The parable of living economic worthlessness

A Herzogian approach to Matthew 25

Photo: Ernesto Cardenal

Sermon for Raleigh Mennonite Church
Nov 19, 2023

When I come across a parable in our lectionary from Matthew’s gospel, I often open a tattered volume on my bookshelf called the Gospel of Solentiname.[1] The book is a series of recorded conversations about the gospel of Matthew between campesinos, subsistence farmers in Nicaragua. These conversations were recorded by a Catholic priest, Ft Ernesto Cardenal during the Somoza dictatorship.

The wealthy Somoza family ruled Nicaragua for forty years. They amassed wealth through brutality and repression and established dominance through the same. Land grabbing, corporate bribes, and industrial monopolies tore apart the economy and the lives of ordinary. (In 1977 the Somoza regime burned the monastery where Ft Cardenal lived to the ground.)

One day, Cardenal decided to try a new way of engaging the local community in discipleship. He invited the campesinos to his monastery for worship. But instead of a homily offered by a learned priest, the sermon would be the voice of the people. They would discuss what they heard together.

But before that, week after week, the campesinos would row across the lake, sit in a circle and say aloud what they heard. When they came to the parable of the talents their reaction was uniform. This parable is lousy. Ft Cardenal asked them to say more:

WILLIAM: “Because it’s about speculating with money: something we all

condemn, like putting money out at interest; giving the money to others so they

can work and work with it and hand over the profits to the owner of the money.”

[CARDENAL]: “It’s really a very ugly example that Jesus gives of

exploitation, of speculation with money, of pure capitalism.”

WILLIAM: “Well, I don’t know. Besides, the example is lousier because

of what the servant says who hid the money: that he was a hard master, that he

gathered where he hadn’t put anything, that he harvested and didn’t sow.”

TERESITA: “At that time there were only masters and servants,

right? He had to talk like that so they’d understand. At that time all the servants

had to be working with the master’s talents or money, and that’s why he had to

give that example.”

[CARDENAL]: He was seeing the exploitation there was in the society of

his time, and that’s going on now—much worse with the banks and finances of

today.”

WILLIAM: “There’s the bank, there’s a bank there!”

When Jesus uses a money metaphor you better pay attention. Money is so significant that in the New Testament money is considered the only direct rival to God. When we hear a parable or story about money, we know the stakes are high.

Last week we heard about teenagers going out to party. This week we’re plunged into the world of finance. A master hand out big chunks of money to three of his household slaves, a unit of money called a “talent.” Our word for a talent, an innate ability we can cultivate, comes from this parable –not the other way around. And that, I think has led us astray when it comes to the tangible realities, the economic realities, faced by the disciples who gather around Jesus on the Mt of Olives to receive this teaching.

A talent is actually money. It is a lot of money. One talent is about half of what a laborer would make over the course of his lifetime. The campesino theologians are right – this is a story that plunges us into a ruthless economic system of exploitation. A wealthy landowner hands out these big chunks of money to his slaves. He gives no instruction, provides no criteria, offers no insight about what they should do. And off he goes.

While he’s gone, the first two slaves involve themselves in some kind of trade and manage to double their profits. How would one manage to do this in first century Palestine? Through exploitation and amassing land. In the ancient world the wealthy acquired the ancestral land of the poor. And if farmers refused to sell their ancestral land, the wealthy elite had ways of forcing a sale. In times of famine or poor harvest, these elite would offer poor farmers loans, charging exorbitant interest rates. Once it became impossible to repay the loan, the elite would foreclose on the land. It was dishonorable for a master to engage in this kind of exploitation so they would give this dirty work to their household slaves. Without hesitation, the slaves in this story manage to double their profits – ransacking the poorest in their community of generations of worth.

The third slave, knowing the master is harsh, expecting something for nothing, puts the talent aside and returns to the master what he started with. The first two slaves are rewarded – they enter into their master’s joy. The third is punished. The reason? He should have taken it to the bank and invested it for a small return. As a result, he is thrown out into the darkness.

To make matters worse, first century listeners to this story would be surprised and aghast that the last servant is in trouble for not getting money through usury, a practice forbidden in Judaism. There are no banks at this time in the ancient world -- that system is just coming to fruition. The master is most likely angry that the slave did not give this talent to the money changers. Yes, those same money changers whom Jesus drove out of the temple and turned over their tables a week earlier.

The campesinos have much more in common with the first listeners of this story than many of us today. They knew what it was like to live under intense economic exploitation. They rightly assess that something is horribly wrong in this story.

For one, the master in this story is eye-poppingly rich, and Jesus hates wealth. Only a few verses earlier he told us that the poor are blessed while woe to the rich. Jesus dislikes the idolatry of money so much doesn’t have any of his own. When he needs a coin, he has to pull it out of a fish’s mouth, or gets something from the common purse he shares with the disciples.

We learn that the master in the parable lives out a credo that is in direct opposition to what Jesus’ tells us shapes the reality of our world – the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

As it is, Biblical scholar William Herzog renamed this story the “parable of whistleblower.” This is the story of two slaves who readily and without hesitation enrich themselves through their master through usury and repression. But then we meet a third. He blows a whistle on the whole business. He refuses to participate. He does so through non-violent resistance, burying the talent and returning back to its owner. Perhaps he does so because he fears his master. But it is just as likely the third slave fears God.

But then he goes a step further. The third slave tells the master to his face the truth about who he is, about his exploitation, about his ruthlessness. And the slave is punished, ripped from the household, cast out.

Friends, there are many ways to be thrown out into darkness and one is to tell the truth about the world.

That’s this world, this age, this greed, this poison. But it isn’t the final story. This won’t be the last word.

Matthew’s gospel continues. In the next moment we’re taken from this troubling parable of despair to a scene in which the Son of Man comes in glory. He gathers before the throne of God all the nations of the earth before he separates them like sheep and goats. Then to the righteous he speaks:

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

The world is judged and it is judged by the measure of compassion and justice by practices that are economically nonsensical, ways of life that are worthless.

That’s what the master calls the last slave – worthless. The word worthless is economic language: lacking monetary value. The King James Version of this story calls the third servant unprofitable, the one who doesn’t produce a profit for the master.

“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

Friends, living a life like this won’t turn a profit. And if we do it well enough, we’re likely to find yourself telling the truth about the world, about economic exploitation and the powers of this world. If we spend enough time with Jesus, we’ll waste the time of the empire. We might even find ourselves thrown into the darkness. It’s there that we will meet Jesus.

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[1] I remembered this interpretive turn from Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Parable of the Fearful Investor,” delivered at the Chautauqua Institution in July of 2016.