Talent

 

Reflection on the Parable of the Talents for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost in the pewnotes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne

How exactly do we read parables? Simply as a story, the parable of the talents (Matthew 25: 14-30) may be read as advice on the benefits of capitalising on what we have been given and a warning against not only doing nothing, but actually burying our only talent where it will do worse than nothing, leaving us internally in a state of frustration and fear the equivalent of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Plainly, even pondering what to do with our one talent through time is better than rendering it useless.

But parables take us further than basic self-help or moral example. We are confronted by choice, by the relative possibilities of circumstance. and by our own will to change. Each of the three people find themselves with the talents they are capable of converting into something new, five talents, two, and one. They are equal in this discovery, the expectation being they will return whatever gifts they are given twofold, or even more. Hence the unacceptable nature of the person with one talent who, through fear or laziness or inertia or indifference or carelessness (all this and more), not only refuses the gift but even treats it as of no value. The storyteller reveals to us the necessity of risk, the challenge of faith, the chance for something new. It is not as though we are given nothing. What do we do with the talents offered to us?

Then, by reading the parable in the context of Jesus’ ministry, we will also notice that this is about what God gives us. This way of reading the parable pushes the limits further, asking us not only what do we do with our talents, but what do we do with our life? The expectation is in the present, where being ready for his return is immediate and how we have lived out what we are given arrives at a reckoning.

Even then, these invaluable and different modes of reading the parable do not exhaust the possibilities of interpretation and usefulness in our lives, if we are open to the parable. The parable of the talents instructs us in how to read parables, which is not by burying them out of sight but taking what we are given and finding more in them each time through both contemplation and action.