Sermon preached by the Dean of Wells at the Cathedral
Eucharist on the Second Sunday before Advent
1 Thessalonians 5 v 1 – 11
Matthew 25 v 14 – 30
Whose talents are they?
Once upon a time there was a girl, an only daughter much loved by her mother. The
mother died and the father remarried and his new wife gave birth to two more children.
They didn’t like their stepsister and used to make her do the most horrible jobs in the
house. One day the prince of the kingdom invited everyone to a ball. The girl had no clothes
to wear to the ball though her two sisters had beautiful dresses. How the girl longed to go
to the ball; but she was left cleaning dishes and washing floors. And then a fairy godmother
appears and miraculously provides a beautiful dress and transport to the ball. There she
dances with the prince and he falls in love with her. But she has to be home by midnight and
in her haste to leave drops her slipper. The prince takes the slipper and tries to find who it
belongs to because he wants to marry the girl with whom he has been dancing. All the girls
in the kingdom would like to marry the prince and especially the two stepsisters but their
feet will not fit the slipper. Finally they turn to the girl in ragged clothes in the kitchen and
to everyone’s surprise the shoe fits. She marries the prince and they live happily ever after.
I am sure that most of you will have realised that I am giving an outline of the story of
Cinderella. Like all great stories it can be told in different ways and the joy is in the details of
the way that it is told. Variants upon the Cinderella story have appeared in a wide range of
cultures. If you want a really good modern retelling of it I can recommend Philip Pullman’s
collection of many such stories in ‘Grimm Tales for young and old’.
Stories like Cinderella work at a variety of levels. It can be seen as a love story in which
downtrodden Cinderella meets the man of her dreams. It can be read as a reversal of status
in which the sisters who have been horrible to Cinderella get their come-uppance and have
to cope with seeing their stepsister move from the kitchen hearth to the royal palace. Some
therapists see the whole story as a profound study of the destructive power of envy, what it
is to envy and what it is to be envied, and how that is played out in the life of a family.
The point that I am making is that stories have many interpretation and we should not think
that only one of the interpretations is right. The more profoundly the story connects with
the depth of the human condition – in this case with grief, poverty and wealth, love and envy
– the more the number of interpretations that will be generated by the readers.
Now the same richness of reading is true of many of the stories in the Bible and especially
of those stories of Jesus that we think of as parables. This morning I want to take the story
we have just heard read by Juliette Hulme, the cathedral school chaplain, and offer two very
different interpretations of it. But first let me remind you again of that story. It is usually
known as the parable of the talents. In this story there is a rich man who is setting off on a
journey and who entrusts his property to his slaves whilst he is away. To those whom he
judges to be most able he gives five talents, to the least able one talent. He is away a long
time and whilst he is away those with five talents and two talents do some trading and
increase the amount of money that the rich man has. But the one who has only one talent
buries it in the ground. When the rich man returns and does his accounts for the year the
one with five talents has produced five new talents and the one given two talents has made
two more. But the one given one talent has only the one talent to give back. So the rich
man rewards and praises the two slaves who have used their talents to make more money
and is furious with the one who has buried the talent in the ground, taking even that talent
away from him and throwing him into outer darkness.
Now the usual moral taken from the story is that the rich man stands in the place of God.
He commends those who have made good use of their talents and condemns the one who
has failed to take any risks. So, the parable is an exhortation to make the most of your
talents, whether you are an accountant or a musician, or a carer or a teacher or a student.
Aspire to do more, to develop, stretch yourselves and take risks, see what you can achieve,
not only for yourself but for the wider community.
It is a noble message but it does rest on conflating two meanings in English of the word
talent. In this interpretation talent is thought of as some particular skill that you have been
given or that you have developed through practice. In the gospel though, the word for talent
(in Greek talanton – the plural is talanta) has a strictly economic meaning. A talent is money,
a unit of value. In fact scholars suggest that a talent was worth a lot – about 5000 denarii
when one denarius was the equivalent of a day’s wage for an unskilled labourer. So the rich
man owns a lot of property. He is a successful businessman and he requires his slaves to
ensure that his capital continues to grow.
So let me offer you now a second interpretation of the story that I came across recently in
Bishop Peter Selby’s book ‘An idol unmasked – a faith perspective on money’. On this view
the rich man is not associated with God, indeed the parable is not a moral tale at all. Instead
it is a brutal description of the economic reality of life in first century Palestine. There are
rich men who travel, perhaps to Rome the imperial capital, and there are slaves who are
required to make money for them. The man who buried the talent in the ground was
genuinely afraid that his master was a harsh man and would ‘reap where he did not sow’ and
would ask of him far more than he could achieve. At least the slave thought I won’t lose any
money for this powerful and ruthless entrepreneur. Surely he won’t punish me for prudence
and caution.
But that is precisely what the rich man does, why he asks did you not give it to the bankers?
Peter Selby’s point is that the fear of the poor and the exploitation by the rich are the same
the world over. The poor fear most and become paralysed because they have the most to
lose. If they make a mistake they will lose everything, job and home, not just a proportion of
what they own. In Europe, in June 2014, 56% of young people in Greece and Spain, and 43%
of young people in Italy under the age of 25, were unemployed. We see daily pictures of
refugees camped in Calais fleeing poverty and seeking a better life; whilst the richest 1% of
the population in Britain owns as much as the poorest 55%. And yet the temptation always
remains for the rich and comfortable to think that poverty is a problem for the poor and
that refugees are all potential benefit scroungers.
If we read the story in this way the point of the parable is to alert us to economic realities
that we would rather forget. We are asked to attend to the world as it really is, not as we
would prefer it to be. If God is involved in the action it is because he is a God of justice, a
God who reads the world from below, a God who is on the side of the weak. It is no
surprise that the story that follows this parable in the 25th chapter of St Matthew, the story
that is next week’s gospel, the judgement story of the sheep and the goats, tells us that God
is to be found amongst the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in
prison.
Two different and contrasting interpretations of the one story – use your gifts and skills to
the best of your ability; look honestly at the economic injustice of the world and embrace
God’s desire to see change. The words that echo through this season that the church calls
the kingdom season, are found in the collect and epistle for today - purify yourselves, keep
awake, live in the light of the day of the Lord that is coming. Those who follow the way of
Jesus and seek his kingdom should never hide from the truth, however disturbing it may be;
they can never say I have done enough.
John Clarke – November 16th 2014