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FINDINGS II
Proper 28 - A - November 13, 2011
Matthew 25: 14-30
 | | Harry T. Cook |
Matthew 25: 14-30 [The rule of heaven] is like a man getting ready to make a trip, and he called his slaves and entrusted them with his savings. To the first he gave 30,000 silver coins, to the second 12,000 and to the third 6,000 in accordance with what he thought the abilities of each were. With no delay, the first slave went immediately to a broker and deposited those 30,000 coins and doubled the investment. The second did the same. The third, who had received a fifth of what the first received simply dug a hole and put his master's money in it. After some time, the man returned and was ready to settle accounts with his slaves. The first of them presented him with 60,000 coins saying, "Sir, you handed me 30,000 coins, and as you see I have made you 30,000 more." The man praised him, saying, "Good job. You are a competent and loyal slave. You have done well with a small sum, so I'll give you larger amounts to manage." The slave who was given 12,000 coins approached the man and did the same, saying he had doubled the size of his portion. The man made the same promise to him. The slave who had received the smallest number of coins approached and said, "Sir, I am well aware that you a hard man, reaping where you have not sown and harvested where you have not planted. Therefore, I was afraid to lose any of your coins, so I buried them. Here they are intact." The third slave was severely upbraided by the man: "You are incompetent and too cautious. You knew, did you, that I reap where I have not sown and harvested where I have not planted? Nonetheless, you should have deposited those coins with the bankers so when I came back I would have received not only those 6,000 coins but interest on them. So [I will] take the money away from [you] and give it to the slave who earned the greatest sum. So it is that those who have more will be given more and yet more; and from those who have little, even that will be taken from them. Meanwhile, get this worthless slave out of my sight and throw him into the dark place where they constantly weep and gnash their teeth." (Translated and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.) RUBRIC The passage at hand raises interesting questions about the demographics of the Matthean communities. If we are correct in having said in previous writings that the primary audience of Jesus and the first generation of his disciples were those of the lower economic classes, then we must wonder if they would have been able quite to grasp what Matthew was getting at with. A τάλαντον (talent, as it has been traditionally translated) was in Homer a balance (always of gold), or that which was weighed. In more common parlance it meant gold or silver equivalent to a talent. Several scholars have decided that a τάλαντον five times over would be worth 30,000 silver coins. One τάλαντον by some calculations would have been 15 years worth of wages. Thus someone given five of them would have in hand the equivalent of 75 years' wages. That would be like winning lottery in our time. So we must say that Matthew's story would have been received as a somewhat overstated object lesson. HOMILETIC WORKSHOP I should not please my late and revered teacher George Arthur Buttrick by what I am about to write, but write it I shall -- and then, to add insult to injury, later quote him as one of the finest commentators on this parable. Some number of the parables in Matthew are, I think, allegories masquerading as parables. No less this one of the talents in which the deity is depicted as yielding free will to its indentured human beings to do what they would and could with what was the deity's own to begin with and would be at the end. One must always keep in mind the conditions out of which such texts came, and, insofar as we know, the conditions operative around the development of the Matthean gospel were those of a community in transition between post-Temple synagogue Judaism and an innovative Jesus Judaism. A case can be made that the author(s) and editor(s) of The Gospel according to Matthew perceived that those of synagogue Judaism held on to a cramped vision of the deity as a hard one, reaping where it had not sown, etc., so burying their power in a hopeless task of holding on to a dying tradition. It is impossible not to think here of Paul's struggle with the entrenched Jerusalem church (see Galatians 2) and of what Christianity might not have become without the initiative he evidently mounted. Those with the five talents (30,000 silver coins) and the two talents (12,000 coins) are, in Matthew's analysis, those of Israel and of the Gentile world who risked much in the recognition and embrace of the Jesus movement. The one-talent man with his 6,000 coins (still a lot!) represents -- again to the Matthew compilers -- those whose moral wealth was diminished in the first place by rejecting the Jesus movement and its egalitarian, peace-making, justice-seeking ethic and further diminished by essentially burying that diminished wealth in an effort to keep it safe and pure. As J. Dominic Crossan translates Matthew 6:21: You buried your heart where you hid your treasure./1 True to form in Matthew, a later editor added the final verse of this passage making sure that readers would understand that the one-talent man and his wrong-headed unuse of his talent would be punished not only by having it taken away but cast into that good old Matthean bonfire of weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is possible that this addition could be a backward look at the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., only 15 years or so before the compilation of Matthew. Maybe the amending editor was thinking that synagogue Jews back then had not seen that dread, writ-large handwriting upon the Western Wall. The Lucan version of this episode is found at 19:12-27. The text seems to have come to both Matthew and Luke via Q, and is therefore earlier than either gospel. The story in the Lucan version is that a man of noble birth is turning over matters to his stewards as he is about to go away, there to receive power to which was his by birth. Could Luke have had in mind the Jesus whom he depicts as ascending into heaven at 24:51 and returning under the guise of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2:4? Luke's feckless steward loses what little he has, but v. 27 suggests a terrible fate for those who would resist the nobleman's return and reign. They shall be killed. Can this be an oblique reference to the events of 70 C.E.? * * * * * |
