Refusing Talent

A sermon preached on Sunday, November 19, 2023, at St. Thomas, Morden.

Propers 392; Jg 4:1-7; Ps 123; 1 Th 5:1-11; Mt 25:14-30.

The British philosopher, Mark Fisher, once wrote, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Fisher was fascinated by the fact that while our society routinely creates movies about the world ending, in the world these movies depict, the basic realities of our capitalistic economy remain resolutely unchallenged, even as this economic structure drives the world to its destruction. Our moral imaginations are trapped, Mark Fisher argues, in a structure he calls “Capitalist Realism” - a situation in which we deeply believe that something like a capitalistic economy is fundamental to human nature. Rather than correctly seeing capitalism as a contingent economic structure that arose relatively recently in Western society, we instead are led to believe that this economic system just is how the world works. Capitalist accumulation, on this account, is just naturally the way the world is. As a result, we can much more easily imagine how this structure might eventually destroy us rather than imagine a world that simply has a different economic ordering.

You might be thinking, what does all this suspiciously Marxist-sounding theory have to do with today’s scripture lessons? Well, today our gospel reading is a passage that is known as the Parable of the Talents. The overwhelming consensus among biblical interpreters of the last two hundred years is that this parable is basically an endorsement of sound fiscal management - or if you want to be pious-sounding about it, “good stewardship.” On this interpretation, God is the master, the first two slaves are those who invest wisely and the third slave is condemned as lazy and faithless.

But what if in this parable, God isn’t the master?

Why do we assume that God is the master in this story? Does it say that anywhere? Consider where this parable falls in Matthew’s Gospel, in the very next chapter Jesus is going to be the one who is seized in the darkness and it is his teeth that will be gnashing as he is put to death on a cross in incredible agony. This should give us some pause, suggesting that far from being the master, Jesus is given the punishment of a rebellious slave. 

But there are more clues, right in the story itself, that should prompt us to consider if this parable is truly the endorsement of the accumulation of capital that so many have read it to be. The Nigerian theologian, Justin Ukpong points out that, “In Exod 22:24 and Lev 25:36 usury is forbidden and the Midrash on these texts states: ‘he who takes usury is not God-fearing.’” As strange as it might sound to our ears, for most of Christian history, and ESPECIALLY in the context of the scriptures, gaining wealth through a return of interest on an investment was not just frowned upon, it was actively forbidden! Somehow in the last several centuries, with the emergence of colonial-capitalism, the Church quietly made its peace with Lord Mammon and began assuming that a sound investment portfolio was a key indicator of church health. But in Jesus’ time, this was simply not something that the people of God did. If we want to understand how Jesus’ audience would have heard this parable, we must understand that they would all be much more suspicious of this kind of investment practice than we are today.

Jesus’ audience would have had this suspicion, not just because they knew what the Scriptures commanded, but because of the actual economic circumstances of the day. 1st century Palestine was a society where the majority of its members engaged in subsistence-level economic activity such as farming or basic trades. In order for the profiteering slaves to manage a 100% return on their master’s investment, they would have had to engage in unscrupulous, if not outright illegal, business practices. Ukpong offers a contemporary example of high-interest pay-day loan businesses in our time. These are lending operations that charge 20-25% interest, compounded monthly, that are designed to reduce its clients to a state of permanent debt-slavery. In the context of 1 century Palestine, the only way for the slaves to double their master’s investment would be to somehow disenfranchise peasant landowners from their ancestral lands, trapping them in debt commitments from which not even the release of Jubilee could set them free. 

This kind of wealth concentration is profoundly distasteful, and as Ukpong observes, it would have also been immensely dishonourable for the master himself to engage in this kind of exploitation. But slaves in the Roman imperial system, by definition can have no honour, so the “honourable” master is able to leave things in their hands, knowing that he will reap incredible profits and manage to do so with his honour and reputation intact. 

Yet in Jesus’ parable, one slave says no. One slave dares to refuse complicity in this extractive enterprise and instead returns the talent to the master. This refusal is a rebuke. The slave is shaming the master by making explicit the injustice that he is being asked to engage in. But the whole point of making the slave do the master’s dirty work is to maintain the fiction that the master is good and honourable and just. So instead of accepting the rebuke, instead of receiving this graced opportunity for repentance, the master does what all those with power do when they are challenged by the truth - he redefines what is true.

The master begins to gaslight the slave. “You wicked and lazy slave!” the master exclaims. The slave has refused to be a tool of coercive power and so coercive power is turned back upon the slave. “As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The Parable of the Talents makes very little sense when we assume that the master is God. This master is cruel. This master is exploitative. This master contradicts the explicit economic teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures! No, God is not the master in this story. God is the third slave. God is the one who refuses the lies of the powerful. God is the one who will not take away the hope of the poor. God in Christ is the one who is radically in solidarity with the poor and it is God in Christ who, in the very next chapter, is handed over to the judgment of the powerful for having exposed their lies and hypocrisy for what it is. 

Mark Fisher might be right that our society is almost incapable of imagining a world that is not determined by the extractive logic of capitalism and the drive for profit at all costs. Tragically, many, many interpreters of today’s Gospel lesson have vindicated Fisher’s analysis by assuming that this parable effectively baptizes unfettered capitalist expropriation. But when we take our time, when we read carefully and let the Scriptures speak to us in their own unique idiom, we can catch sight of a world made strange. We discover that what is really real is not the profit-imperative of capital, but rather that the one who is indeed Master of the Universe opted to take on the form of a slave. The Lord of all Creation stands on the side of the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed. This Lord rebukes all masters, and as a result, pays the ultimate price of such solidarity - our Lord is the crucified one. And it is in the gloom of the divine darkness, crucifixion, and gnashing teeth, that we glimpse what the world is really like - and it is nothing but grace all the way down.