You ought to have invested my money with the bankers.
The Parable of the Talents, as it is called, illustrates clearly both the total surprises and the significant dangers of reading holy scripture uncritically or with literalist intent: You ought to have invested my money with the bankers. These purport to be the words of Jesus, but in a time of global financial panic twenty centuries later they strike us as very strange, and make us think, at the very least, what a good job it was that the Lord did not know that there were going to be banks in Iceland.
Of course, you are not meant to read parables in a literalist sense, but to have sufficient effect they do have to be grounded in illustrations from the real world in order to generate their allegorical or metaphorical lessons. You are not meant to lift out tiny sections of them to claim definitive teaching on not directly connected topics. Jesus is not a bank manager, or an apologist for them. But nevertheless, individual lines of scripture do have their own power to challenge us about how we look at the world and plan to live in it according to the will of God.
The Parable of the Talents is one of a series of parables about readiness – readiness to face the coming of the Lord in judgement. Preceding it, in Saint Matthew's Gospel, are the parables of the Unfaithful Servants and the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Following it is the famous, and quite frightening Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. All these are also about readiness to face the judgement of the Lord. The first three parables tell you that you must be watchful for that coming time. The final parable tells you how to be watchful.
So far, so good. Then we must resolve that the "talents" mentioned should not be interpreted in the way that we speak of a television "talent contest". In the parable, these are not to be understood as natural gifts or abilities, but as financial units. A biblical commentary of 1963 says: This talent was probably worth about £300. So, in today's money, as they say, we may infer that a talent had the spending power of about £7,500. On that basis, the first servant was given venture capital worth about £37,500. This biblical exposition is beginning to sound a bit like the television programme, "Dragons' Den", isn't it? Let us go on somewhere else…
Was the parable based upon the story of a real person, or are you meant to jump immediately to understanding that the man of property going on a journey is supposed to represent God – or, more critically, to represent his Son, leaving the earth through his death, and then returning as the risen Lord and judge? Now, that is more difficult. It is possible that the parable might have been based upon the story of Herod Antipas who went abroad in search of a royal title for himself, but Herod Antipas was a hated tyrant. Are we meant to infer allegorically that God or his Son is the same in the conduct of their affairs? Obviously not, but you can see the dangers of the comparison. Likewise, if you jump directly to the representation of the travelling landowner as God or his Son, you have a picture of a character who is "a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow." Is this the picture of God that Jesus gives us? No, it cannot be, so you are left with the substance of the parable which urges readiness for the coming of the Lord, and the resolution that all other details of the parable are merely illustratively incidental.
But that still leaves us with the bankers. What on earth are we to do with them? You ought to have invested my money with the bankers…
We are not too keen on bankers at the moment, are we? We suspect that their greed and their speculation has led to the worldwide banking crisis, and their reluctance to pass on the full Bank of England rate cut (even though the tax-payer has bailed them out of their folly) and their readiness to continue to pay themselves handsomely fuels our deep suspicions. Once, according to the advertisements of many years ago, bankers were friendly little chaps who lived in your wardrobe and cheered you up and gave you money. Not any more, it seems!
Perhaps my calculation is no more valid than attempting to interpret the Parable of the Talents literally, but if a city banker pays himself a bonus of one million pounds this year for doing things disastrously, in order to match that income with my net annual stipend I would have to work until I was one hundred and thirty five years old. If he paid himself the same bonus next year too, I should have to work on until I was two hundred and twelve years old to match it. Yes… I think that I can see why high-flying bankers are not flavour of the month at the moment. Mind you, in the light of that, if a banker were to ask me to conduct his daughter's wedding now, he wouldn't believe what I am going to charge him to do so!
Oo-er! Can you see what I have just done? I have committed one of the cardinal sins of bible study. I have committed the sin of eisegesis. You may have heard the technique of explaining the meaning of scripture described as exegesis – that is to say, reading a meaning out of scripture. Well, eisegesis means the opposite – reading a meaning from the present day back into scripture and the world that produced it two thousand years ago.
Start with what the bible meant to the people at the time that it was written and then ask if it has a specific relevance to situations two thousand years later. Don't do it the other way round!
So what was the state of banking two thousand years ago? In some respects, it must have been remarkably like it is today. When primitive society moved from hunter-gatherers, to nomads, to settled farmers, and eventually to town-dwellers, trading what you did produce for things that you did not was facilitated (as they say in fashionable circles two thousand years later!) by the invention and use of money. Money was lent and borrowed. Hiring money – borrowing – was not much different from hiring a pair of oxen to plough your field. You paid a fee – interest – for the convenience of doing so. An extortionate fee for borrowing money was always criticised. Jesus' driving out of the moneychangers from the temple may have had as much to do with their extortion as with their desecration of holy ground. What differed was that whilst there were bankers two thousand years ago, the concept of banks themselves was an entirely different matter.
The security of a banker's strongbox was not the same as the security of a modern vast building with a strong-room and a safe. In an era when countries were frequently invaded by foreign armies, bankers could flee with your money, or do a moonlight flit just for the sake of doing it. In ancient times, you did not lend bankers money primarily for them to keep it safe. You lent them money purely for the sake of the interest – as an alternative to using the money yourself in schemes of creative trading and commerce.
So what did you do if you wanted to keep your money safe, either from burglars, or from invaders, or from dishonest family members? You did what most people at the time did. You buried it somewhere on your property, taking care that nobody saw you doing it, and telling nobody where you had done it. That was the substance of the earlier parable about a man who had found money buried in a field by a previous owner but the existence of which was unknown to the present owner.
People at the time who had money for a more than a hand-to-mouth existence tended to use it to build up their commerce, rather than place it with bankers. And at times of great political or social uncertainty, they buried it. At the moment, apparently, there is a considerable demand for £50 notes, which suggests that people consider that putting actual money in their own safes, under their mattresses, or under their potting shed is going to be safer than entrusting it to a bank.
So why does Jesus include in his parable the remarkable line: You ought to have invested my money with the bankers? In a sense, it illustrates the very nature of parables, which involves drawing heavenly principles out of earthly pragmatism. The whole Parable of the Talents echoes the earthly practice of commerce to explain something about being fruitful for God with the gifts that he has given you, and being ready to answer to him for what you have done with those gifts. From the parable's purely financial point of view, if you invested your money with the bankers, they would have got some sort of return for you even if you could not be bothered to use it for yourself. If you buried it in the ground, what was there? Just stagnation and wasted opportunity.
Commerce involves risks, of course. In the matter of stocks and shares, for every number of winners there is going to be an equal or greater number of losers, one way or another. But look again at the parable. Both of the servants who used the talents that they were given were winners for their master. Now we jump from the financial aspect of the parable back into its allegorical mode. All those who use their talents to help the kingdom of God to grow will never be losers. They may be hard-working, they may face frustrations, they may not be able to see the ultimate fruitfulness of the use of their gifts, but those who use their talents for God will never be losers.
Now, instead of reading a present-day financial and political situation back into a first century parable, let us see how a first century parable can inform a present day church situation… You ought to have invested my money with the bankers… I expect that you have all been to one of those pastoral committee meetings where the pastoral secretary says of some church member, "Well, they don't seem to come to church very often, or take a place on a committee, or join in many things, or come up with good ideas for the church, or help at teas and bazaars. But they send us their Sunday offertory on a regular basis. So, should we keep them on the membership list?" The initial response to that question is, yes – keep them on, because, in terms of the parable, they are the servants who are investing in the (ecclesiastical) bankers – the people in the church who can get some sort of return out of what those people are giving. It would be far better, both for the Church and for their own spiritual growth, if they used their talents fully, but in the interim, their financial generosity helps you to put slates back on the roof and to fund your youth work. And all the while you can help and encourage them to discover and to use their real talents for God. What they do at the moment could be far more fruitful, but it is better than burying it in a field!
The Parable of the Talents is about readiness to account to God for what we have done with the gifts that he gave us. Yes – one day you could stand before him and explain that you decided to make the least creative use of those talents – You… invested (his) money with the bankers. But I would dread to stand before him and say, "Lord, after you gave the gift of my life to me, I just buried all my life's talents in a field… here they are, unused, unshared, and un-given."