This story, recorded by both Matthew and Luke, has been given a lot of different interpretations. I’ve been working/playing with it recently and I have three observations I would like to make.
Before I get into the observation-making business, let me pause for a confession. I have written this essay completely and it wasn’t until I was done that I discovered that the observations I had made could be organized as three main points. I began with a simple grammatical discrepancy—as I will explain below—and followed my several curiosities as the argument flowed from one topic to another. It wasn’t until I was finished writing the essay that I noticed that I had “three observations I would like to make.” I am amazed at how organized it seems to me now, knowing, as I do, that when I first approached the topic, I charged around like a bloodhound with a meaningful scent in his nostrils.
That is the end of my confession, Now on with the observation-making business.
Here’s the story, often called “The Parable of the Talents” but which might be better called “The Risk-averse Servant,” or possibly, “The Servant Who Feared the Wrong Thing.”
Parable of the Talents
To shorten the essay up a little, I am going to presume that you know the general plot. If not, a quick look at Matthew 25 or Luke 19 will fix that. Briefly, a noblemen went away and trusted three servants with some of his funds to make money for him while he was gone. Two of them did. This is about the third one. Here is the clip that dealt with him.
Matthew 25: 24 Last came forward the man who had the single talent. “Sir,” said he, “I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you had not sown and gathering where you had not scattered; 25 so I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back.” 26 But his master answered him, “You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered? 27 Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have got my money back with interest. 28 So now, take the talent from him and give it to the man who has the ten talents.
What did the servant know and when did he know it? [1]
I first began to be interested in this passage when I noticed that the New Jerusalem Bible (my favorite) has a translation of “knew” that was new to me. Like everyone other Protestant my age, I grew up with the King James Version, which has: “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man…” [2] The Revised Standard Version has a modern version of the same sentiment: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man.” This is something the servant knows to be true and it attaches to the character of the master and is evidenced by the master’s repeated actions that support it.
But I noticed that the New Jerusalem Bible has “I had heard that you were are hard man.” “Had heard” is not at all the same thing as knowing, so I checked to see what verb is used in the Greek text. It is egnōn, “to know,” a verb widely used in the New Testament to refer to knowledge. But knowing is different than “having heard” so I was puzzled. The New Jerusalem Bible is not given to flights of fancy; it is the work of careful scholars.
But it turns out that egnōn is in a tense we don’t have in English and this is the first of my three observations. It is the aorist tense. (Please don’t give up here; this is the only really technical point in the entire essay.) An aorist verb describes an action that is taken only once although the effects of that action may go on for a long time. [3] So what would it mean to say, “There was a time when I knew a particular thing, but I have not continued to know it?” That formulation represents “past knowledge,” or, in other words, information that came the servants way in the past and which he is still using. If that is what Matthew has in mind, then the translation “I had heard” instead of “I know” is perfectly appropriate. And not only appropriate, but provocative. What does it imply about the servant I am calling “risk-averse?”
Now the servant characterizes himself as risk-averse. “I had heard that you were a difficult master so I decided to minimize the risk of doing anything to make you angry.” But does it seem odd to you to say that a man who makes a crucial decision on the basis of hearsay is really averse to risk? I don’t think so. And this brings us to the second of the three points: what would a risk-averse servant have done?
Risk-aversion and Good Information
So the servant knows the mater to be demanding and he, himself, is fearful of doing something wrong and being punished. It is not his view of “doing something wrong” that matters, of course. It is the master’s view. In order to get current and accurate information about how to stay out of trouble, the servant needs to “seek (information) and keep on seeking it” to use the language Matthew attributes to Jesus eighteen chapters earlier (Matthew 7:7)
It would be asking a lot to ask that the servant put his master’s interests ahead of his own and I am not asking that. I am saying only that if “avoiding punishment” is the servant’s own top priority, then information about what kinds of activity the master will punish is very important. Instead of that, the servant relies on “I had heard.” That doesn’t sound like risk aversion to me.
There is one other possibility, though. It may be that asking the question about the master is the risk that most terrifies the servant. The text doesn’t tell us that, but it does tell us that the servant didn’t take the trouble to find out. If wondering what the master will want of him simply terrifies the servant, then gathering information about what the master is like is the scariest possible course of action. So the servant commits himself to denial [4]in the same way and for the same reasons that someone who has a suspicious lump in his neck refuses to go to a doctor and find out what it is.
I think I would be willing to call that behavior risk-averse, even though it is not the behavior the story is intended to refer to. Which brings us to the third of the three observations. Just what was the story supposed to be about?
Some have said it is a story about the nature of God. I don’t think that’s very helpful as an interpretation and it is really hard to see why Matthew would have chosen to represent God that way. Some have said it is a story about “lending at interest” (forbidden to Jews except to non-Jews) and therefore about capitalism. I don’t think that’s where Matthew’s interest is at all; not the Matthew who recalls that Jesus said it was impossibly hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 19:24).
Being in the Game
So what is the story about. It seems to me that it is about recognizing that you are in the game and that it is useless to pretend that you are not. I’ve slipped into a modern metaphor here—“in the game”—but it’s only to highlight how contemporary the notion is. If you are a Jew living by the Torah you are “in the game.” You have a lot of obligations that pay no attention at all to what you would prefer. You are obligated to help an enemy unload his pack animal, for instance, and to redeem a kinsman from slavery and to produce offspring from your brother’s widow who will be counted as his offspring, not yours.
A Jew could say about any of those, “I wish I weren’t even in this game,” but he or she is anyway. I learned during my time in Ireland last week that the word “lynch” comes to us from Judge Lynch who was obligated to hang his own son because the son had violated a law that required death. I am sure he said, as he saw he has obligated to give the sentence the law required, that he wished he was not even in this game. But he was anyway and pretending he was not would not help him. I’d be willing to bet that this Utah player had to stop and consider just what “being in the game meant for him.”
The servant is the recipient of his master’s money and the name of the game is investment and profit. I can see that Matthew would have a good deal of interest in that. Matthew would have been troubled by people who “wanted a little piece of Rabbi Jesus’s kingdom” but who wanted to pretend that no obligations went with that “little piece.”
And that, finally, is what I think this story is about. Being a part of the Jesus ministry is a kind of “being in the game.” It may require that you do things that make you uncomfortable or require that you condemn, in yourself, behavior that otherwise you might call justifiable. Like hating your enemies, for instance. But if you have been given a gift, you are responsible to use it as the master intended it be used.
You could, of course, wish that you had not been given the gift and all the obligations it carries with it. I think about Frodo, who, when he discovered what “Bilbo’s ring” really was and the burden it was going to be to him, said, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
I get that. I have felt that way myself. But Frodo said that to Gandalf [5] and this is the reply he got. “So do I,” replied Galdalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
And I think that’s why Matthew want to tell us this story.
[1] I wrote that line well before the recent firing of FBI Director Comey put the minds of everyone old enough to remember back to the Watergate years. All the coverup questions were set as answers to the question, “What did the President (Nixon) know and when did he know it.” These questions were asked in vain during the Iran/Contra allegations of the Reagan years, but they seem to be making a comeback.
[2] We can leave out the archaisms “I knew thee that…” and “an hard man” and still get the sense of the servant’s confession
[3]It is used this way in other text, as well. When Paul says, “Christ died for us according to the scriptures…” (1 Corinthians 15:4) he uses the aorist tense. He means that Christ died once and the effects continue. On the other hand, when Jesus says “seek and you will find,” he uses the present tense. That verse fragment means “seek and keep on seeking” and you will find (Matthew 7:7). So the implications of the aorist and the present tenses are crucial in some contexts. I think this is one of them.
[4] If you have a “denial” joke, like “it’s not just a river in Egypt,” for instance, feel free to insert it here.
[5] In Tolkein’s world, a “wizard” is a kind of being and there is no question that Gandalf is one of that kind. But in English, the -ard suffix is uniformly pejorative and in the word “wizard,” the -ard ending is attached to “wise.” Looked at in that way, Gandalf really was wise; he was not just a wizard.
is green, as all Notre Dame fans know, the official color of Ireland is blue. I didn’t know that. The official symbol of Ireland is the harp and I was just playing around when I added the (s) to “symbol of Ireland” because Guinness has great popularity in Ireland and all they had to do is to reverse the direction of the harp. Note the direction of the harp in these two images.
The harp has been a traditional Irish instrument for a very long time, but I think it has a special status because the English domination of Ireland included a determination to obliterate Irish culture and playing the Irish harp was declared to be a capital crime. When I saw the intensity of Ireland’s love of its harp and of traditional Irish music generally, I realized I was seeing more than just a tradition-loving people. I was seeing an indomitable people.
not prepared to have–not, everybody assured me, “like the Celtic Tiger years of the 90’s–and a stable socialist democracy that is not dependent on England. It is dependent, however, on the European Union (EU), which funded the Celtic Tiger 90s, and Irish news pays a great deal of attention to the EU. I heard speculation of what the EU flag would look like –the ring of stars on a field of blue–when the U. K. withdraws. There may have been just a little glee mixed in with the speculation.
When I travel, I am often taken by signs that catch my interest. I had never heard, for instance of the earliest written Irish script, called Ogham (and pronounced ōm). It is just a series of lines representing letters of an alphabet. But that makes this sign in Dingle–Chinese take-out, no less–a four-language sign. Even in Ireland, where two languages per sign are common, this was worth a good laugh. [1]
There is nothing at all subtle about this statue of Molly Malone in Dublin. It was hard to get a picture of just her–people wanted to have their pictures taken with her as background and who could blame them. On the other hand, if you know the traditional Irish song “The Rose of Tralee,” this picture might catch your fancy. This (see footnote 2) is a rose IN Tralee. We stopped there for dinner on our way back to Adare and I couldn’t resist it.
I saw more redheads in Ireland than I have ever seen at one place. There was an attempt in Portland to break the Guinness (!) Book of Records for the most redheads in one place and one time and I contributed my redhead to that cause, but I didn’t actually see the gathering itself. It will not surprise you that there are a lot of redheads in Ireland, but this one, in Ennis, is named Éowyn and I sincerely hope there is a Faramir somewhere in her future.
me all that much because I am, after all, from Oregon and we do green as well as they do. [3] But nothing in Oregon suggests the division of all that green into very small plots of land marked by rock walls or, as here, by hedges, and you see that all over the parts of Ireland (south and west) we saw.
sources. “Culture” is just things everyone knows and the elements of it don’t come with labels attached. I got a quick lesson in Ireland about how very much of “my culture” is Irish.
Here’s an example from Genesis 38, the story of Tamar, who is one of my favorite biblical characters. The story of Tamar and Judah, her father in law, is not the easiest story to grasp because it requires an understanding of levirate marriage. [2] Our students were perfectly ready to approve of God’s commands that we should not steal, lie, or kill. God’s commands that the younger brother should mate with the widow of an elder brother was not as easy to approve. It is, however, the basis of the story of Tamar and Judah.
Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate how difficult and unappetizing this is. We are asking them to grasp a truly foreign concept—levirate marriage—and understand it as part of God’s covenant with Israel. It is, in other words, binding. And having grasped this concept, to care about it; to see why it would have mattered so much to the writer. On the other hand, there is nothing at all foreign about a woman seducing someone else’s husband, as Tamar did—and her father in law, no less. But to stay with the writer and his values, you have to set aside your own condemnation of Tamar’s behavior and see her as going to great lengths to achieve the goal God had in mind. [4]
of church organization that followed from the Hellenized Jews who first followed Jesus, rather than the kind of church organization that followed from the Hebrews who first followed Jesus. From the split that Luke describes, two entirely different approaches developed and if you are inclined to doubt that, I recommend that you read the book of James, then the book of Galatians. I am reminded here that in our little church in Englewood, Ohio, we used to sing a hymn called “The Church in the Wildwood.” Possibly this woman in on her way to that church.
If you start with how it must feel to have someone tell you that you should not dress the way you want and have your hair the way you want, much less that you should defer to the authority of “a man” just because he is a man—you arrive at a completely modern and understandable and unscholarly anger. But you can choose not to start there. (You probably cannot choose to ignore your feelings altogether, particularly when you begin to apply it to our own times.) But you can choose not to start there. You can choose to start with the situation the writer faced.
more more clearly and to evaluate it more thoughtfully. In a way, I am not the ideal person to do this. I am, I need to say, a fan of TWW—the kind of person who was referred to in the chatrooms as a “wing nut.” I participated in the chatrooms. I taught a university course about the West Wing. I own the DVDs of all seven seasons and I do, in fact, refer back to the issues that are raised more urgently and ominously in the Trump administration. [1]
I’d say there is no blood in that one at all. But it does launch some criticisms. “Fantasia” is not entirely clear, but the relationship with “fantasy” not at all obscured. And the fantasy is founded on “shibboleths” [3]—inside code words that establish membership. These same shibboleths sustain “Beltway liberalism.” By the way, “Beltway” is the adjective of death. Nothing good is modified by the adjective “Beltway.”
our house, so after every run, I would add that extra half mile. I called them “victory laps” after all the victory laps I had seen superb runners like Steve Prefontaine take at Hayward Field in Eugene. [2] And that’s all there was to it at first.
This is Britain Lake, by the way. The faculty circle loop is just to the right.
and right downstairs by the pool is the hot tub. I do have one new trick about physical relief. My body has felt bad in a lot of different ways over the years and I am familiar with those ways. I am capable, now, of getting up in the morning and actually experience the “not hurting” of a joint or a muscle. That is something I never experienced at all at the time I was running the 1776 project.
And I think I will start with winter. Winter will begin five days after my birthday. That doesn’t seem too long to wait. And my brother John, who has greatly enriched my appreciation of seasons, begins his survey [7] with winter on the grounds that it is the simplest. Productivity has shut down and “life” is resting—unless it is trying to find a way to live through the winter—and the whole cycle is getting ready to begin again.
good at it or who had gotten good at it. But good people or no, the ceremony itself is aimed at making people feel welcome because it is a library. They conveyed the attitude that a library is a special place. That’s where the illusion of the curtsying came from. Welcome to this special place. We do knowledge here. We are so glad you have come to spend some time sharing this pursuit with us.
We’ll look first at the situation as Levitin describes it; then at the alternatives as they seemed to him at first. Then, finally, how he escaped that trap and how those familiar and bad options turned themselves inside out and gave him some new choices.
indicated above, the decision situation derives directly from things you aren’t aware of at the time. “The situation” is concocted of stories you have heard, movies you have seen, arguments you have had, your own attitude toward yourself, your self-confidence or the lack of it. So the set of options—should I shoot or not if it comes down to that—seems very present. It seems clear. And it should seem clear. These are all things you are experiencing.
I like this story because Levitin escaped from the trap that his gun laid for him. Suddenly another question became available to him Am I prepared to kill another human being just to protect all this stuff? Of course not. In that form, he rejected it instantly.
ry to understand why an Easter card has meant so much to me over the years. It first meant something to me because it was sent to me by my niece, Lisa Hess, in the confident expectation that she and I found the same kinds of things to be funny. Boy was she right about that!
. Welcome back.” For me, this is where the funny starts.
artist didn’t have a candidate in mind. For myself, I think maybe “the natural order.” The relationship of God’s followers to the natural order has been contentious to say the least. Those drawing from Genesis get to choose between God’s command that we “dominate” and “subdue” nature or that we “care for it” as a steward cares for his master’s property. Quite a difference.
wrestling with it. I haven’t either. Dad was in a great deal more contact with “resurrection” than any casually orthodox Christian would have been. I think Dad knew the Resurrection about as well as Jacob knew the angel he wrestled with and for most of the same reasons.
have any trouble with that particular clause, but there were clauses that troubled him a good deal and he didn’t say those clauses. The effect was like a radio with a loose connection and some clauses would be easily audible, then some silence, then another audible phrase.
is probably about right—I tried to understand the essential “truths” of the Christian faith in a way that made sense. I was free, as Dad was not, to mess around with the questions and that is how I was able to come up with “answers” that fit the questions better. Like Captain Kirk, subverting the Kobayashi Maru exercise, I have felt free to reprogram the computer and manage not to die.
ear. Of the socks I show you here, one of the tapes is still clear, as Dad had been. And one is blank, the identity has come off, as Dad became. And I think about that when I put on the one sock; then the other.
Let’s get the invidious comparisons out of the way right here at the beginning. McKenna Grace is much cuter than Matt Damon has ever been. OK, having said that, Good Will Hunting is a much richer movie than Gifted. Both explore the dilemma faced by a brilliant kid who wants to life a normal life. Matt Damon plays a punk from South Boston; McKenna Grace plays Mary, a little girl with no social skills whatsoever (no friends either) being raised by her uncle in Florida.
had read the synopsis and seen a preview. But I also knew that sitting there in my chair in the theater, I could see any number of other movies. It occurred to me when we went in that I might be about to see a movie about a “gifted” uncle, who is raising a little mathematically precocious girl in pretty casual circumstances in Florida. I was ready to see that movie and it would have been a really good movie. I might see that movie when I go back to see Gifted again. I could call it The Gifted Uncle.
g. But if the climax of the movie is Frank’s slamming the document down on the desk in front of his unbelieving mother, then his doing nothing about that document all through the movie is enormously meaningful. You just don’t realize it at the time.
I have no way of knowing, of course, what movie you will see when you go to see Gifted. You may want to go back and see Good Will Hunting again. I did. You may attach the principal meaning to the mother and the relationships she has had with her husband, her son (Frank) and her daughter, Mary’s mother. This particular movie is about her relationship with her granddaughter, but Evelyn is a “one interest at at time” sort of person. “Very English,” says her continent son Frank, and there is no reason you can’t just give yourself permission to see the story that stars her and her aspirations, if that is the one you want to see.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 