This coming Sunday is the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Our gospel is the Parable of the Talents: 24 Then the one who had received the one talent came forward and said, ‘Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; 25 so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.’ 26 His master said to him in reply, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant and gather where I did not scatter? 27 Should you not then have put my money in the bank so that I could have got it back with interest on my return? 

The third servant’s inaction is perhaps to be attributed to simple self-interest: he could not expect to get any significant personal benefit from whatever his trading might achieve, so why bother? He may also have been afraid of how such a master might react if his commercial venture failed, but if so he has chosen his words badly: his description of his master’s “hardness” explicitly recognizes the desire for profit which makes his own safety-first policy so unacceptable to his master. So his own words are rightly turned against him for his failure to engage in any degree of risk. But risk is at the heart of discipleship (10:39; 16:25–26); by playing safe the cautious servant has achieved nothing, and it is his timidity and lack of enterprise which is condemned. Some scholars describe his attitude as representing “a religion concerned only with not doing anything wrong.”

The servant’s portrayal of an unreasonable, grasping despot is not of course meant to be taken as a sober assessment of God’s expectations of his people. Parables often use surprising characters to illustrate aspects of God’s activity, (e.g. The burglar, 24:43; the eccentric employer, 20:1–16; the grudging neighbor, Luke 11:5–8; the lazy judge, Luke 18:1–8; the man who commends his steward’s dishonest practice, Luke 16:8) and the parable reader must learn to distinguish between the message conveyed and the vehicle. But even if God is not unreasonable and exploitative, the parable as a whole emphasizes that he makes exacting demands on his people.

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