Introduction
The parable of the talents often appears in stewardship sermons. God is the master, we are the servants, and the talents represent something God has entrusted to us: our abilities, our resources, our faith, or the gospel itself. We are called to put what we have received to use.
I think that interpretation works. There is a faithful sermon to preach about receiving God’s gifts and sharing them for the sake of our neighbors.
But we have to take care of the person who hears that sermon and thinks, “I buried it. I have wasted what God gave me. Is this what happens to me now?”
Whatever we make the talent represent, we need good news for the person afraid they have failed. Calling people to faithfulness includes proclaiming the mercy of Christ to people whose faithfulness has faltered. We cannot leave them standing alone with the master’s final words.
For me, though, spending time with the person thrown into outer darkness keeps drawing me toward another reading. When I stay beside the one who is condemned, stripped of what he has, and put outside, I begin to recognize the path Jesus is about to walk.
That is the connection I want to follow this week. I want to hear this parable with the disciples sitting near Jesus, before any of them has seen how far outside he will be taken.
Narrative Context
Like last week, Jesus is on the Mount of Olives, speaking privately with his disciples. This is his final extended teaching before the passion. When he finishes, he will tell them that in two days he will be handed over to be crucified (26:1–2).
These are people who have followed him, eaten with him, asked him questions, and been sent out to share in his ministry. They have also argued about who should have the places of honor. They can imagine themselves sharing his authority more easily than they can imagine him dying.
Jesus has already addressed that desire for power. When the disciples were angry about James and John seeking privileged places, Jesus called them to him. He described rulers who dominate others, then told them, “It will not be so among you.” Their life together was to take its shape from his own service and the giving of his life (20:20–28).
Now he is preparing them for the days ahead. Soon their teacher will be arrested and condemned. They will have to face the possibility that the people exercising authority have judged him wrongly.
That matters as we hear a powerful man pronounce judgment over someone in his household.
The Master and His Money
A man leaves his property in the care of three enslaved people. One receives five talents, another two, and another one. These are remarkable sums of money. Even one talent represents roughly fifteen to twenty years of a laborer’s wages.
The first two servants trade with the money and double what they have received. When the master returns, both receive his praise. Both are promised greater responsibility and invited to share his joy.
It is easy to hear that approval and assume we already know whom to admire. But we need to know something about the world in which this money was changing hands.
There were particular methods of increasing wealth through interest. For farming communities in Galilee and Judea, land supplied food, work, and the means of paying rents and taxes. Borrowing against a coming harvest could keep a household going, but it also gave creditors a claim on what that household had yet to produce. When debts could not be repaid, land could pass into other hands. People who lost their holdings might have to work as tenants or day laborers instead. One person’s increasing wealth could come with another family’s loss of its livelihood.
These are the stakes behind Torah’s lending laws. Exodus forbids taking interest from the poor among God’s people. It then addresses the practice of taking a cloak as security for a loan: the creditor must return it before nightfall, because the borrower still needs something to sleep in. God promises to hear that person’s cry (22:25–27). Even a creditor with a legitimate claim has to maintain respect for the life of the person who owes them.
Leviticus likewise instructs people to support a neighbor who has fallen into poverty, rather than take interest or profit from that need (25:35–37). Its provisions for redeeming land and returning it at Jubilee rest on the declaration that the land belongs to God (25:23–28). These laws place limits on what someone may gain from a neighbor’s hardship.
By the time of the revolt against Rome in 66 CE, debt had become part of the conflict in Jerusalem. Josephus describes rebels setting fire to the high priest’s house and royal palaces, then moving to the archives where debt contracts were kept. They burned the records. According to Josephus, they wanted to destroy creditors’ claims and draw poorer debtors into the revolt. Cancelling those obligations could give people a reason to join them (Jewish War 2.425–429).
This happened decades after Jesus’ ministry, but for Matthew’s likely postwar hearers, these events belonged to recent and painful history. Roman armies had destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE. That history could shape how they heard a story about a wealthy man demanding still more.
So when biblical scholar Ulrich Luz suggests that the extraordinary profits in this parable could have brought land speculation and unscrupulous dealings to hearers’ minds, there is a history behind that concern. The people hearing about a growing fortune could also have known what it cost to lose land, fall behind on a debt, or work for someone who now controlled what had once sustained their family.
Jesus does not tell us which transactions produced the first two servants’ profits. We hear how pleased the master is with the increase. We hear nothing about what those profits may have cost anyone else.
These are also enslaved people increasing someone else’s wealth. The master holds power over them as well as over the money. His approval matters, and so does the threat of losing it.
That is why I want to hear the third servant before accepting the master’s praise as the last word. He has something to say about the person whose wealth they have been increasing.
Listening to the Third Servant
The third man returns the entire amount. He has buried it and kept it safe. Then he speaks about the master: “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed.”
Here we have to decide how we hear this man. Has he misunderstood his master, or is he telling the truth? If we have already identified the master with God, we may be quick to explain his words away. But he may be naming something the first two servants’ success has allowed us to overlook.
He is afraid. That fear may come from knowing what this master is like, and what it may cost to speak about him this way.
“Here you have what is yours.”
Those words can carry fear and defiance together. He can be frightened of the master and still be unwilling to make him richer. I think we should hear the courage it may take for an enslaved person to return the money and name the master’s harshness aloud.
In response, the master calls him wicked and lazy. He insists that the money should at least have earned interest. That demand would itself raise questions for hearers formed by Torah’s lending laws, even though the story does not identify the borrowers or tell us whether a particular prohibition has been violated.
Then the master takes the talent and gives it to the servant who already has ten. He calls the third servant worthless and orders him thrown out.
The person who has failed to increase the master’s wealth has no place in the master’s joy.
Read this way, the story tells the disciples what a household ruled by wealth and fear does to someone who refuses its demands. It warns them about the world into which Jesus is going and the kind of power they may be tempted to exercise themselves.
I know the departure, return, and reckoning give us good reasons to hear the traditional interpretation. Matthew’s language of judgment gives that reading weight, too. But I also want to keep looking at the Jesus telling this story. Before I accept the master’s verdict as God’s verdict, I want to see where Jesus goes.
Following the One Who Is Cast Out
If we hear the third man’s words as a refusal, the connection with Jesus begins before anyone is thrown into darkness. He names the harshness of the one who holds power over him. He returns the master’s money without adding to it. For that, he is condemned and stripped of what he holds. That is the pattern I want to place beside Jesus’ story.
From the beginning of Matthew, Jesus faces pressure to use his identity and authority to secure something for himself. The devil offers him the kingdoms of the world and their glory if he will offer his allegiance in return. Jesus refuses (4:8–10). Later, when his disciples seek places of honor, he directs them toward service and points to his own giving of his life (20:20–28). He will use his authority to bring life to others, even when doing so gains him opposition instead of security.
Like the third man, Jesus also speaks plainly about the people who hold power. Just before these parables, he accuses leaders of placing burdens on others while refusing to help carry them. He names their neglect of justice, mercy, and faithfulness, and the greed concealed beneath an appearance of righteousness (23:4, 23–28). He does not accept their standing as proof that their practices serve God.
That helps me hear the third man’s accusation differently. Speaking against the person in authority may be an act of faithfulness. The accusation deserves to be heard before the speaker is dismissed as wicked or lazy.
And we should remember what faithfulness will look like for Jesus in the garden. He will be deeply distressed and ask his friends to stay with him. He will pray that the cup might pass from him (26:37–39). His faithfulness to his Father does not spare him the anguish of what is coming.
When the arrest follows, a disciple reaches for a sword. Jesus tells him to put it away. He speaks of the angelic help he could summon, but he does not call for it (26:51–54). He refuses to secure his own freedom through the violence that could force others to submit.
Then comes the condemnation. Jesus is stripped, mocked as a king, and led away to be crucified. The people at the cross demand that he save himself and come down as proof that he is God’s Son. They even question whether God wants him (27:27–43). His refusal to rescue himself becomes, in their mouths, evidence that he is a failure.
We have already heard Jesus speak of authority exercised through service and the giving of his life. At the cross, that same giving of himself is held up for ridicule. The people judging him cannot recognize faithfulness in someone who will not use his power in the way they demand.
That is where I recognize the connection with the third man. On this reading, his unwillingness to serve the master’s interests is condemned as worthlessness. In the passion, Jesus’ faithfulness to God brings him into conflict with human authority, and his refusal to use his power to preserve himself is treated as proof against him.
Matthew has already given us a parable in which the son is thrown out and killed, followed by Jesus’ words about the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone (21:39–42). Being rejected by those in power does not settle where God is at work.
By the time darkness covers the land at Jesus’ death, we have followed him through refusal, accusation, condemnation, stripping, and rejection. The darkness belongs to that whole path.
That is why I cannot leave the third man alone with the master’s word “worthless.” The person put outside may be the one who helps us recognize the Lord of the kingdom.
The Disciples and the Church
This gives the disciples something searching to hear as they prepare to carry Jesus’ ministry into the world.
They will have authority. People will look to them for teaching and guidance. They will make decisions about the community’s life. They need to consider what kind of authority they will exercise, and whose judgments they will trust.
Will they recognize faithfulness only when it produces the results they wanted? Will they call someone worthless because that person has failed to strengthen the household? Will they recognize their teacher when he stands among the people others have rejected?
Those questions reach us, too.
We know how to praise people who make our lives easier. The generous donor. The dependable volunteer. The person whose work keeps everything going. We have good reasons to give thanks for them.
But our gratitude can become a way of deciding whose voice matters and whose needs deserve our time. Someone who can no longer do what they once did begins to feel forgotten. Someone who needs repeated help becomes an inconvenience. Someone who questions a practice that benefits us is treated as a problem to remove.
We can become very confident in judgments that Jesus gives us reason to question.
There is still a serious word of judgment in this reading. It falls on our willingness to benefit from another person’s vulnerability, on the authority we use to protect our advantage, and on our readiness to attach God’s name to our own decisions about who belongs.
When we put someone outside, we need to consider whom we may be failing to recognize.
The scene immediately following this parable presses that concern upon us. The king identifies himself with people who need food, clothing, welcome, care, and companionship (25:31–46). That scene has its own severe judgment, but the king’s identification with vulnerable people should keep us from assuming that we know where he will be found.
Jesus keeps bringing the disciples close to people they might otherwise overlook. His own path to the cross will bring him there, too.
Preaching Possibility
Castaways
I would begin with how much we want to hear “Well done.” We want our work to matter. We want to be trusted and needed. We want to know that we have done right by the people depending on us.
Then I would let the third man disturb that desire. Who gets to tell us we have done well? What happens when serving the household means helping it profit at a neighbor’s expense?
That is a question about our own loyalties. We know how much it can cost to question a practice that benefits us, refuse an opportunity that would harm someone else, or tell the truth to a person whose approval we need. Fear can make cooperation seem like the only responsible choice. We may even call it faithfulness.
A sermon could press us here: there are things we cannot keep doing if we are going to follow Jesus. There are profits we may need to refuse, advantages we may need to surrender, and people whose approval we may have to lose. The third man’s story asks us to consider whether what gets called failure might sometimes be the cost of doing right by our neighbor.
But we need more than an appeal to be brave. Jesus knows the anguish of costly faithfulness. He has walked into condemnation and rejection, and the one who was killed has been raised. His mercy reaches people who have failed as well as those who have stood firm. We can confess the harm we have joined in and begin again.
That mercy gives us somewhere to stand when another person’s verdict frightens us. We can risk displeasing someone whose demands harm our neighbors because our lives are already held by Christ.
His giving of himself is the promise beneath the call to follow him. We belong to him before anyone decides what we are worth.
Subscribe to this commentary here:
Leave a Reply