After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.’
His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’
The man with the two talents also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.’ His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’
Then the man who had received the one talent came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’
His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.
‘Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
Matthew 25:14-30
It’s always strange and uncomfortable when Jesus, in one of his parables, compares God to someone unsavoury or even unjust. Today’s parable is unfortunately a rather timely example – God as hedge fund manager, reaping where He did not sow, gathering where He did not scatter seed. Meanwhile, Zephaniah 1:13 tells us, God overthrows those who did build houses and plant vineyards – those who according to the Gospel were acting prudently, planning and investing for the future. And for anyone with a sensitive conscience about spreading wealth around, the assertion that those with much will be given more and those with little will lose everything is a positive embarrassment – even if it is only too probable in today’s economic climate.
This parable shows Jesus as provocateur, indulging his manifest love of irony, even his shock tactics. And a Gospel urging us to take risks with other people’s money is pretty shocking. But it challenges us to reflect on what brings profit from human action; and about the nature of God’s action in the world when it interacts with our own.
Theologians and religious believers don’t normally use economic metaphors when speaking of religious and spiritual matters. I had an introduction to it once, when it went beyond metaphor to actual methodology, when an economics professor, a colleague of mine in the University of London, introduced me to the science known as ‘Economics of Religion’. It’s a strange social science, where the religious and spiritual activities of families were quantified and described as investing in ‘afterlife consumption’; and where the conversion of one spouse in a religiously mixed marriage to the religion of the other is deemed to be a religious ‘efficiency gain’.
I have to say I never used the methods or even adopted the metaphors. But let’s play with it now to unpack the Gospel.
The first thing we notice is that when investing the talents given us by the Lord in a portfolio, we are castigated for being risk-averse. We’re not meant to invest our talents into reliable, steady but low-yielding opportunities – the bonds of religion or society. We’re expected to get a 100% return – 5 talents for 5, 2 for 2 – the sort of yield that only comes from highly speculative, wildly volatile stocks. Take risks – throw everything into it.
Another thing that is striking is that our talents are not to be buried, hidden away in private. The man who hid it to keep it safe, out of sight, is ‘wicked’.
But this is against the conventional liberal nostrums of our time – according to which religion should be a private matter, kept out of the public sphere. Religion in the public domain attracts the rage and scorn of the celebrity intellectuals of our age. Religion in public does damage to the rest of us. What you do in private is your business.
But why is this a good idea? Even if you view religion as purely noxious, toxic; why is it all right confined to private spaces? The worst abuses justified in the name of religion often happen in the private sphere.
Above all, we’re told, religion must not interfere with politics; that is when it is most dangerous. But if we look at the most recent political dramas, on both sides of the Atlantic – it looks to be the other way round. Politics has begun to interfere, horribly, with religion. In the last decade or so of US presidential campaigns, we have seen one party seize hold of religious themes, issues and affiliations to achieve a political end: trying to lure a largely apolitical religious grouping firmly into their camp to secure political power in their hands for – as they thought – the foreseeable future. Whether this was good or bad for American Christianity, or for that matter good or bad for America, will be a question of religious and political taste; but it was less a case of religion interfering with politics than the reverse; political operators, not necessarily religious themselves, exploiting and manipulating religious passions to gain political power.
The British pride themselves on being rather less susceptible to this sort of thing, perhaps due to cultural and historical differences around fundamentalism and the nature of evangelical movements.
But in Europe a different dynamic is at play: the manipulation and exploitation of religious difference to score political points and gain territory. In the crisis of immigration and refugees, the rise of populism, and in Britain, Brexit: the climate has noticeably worsened. A sense of threat from one religious community is, in some cases, being exaggerated as a tool for attacking or furthering respective political and party interests. The rise of certain think tanks and influential blogs, peddling hatred and suspicion of Muslims, bleeds across to the discourses of MPs, the media, and the general public; and nationalist xenophobia bleeds back, egging on the would-be demagogues. Whenever an election or referendum nears, those of us professionally engaged in this area notice an increase in verbal attacks on those Muslims that the government engages with in an attempt to embarrass the ruling party. But it is the individuals and faith-groups who suffer the lasting damage. Governments are pretty good at protecting itself; meanwhile, not only Muslims (or refugees of any faith) but also Christians who have engaged positively with them have found themselves accused of ‘institutionalising the Muslim Brotherhood’, consorting with Islamists, and ‘suffering from ideological Stockholm Syndrome’. So how far is this simply ‘just politics’ – a hobby for those of us who are interested in it while others can opt out? When does it become an ethical or moral matter that we should address regardless of political motivation – a question of justice, and working for the Kingdom of God?
Religion is vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Insofar as it confers an identity and sense of belonging to a group, it is susceptible to lapsing into our primitive, tribal propensity to have an ingroup and an outgroup, an Us and a Them, where all the good qualities of humanity are attributed to Us and all the evil attributes of being human are projected onto Them. But tribal atheism is just as prone to the same logical error and ethical fallacy as tribal religion; not least when they argue that it is ‘religious people’, not human beings generally, who are irrational, deluded, oppressive, violent, and sexist.
But religion is also wondrously fertile for doing the opposite – for inspiring compassion, uniting us in bonds of solidarity across the divides; for throwing into reverse the engines of vicious circles and spirals of violence, powering in their place virtuous circles and pro-social developments. Religion can also create networks of resistance to political manipulation, and a kind of ‘community organising’ that calls for a deeper transformation than political mantras of change and reform. We can each think of our favourite famous examples – a South African Christian, a Tibetan Buddhist, a Hindu working non-violently for radical change… But what are your talents for identifying an urgent need? For the imaginative, compassionate response you could invest your energy and your spiritual power in? And for multiplying your own talents by taking it public, not buried in a private, solitary, spiritual commitment. As the African proverb has it: If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, take others with you. That is surely the most effective investment strategy for multiplying talents – to have more added on to you; while those who have invested little or nothing in social capital will find the little they have disappear.
So this parable of Jesus calls for a public investment of our talents that is wildly speculative in an area of high volatility and high return – to take risks with our energy, our love, and our compassion in those situations, those people, those opportunities where it looks least safe, but where it would yield the most. We each need to discern for ourselves where and what that investment must be, that we undertake on behalf of our Master. But here is the hot tip from our source: reap harvests where Jesus did not sow. Go beyond the imitation of Christ – we have a demanding Master, who expects returns from what he has not done himself, but who will overthrow the prudent, self-interested building for the future of those who construct their own houses for themselves to live in and plant vineyards for themselves to drink the fruits of. So go and scatter the seed of your action in the world where there is no security, no return for yourself, no guarantee of success – – but a rich harvest for those who are bold risk-takers with their energy and their love. For those who give everything there will always be more.