be interested only in what was rightfully his and would have no desire to gain anything more, that is, to take what was another’s. Acquisition was, by its very nature, understood as stealing. The ancient Mediterranean attitude was that every rich person is either unjust or the heir of an unjust person (Jerome, In Heiremiam 2.5.2). Profit making and the acquisition of wealth were automatically assumed to be the result of extortion or fraud. The notion of an honest rich man was a first-century oxymoron.”

I primarily offer these voices to again point to the nature of parables.  There is much room for interpretation. Still, one can critique Carter and the others since this is not the only parable which assumes the validity of acquiring wealth and of private ownership. Even in the end of our parable of the talents, the two servants acquire a great deal of wealth in private ownership. Yet there is the question of what one does while being ready.

It is perhaps less about the “what” and more about readiness and responsibility. It is not about natural endowment, though the degree of responsibility given to each depends on their individual ability (v. 15). The “talents,” however, do not represent that individual ability but are allocated on the basis of it. They represent not the natural gifts and aptitudes which everyone has, but the specific privileges and opportunities of the kingdom of heaven and the responsibilities they entail. St. Paul notes this same distinction in “gifts.” The parable thus teaches that each disciple has God-given gifts and opportunities to be of service to the Lord, and that these are not the same for everyone, but it is left to the reader to discern just what those gifts and opportunities are. This is appropriate to the open-ended nature of parables, and different readers may rightly place the emphasis on different aspects of their discipleship. What matters is that, however precisely the “talents” are interpreted, each disciple should live and work in such a boldly enterprising way that the returning master will say “Well done, you good, trustworthy slave.”

Image credit: The Parable of the Talents by Willem de Porter, 17th century, National Gallery of Prague, PD-US