Survival, Power, and Peace with Justice in the Parable of the Talents
By: Sarah Howell-Miller
Tags: Sermons, Preaching, Racial Justice

This sermon was preached on Sunday, November 15, 2020, online for Green Street United Methodist Church (Winston-Salem, NC). The text was Matthew 25:14–30, the parable of the talents.

Parable of the Three Servants, or, The Talents, by JESUS MAFA, Cameroon

I don’t know about you, but any story that ends with the phrase “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” sounds like the opposite of good news to me. This parable is a tough one if we really dig into it. I’m sure we’ve all heard sermons where the preacher tells us the moral of this story is that we are called to use our gifts and talents for the glory of God and not to hide or bury them. That’s a fine sermon, but it’s not the sermon I’m going to preach today, at least not quite so simply.

When we resist the urge to oversimplify the message, this parable is much more disorienting and yet much richer. So today we’re going to complicate things a bit. This complication of the parable of the talents will, I think, yield insight into three themes: the wisdom in survival, the power of love, and peace with justice.

Before we dive in too deep on this, we need to get a few things straight. First, the word “talent” in this parable is not referring to an aptitude or skill but to a sum of money — a very large sum of money. You’ll see versions of this passage where the word for “talents” is translated as “bags of gold” or “valuable coins.” That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong to interpret this story using a gifts and skills definition of the word, but I think you’ll see in a bit why knowing the vocabulary may make a difference in our interpretation.

The second thing I want to get straight is what I wrote down when I first started taking notes to prepare for this sermon: “That master ain’t God.” I love the way Ms. Kim and Robbie talked in the children’s sermon about how sometimes the stories we find in Scripture don’t line up with the big things we know about God’s love and care for us and for those the world doesn’t seem to love.

The master in this story doesn’t have much in common with a loving, caring God, and we have no reason to believe that Jesus intended us to see the master as God. Unfortunately, many of us have experienced forms of Christianity where the vision of God is very much like this master. This vision of God has been wielded against enslaved people, against poor people, against indigenous people, against the queer and the questioning and many other marginalized groups. But this is not the vision of God we hold at Green Street.

As with the parable of the bridesmaids, that troublesome passage that Maria preached on so beautifully last week, we will get confused if we try and reduce this parable to a simple moral lesson or even definitively to locate God in one of the characters. We will also get confused if we try to interpret it from within our 21st-century American economic context — but that’s often what happens with the parable of the talents.

Here’s how that usually goes: the master entrusts his servants with different amounts of money. Two of the servants invest the money and double it; one buries the money in the ground, where interest rates are, of course, zero. The third servant is punished for his failure to grow his one talent while the other two are celebrated for increasing their master’s wealth — and whether you interpret that to be explicitly about financial stewardship or about the use of our talents as in aptitude or skill, the moral of the story is that we should all be venture capitalists for the glory of God.

If that sounds a little fishy to you, it did to me too. Richard Rohrbaugh points out that this story sounds very different depending on whether you read it from within a capitalist society vs. an agrarian one like that in which it was written. In the ancient near east, the highest legal interest rate was around 12% — to charge anything higher would have been considered deeply morally wrong. I did the math: at a simple interest rate of 12%, it would take 6 years to double a sum of money if everything went smoothly — and while the master was gone for “a long time,” I’ve never imagined it being in the order of years. Many commentators have said that in order to produce the results the first two servants got, there would have had to have been some serious exploitation going on.

I always like to look at what comes right before and after a Bible story to help me put it in context, and here that is helpful. Immediately after the weeping and gnashing of teeth comes the parable of the sheep and the goats, where the worthy are not venture capitalists but those who see and reach out to Christ in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.

And do you know what happens after Jesus finishes telling the series of parables that includes our passage for today? The plot to arrest and crucify Jesus begins. Gerhard Lohfink points this out and notes, “Nobody is executed for teaching nothing more than bourgeois morality.” That such conspiracy begins immediately after Jesus tells these stories should cue us to look not for morals that would be endorsed by neoliberal capitalism today but for signs of subversion of the status quo.

Even if we were to make this a capitalistic allegory, the end result might look less like a triumph and more like a novel I read earlier this year by science fantasy author Octavia E. Butler. The novel is called The Parable of the Talents. It is the sequel to Butler’s book The Parable of the Sower. Both books tell the story of Lauren Olamina, a Black teenager and aspiring religious leader living in a dystopian future where climate change is ravaging the west coast with fires and droughts, where poverty and the consequences of chaotic drug use are endemic and catastrophic, where the American political project has fractured and a Christian nationalist leader with the slogan “Make America Great Again” is coming to power.

Yes, you heard all of that right; yes, I said science fiction; and by the way, these books were published in the 1990s.

The title of the first book, The Parable of the Sower, made sense to me because Lauren Olamina is the founder of a religion called Earthseed, and both images of sowing and planting and actual sowing and planting are all throughout the novel. But it wasn’t as immediately clear to me why Butler chose The Parable of the Talents as the title to the second book. Fortunately, she gave us some insight in an interview. Here’s what she said:

“The parable of the talents is one of the harsher parables of the Bible, but then, life can be harsh. … We will use our talents or we will lose them. We will use our talents to save ourselves or we’ll do what other animal species do sooner or later. We will continue turning as much of the world to our use as we can. Technology helps us to do this faster, more thoroughly, and more disastrously than any animal species could. At some point, this must end. Earth is finite. Consciously or unconsciously, we must decide whether, in all our intelligence and industry, we choose to be no more than…smooth dinosaurs.”

In Lauren Olamina’s world, using our talents — whether money or skills — may just use up this good creation and the people who are part of it. Endless self-advancement is no moral good when it is all-consuming. Interpreting this parable from the comfort of our capitalistic mindsets will not keep us safe; in fact, it may destroy us more readily than digging into its more prickly implications.

And here, is where we come to the three themes that have emerged for me as I’ve wrestled with this passage.

First, the wisdom of survival.

It was thinking of Octavia Butler’s work that helped draw out this theme for me. In Lauren Olamina’s world, violent theft and robbery are common, so people often bury money and valuables rather than keeping them in their home or on their person. Many biblical commentators have pointed out that contemporary wisdom in the ancient near east taught that burying money was considered the safest form of theft prevention.

The image of burying money and valuables is an image of survival. The servant who buried his one talent was a survivor. And while in 21st century America, survival is barely a consideration for many citizens, much less a value, in the ancient near east, the main values were stability and survival, not investment and self-advancement. I argue that this is not an unfortunate side effect of living before the industrial revolution and the advent of modern medicine, but rather that there is deep and holy wisdom in survival itself.

One of my favorite reads so far this year has been Mikki Kendall’s book Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot. In it, she pushes the feminist movement to examine its whiteness and privilege and rightly claims that basic needs, from housing to basic health care to food security, are feminist issues. Kendall invites us to imagine a feminism that refuses to abandon the wisdom of survival in either theory or practice. Such a commitment would challenge any movement for justice to a deeper intersectionality and a shift in priorities.

This idea speaks to the parable of the talents in the Bible because it makes me look at the third servant differently. Preachers love to dunk on him for failing in his task, but didn’t he return to his master exactly what his master left him? The third servant was considered less able than the other two, and he clearly feared his master — and it’s hard to take the kinds of risk that investment requires when you have less and are living in fear.

Thinking about the wisdom of survival in the third servant reminds me, too, that choices I make and take for granted as a white middle-class woman are no better than those made by anyone of a different class or background, and that simply because I don’t understand another person’s behavior doesn’t mean it’s wrong or illogical. Those of us with relative privilege would do well to look for the method in what we narrowly view as madness in decisions made by people in different social positions.

So that’s my first theme: the wisdom of survival. Second is the power of love.

In the original Greek of this text — or so I am told by people who understand Greek — when we read that the different amounts of money were given to the servants “to each according to his ability,” the word we translate “ability” is dynamis, which can also mean “power.”

Apparently the third servant has the least power in the group even before the talents are distributed, and this is made even clearer when the master returns and punishes him. This points to why, as we heard in the children’s sermon, this may not be a story about the kin-dom but rather a story about the world around us. It may be a story aimed to warn us about the injustice of the systems we have in place.

“For to all those who have, more will be given…but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” That sounds an awful lot like the growing wealth gap in today’s American society, and it is the complete opposite of “Those who are last will be first. And those who are first will be last.” Consistently throughout the Gospels, Jesus speaks and acts to undermine and overturn systems of power, to lift up the powerless, and to remind the powerful that their worth is not found in the privilege they hold or the influence they wield but in their status as beloved children of God.

We often get power very wrong in our depictions of God, and it affects how we view and handle power in the world. One interpretation of this parable that I reject goes like this: if only the third servant had humbled himself to his master, all would have been well. We are called to submit to God’s power and authority, never to resist or question it.

In this parable, the master is described as a harsh man who exploits others for personal gain — and even when the third servant accuses him of being that way, the master does not deny it. This does not align with the big things we know about God. And this form of power is what Cyndi Suarez calls dominating power. Dominating power is what it sounds like — a supremacist stance that is based in scarcity and requires domination and submission. This is often how we most often think about power, but Suarez offers an alternative: liberatory power. Liberatory power is based in abundance, not scarcity; liberatory power is creative, not punitive; liberatory power embraces difference rather than seeking to eliminate it.

Having dominating power and dominating power alone so deeply ingrained in our imaginations about God and about one another can have deadly consequences. We have all heard people say, if only George Floyd had complied with the officers’ orders…if only Rayshard Brooks hadn’t struggled with police…if only Daniel Prude had followed orders even in the midst of a mental health crisis…if only Sandra Bland had been more deferential when she was pulled over…if only the third servant had complied and done as his master said…

And just a week ago, here in Winston-Salem, a confrontation between white police officers and a group of Black teenagers ended when a 15-year-old girl was violently tackled to the ground by an officer after he asked for her name and she refused to give it. In the comments on the online news story, people said, if only she had complied…

But that logic only works if we ignore everything Black people have been telling us for years and decades and centuries, if we pretend that a frightened 15-year-old Black girl has equal responsibility for how an interaction plays out as does the white male adult who is trained and armed to protect and serve, if we believe that dominating power is the only option. Friends, dominating power is never our only option. It’s just the one we are sadly most used to seeing and imagining and choosing. God is not our harsh and exploitative master, and we are not each other’s masters, either, regardless of our role or station.

We must give up our love of dominating power in order to receive the liberatory gift that is the power of love. The power of love is not in its ability to dominate but in its ability to set free. And to quote Jimi Hendrix, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

And that brings us to our third and final theme: peace with justice.

Since the election, there have been a lot of calls for unity and peace. I’m not against either of those things. But I have noticed a pattern of white people and people of privilege calling for unity and peace without asking what that will cost Black people and other marginalized groups. Austin Channing Brown put it clearly when she said: “I’m wholly uninterested in a conversation about unity that’s not rooted in the unrelenting pursuit of racial justice.” To “unite” and have “peace” while refusing to address white supremacy and anti-Blackness is to embody the lament of the prophet Jeremiah: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”

I’m reminded of the Pax Romana, that mythical 200 years when the Roman Empire was “at peace.” What really happened was that imperial power was consolidated at the top and backed by military force to violently subdue any dissent. And I think this is relevant to the parable of the talents because the third servant was disturbing the peace — William Herzog called him a whistleblower. The third servant could have kept the peace by continuing to participate in the master’s project of exploitation — but that peace would have been a false peace. Today, many justice seekers are accused of being divisive, but they are not creating division; they are simply naming and uncovering it.

I can imagine the third servant asking himself this series of questions that Austin Channing Brown put to her Facebook followers after the election: “Will you acquiesce to a unity that maintains the status quo? Will you settle for a feel-good but false harmony? Or will you courageously refuse to unite with any movement not rooted in the pursuit of justice?”

This is part of why I was so excited to include Karon and Jason McKinney’s version of “Lift Every Voice/Shalom Aleichem” in this service. I love “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” that hymn often called the African-American national anthem — as a child, I declared it my favorite hymn, long before I could understand the complexity and potential awkwardness of that claim. And “Shalom Aleichem” means “peace be with you” and begins the traditional Shabbat prayer of our Jewish siblings.

I was captivated by this mashup because I felt like it captured in music what I want us to bear in mind as followers of Jesus anytime we hear a call for peace or unity — and that is that every cry for peace must always be interwoven with a cry for justice. Hearing “shalom aleichem,” “peace be with you,” alongside “let us march on ’til victory is won” makes all the sense in the world to me. When the peace we claim is a false peace, we must be willing to disturb it, not to destroy it, but in order to make it real.

The three servants could have been unified in obedience to an unjust system. We could be “at peace” and unified in the relentless exploitation of our planet and of vulnerable communities. But I have no use for that kind of peace or unity. As Pope Paul VI said, “If you want peace, work for justice.”

So I invite you on your own journey of wrestling with this text, finding the wisdom in survival, wielding the power of love, and seeking peace with justice.

And I’m going to leave you with an image that I kept coming back to when I thought about the third servant burying the talent. And that is this famous couplet from Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos:

What you didn’t do to bury me / But you forgot I was a seed

When we are buried in our efforts to survive, we are seeds waiting to open. When we are buried by dominating power, God’s liberatory love comes to set us free. When we are buried in a false peace or forced unity, God’s justice insists that for anything to grow, the ground must first be broken.

And that master ain’t God. Isn’t that good news. Amen.