This coming Sunday is the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Our gospel is the Parable of the Talents: 28 Now then! Take the talent from him and give it to the one with ten. 29 For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. 30 And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’

The master was portrayed in v. 24 as someone determined to hang on to the proceeds of his servants’  trading as well as the talent just returned. But there is a surprising twist to the story in v. 28 as the story moves the spotlight away from the master to the successful servant who represents effective discipleship. But why is he now in possession of the ten talents which he had previously surrendered to his master (v. 20)? Should we suppose that the money has been returned to him for further trading (perhaps this is what the “many things” of. v. 21 referred to)? Otherwise eleven talents seems a ridiculously large sum for a servant to be given. But probably we should not expect the parable to mirror real life, and this is a way of underlining the theme of the disproportionate rewards which God gives to his faithful people, e.g. 19:27–29. So this slave’s success attracts further reward, on top of what has already been declared in v. 21, and the same proverbial saying which was used of the progressive enlightenment of the disciples in 13:12 now underlines the theme that success breeds further success, while failure is further compounded. It would, however, be pressing the imagery too far to infer that the blessing of the good disciple is at the expense of the forfeiture of the bad.

There is thus a fundamental division between good and bad disciples, between the saved and the lost, and the language of ultimate judgment is deployed again to warn the reader to take the parable’s message seriously. What ultimately condemned this disciple, and made him not ready to meet his Lord at the parousia, was the fact that he had proved to be “useless” for the kingdom of heaven. Like the man ejected from the wedding feast in 22:13, his performance had not matched his profession, and it is only those who “do the will of my Father who is in heaven” (12:50) who ultimately belong to his kingdom.

A Final Thought

Even though “talent” in our text refers to a large sum of money, I also think that we can use it to refer to abilities that God has given us and how we use them while we are waiting for Jesus’ return. We need to consider them as gifts from the gracious God and we need to consider that what we do with them becomes our gift to God. The parable is not a gentle tale about what Christians do with their individual gifts and talents, as helpful as that may be, but a disturbing story about what Christians do or do not do with the gospel as they wait for the coming of the kingdom of heaven.

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