Maybe God isn’t an angry absentee landlord, and maybe the wicked, lazy, worthless bloke isn’t the slave at all. A provocative retelling of the parable of the talents. (Listen.)
Who profits? Who pays? For many years, these words were daubed in bright yellow paint on a wall near my old house; I read them every time I walked past. Gradually they sunk in, until they became the fundamental questions I bring to everything. The news. A sermon. A theological position. A decision. And, of course, any reading of the Bible.
For example, last week I read that private companies frequently suspend welfare payments for often spurious reasons. Between April and June of this year, nearly 240,000 jobseekers had their payments temporarily suspended by the very same companies who make money out of these processes; and only 10% of jobseekers’ phone calls to Centrelink are being answered. So, privatization of welfare: Who profits? Who pays?
I ask the same questions of trickle down economics, stage three tax cuts, privately operated prisons and cash bail. And I also ask these questions of an absentee landlord who expects slaves to double his money while he’s away.
Now, most of you will have heard spiritual interpretations of the parable of the talents. In such a reading, those Christians who don’t use their time, money, resources and abilities to generate dramatic outcomes for the kingdom have only themselves to blame, and will experience God’s vitriolic anger and condemnation.
But nothing says that the absentee landlord is God. So let’s see what happens if we assume that, when Jesus talks about talents, he’s actually talking about money. Because that’s what a talent was: a unit of money, over a million dollars in today’s terms; and in this story, two people doubled their money in a short space of time, while a third is castigated then rejected for refusing to invest.
So, who profits in this story? Who pays for that profit, and how? Who, then, is truly wicked, lazy and worthless? And which character is most like the God we worship, that is, the God made known in Jesus Christ?
I invite you to wonder about these things as I riff on the story, and re-tell it in a modern context. Perhaps we will end up in an interesting space. And if we do, then where you go from that space is entirely up to you.
So make yourself comfortable: it’s time for a story.
***
Once upon a time, there was a billionaire who was rather fond of cage fighting. But what with the collapse of an overseas stock market, and a royal commission, and a great deal of lobbying to protect his interests, he’d had a hard year. He needed to take some me-time, and chillax. But before he went away, he called in his chief investors.
He turned to the first, and gave him five million dollars to play with. He turned to the second, and gave him two million dollars to play with. He turned to the third, and gave him a million dollars to play with. Then he went to the rooftop helipad, flew to his private yacht, and sailed for the Bahamas.
Now, the first investor was a real wheeler and dealer. Thanks to his timely donations to major political parties, environmental controls had been relaxed. Companies began extracting oil from tar sands, and fracking near schools, and building an enormous coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef. His energy investments shot through the roof.
Thanks to his canny lobbying, governments were locked into contracts which guaranteed profits for energy companies; and so despite a downturn in usage, he continued to make money. Thanks to his careful manoeuvring against wind farms and solar power, small energy producers were driven out of the market, and so in this way, too, his investments in big energy continued to pay excellent dividends. And thanks to his creative accounting, he was able to funnel the profits offshore and pay no corporate tax. Over time, he doubled his investment; he made another five million dollars.
The second investor put his money into manufacturing. Since the relaxation of import tariffs and the migration of work to special economic zones, his investments had been performing well. In Cambodia, when workers fainted and even died from exhaustion, there were always others willing to take their place. In Bangladesh, when one factory collapsed and killed a thousand workers, another factory and another thousand workers took their place.
In China and Guatemala and India and Mexico, floods of workers made t-shirts and jeans and sneakers and smartphones for less than a dollar a day; and the branded products were sold in the West at enormous profits. His astute approach to investment soon paid off. Over time, he too doubled his money; he made another two million dollars.
The third investor: well, he was afraid. As a young man, he had been energetic and ambitious; he had pleased his billionaire boss. But something had changed. He continued to invest by day, but with an increasing sense of unease. And at night, well, at night he was haunted. In his dreams he heard the groans of those who worked all day all week all month all year, and were still hungry, and poor, and wretched. In the mornings, when he checked his portfolio, he found himself thinking of Amazon order packers with no breaks and no healthcare, and children picking tomatoes in the California sun, and Uyghurs enslaved in labour camps, and all who work in precarious positions for other people’s gain.
So when the third investor was given the million, he felt a bit sick. He thought back to the global financial crisis. His boss had taken a government bailout, and used it to award himself a forty-million-dollar bonus. Meanwhile, he had let thousands of workers go, and foreclosed on hundreds of thousands of homes.
Only last week, while being driven to a meeting, the investor had glanced up from his iPhone and noticed an encampment on land zoned for a luxury redevelopment. Little children were playing among plastic bags and broken bottles, and he had realised this was their home.
He thought of his boss, a man who holidayed on his yacht while his staff worked ninety hour weeks; a man who pushed down wages and cut costs at every turn; a man who undermined or ignored environmental and workplace safety laws; a man who took vast government handouts but paid not a cent in tax. He was rich as Croesus, yet never seemed to have enough.
The investor remembered all the times his boss had been enraged and had screamed obscenities at his staff; he remembered watching the spittle fly as he called them good-for-nothing slackers and worse. He wondered, why do I work for this man?
He thought of the work itself. He was tired of slaving at the office all day, and wining and dining MP’s at night. He hated the person he was becoming: ruthless like his boss, cruel to his underlings, merciless in his investments, and never, ever satisfied. And he wondered, what am I really hungry for?
He thought of his life. He was exhausted by all the racing around, the travel, the spending, the rivalry, the accumulation of stuff and worry, and no space just to sit and shoot the breeze with friends. Then he realised he had no real friends. And he wondered, is this the only way to live?
His head was spinning; his stomach churned. Unable to think straight, he stood up. He left the office and went for a walk, for it was in walking that he often found peace. He paid no attention to where he was going; he let his feet guide him.
Eventually, he wound up on the other side of town, near the entrance to a supermarket. And at a table in the food court he saw a ragtag bunch. There were tired women, ratty kids, and weather beaten blokes, a jittery addict, some disabled people, their support workers and the like. And they were all listening, listening to a storyteller.
As he came near, he heard the storyteller say, ‘You can’t serve two bosses. You’ll hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve God and money … Isn’t there more to life than food and fashion?’ (Matthew 6:24ff). Then the storyteller broke open a pack of TimTams and shared it with the group.
The man paused. The words were balm. Then the storyteller looked up, and their eyes met. In that instant, love poured into the man. His eyes filled with tears and he rocked back; it was more than he could bear. Grinding his teeth, he turned on his heel and strode home.
But that night in bed, he tossed and turned, trying to sleep. He punched his feather pillows, he twisted in his linen sheets, he adjusted his silk pyjamas. But the problem was not the bed. He was being kept awake by thoughts, by a self at war with self, by questions which spun around and around: ‘Who is my master?’ he wondered. ‘What is my life worth? What do I really serve?’
He tossed and turned, his mind racing; but as dawn broke, things became clear. He rose, showered, and dressed with a strange sense of calm; then he went to the office. He looked around at his colleagues staring into their screens, their foreheads frowning anxiously; shouting into their phones, red-faced and panicky; checking their accounts, eyes glittering with greed. There and then, he removed his master’s money from the stock market. And he took the money, and put it in a safe-deposit box, and hid away the key.
Some time later, his boss returned. ‘Whaddaya got for me?’ he asked. Quaking in his boots, the man said, ‘Here’s your money. Take it. I knew you were a harsh man, grabbing at what you didn’t plant, and taking where you give nothing. So I opted out of this rotten system and put the money where it could do no more harm.’
His boss blew his stack. ‘I own you, you lazy worthless punk! At least you could’ve put my money in a term deposit so I got interest.’
He ordered the million be taken away from him and given to the one with ten; then he shouted ‘You’re fired!’ and sent the investor packing.
The man returned to his desk and found security waiting. They gave him a cardboard box already packed with his personal possessions. Then they stripped him of his pass, his phone and his laptop, and escorted him into the street.
The man went home, so quiet in the middle of the day. He kicked off his shoes, and he threw off his suit. Then he dug out his gardening shorts and a ratty old shirt; he found some battered sneakers. He left the house and headed to the other side of town, where the other side of us all live.
He walked among the hungry and the homeless, the strangers and the weirdos, the deadbeats and the dropouts. He walked among the chronically ill and the chronically unemployed and the chronically convicted and the chronically addicted, and as he walked he looked. And he hummed to himself as he went walking and looking, a man in search of a storyteller. Ω
A reflection by Alison Sampson on Matthew 25:14-30 given to Sanctuary on 19 November 2023 © Sanctuary 2023 (Year A Proper 28), with a tip of the hat to the Flemington Ark and Pantry Prayers and their impromptu TimTam communion outside a supermarket last week when locked out of their venue. Reporting on JobSeeker suspensions by Rick Morton, Private companies halting welfare payments, here. An earlier version of this re-telling was shared in 2017. Sanctuary is based on Peek Whurrong country. Acknowledgement of country here.
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