The talent the gospel parable talks about is an amount of money, not a personal ability or aptitude. One talent is equivalent to 6,000 denarii. One denarius was a day’s wage for the ordinary worker in Jesus’ time.
Anyone who worked six days a week for one denarius each day earned 340 denarii a year. To be entrusted with one talent is to have at one’s disposal the earnings of an ordinary laborer for 17 years. The five talents the first servant receives would take 85 years for the ordinary laborer to earn.
What might be a wage today comparable to the one denarius per day a laborer earned in the first century? Working a 40 hour week at a $15 per hour job, a worker today earns around $30,000 per year. At $30,000 per year, earnings over 17 years round out to $500,000, the amount the master entrusts to the third servant. The master entrusts the first servant with five times that amount, $2,500,000.
The master in Jesus’ parable is not giving the servants a pittance to test their trustworthiness to handle his affairs. They have received a windfall, like winning the lottery. The priceless windfall each of us has received is life itself.
- If you made the Forbes magazine list of billionaires, how would you invest for the good of the whole?
- What is one of the most valuable ways you have invested your life energies?
The word talent, although it refers to an amount of money, is the same word in English that refers to our personal abilities and gifts, to all our natural endowments and the qualities our families have nurtured in us. All of us have some artistic, athletic, and musical ability; some of us have distinctive gifts in various areas of capability. One can teach, another administer, another inspire others.
Both the first and second servants in the gospel receive amounts of money equal to the earning of one or more lifetimes. This fact and the double meaning of the word talent urge us who hear the parable to identify the money amounts with all that God entrusts to us in giving us life, unique gifts, and family and friends whose lives we share.
We each have life without having caused ourselves to be. Our ancestors have invested themselves in relationships and efforts that bring us to be. Jesus invested his life in the human race, identifying with us totally unto death, opening to us all we can become in God. How do we use these extravagant down payments on ourselves? Sunday’s parable calls us to multiply the gifts entrusted to us.
- What do you entrust to your children or those you nurture?
- What does Jesus entrust to us?
- What talents as Christians are ours to multiply in our time?
The parable of the talents follows the rule of three, which is familiar in folk tales and jokes. This rule for plotting stories sets up a pattern in two events or two characters which a third event or character breaks. The rule of three focuses the point of the story on the exception to the pattern.
In the plot of Sunday’s parable three servants receive huge but different sums of money. The first two servants set up a pattern; both immediately invest the money and double it. The third servant breaks the pattern by going off and burying the money.
At this halfway point in the parable, the servant who has received the least money, as suited his ability, has done the least with it. None of the three have squandered their money. The parable doesn’t tell us why the third servant buried the talent, nor how the first two so easily doubled theirs.
When the master returns, the first two servants again set up a pattern which the third breaks. Both announce they have doubled the money entrusted to them. Both receive the same praise and promise of future responsibility. The master welcomes them into his joy.
However, the parable focuses on the third servant who, when he faces the master, finally articulates his motives for burying the money. His failure to invest the money was not his fault, he says, but the master’s. His master’s harshness and readiness to take what was not his made the servant too afraid to use the money.
The master in the parable has no sympathy for the third servant’s fear or blaming but condemns his laziness and orders him cast outside the community of joy to which he has welcomed the two other servants. The servant who already has ten talents gets this man’s one.
- With whom in the story do you identify — the servants who risk their talents or the one whose fear paralyzes him?
- How have you experienced fear shutting people down at work or inhibiting you at times?
- What or who has helped you overcome fear and invest your gifts in family and community?