The Parable of the Talents

My mother was a creature of routine. Every Saturday afternoon for over thirty years she would go into Dublin to do her shopping – including going to Magill’s delicatessen on Johnson’s Court, where she bought salami and coleslaw, exotic delicacies in late Sixties Ireland – and then on to six o’clock Mass in Clarendon Street church. One day in the mid 1990s, dank and drizzly, I too was in town and thought I’d offer her a lift home given the weather. I stood at the end of the church as the faithful streamed in so I would catch her on her way in and tell her I’d collect her once Mass was over.

Two decades earlier, aged twenty, I’d abandoned my religion, a late decision for someone of my generation. It was a process I found very painful. I missed the transcendent “otherness” of the rituals and the soothing sense of community that religious observance provided. (As a child, I’d perversely always looked forward to the most arduous aspects of the Catholic rites e.g. the long services associated with Easter Week, for example, which went on for days in a darkened church, the statues swathed in purple crepe while the bells fell silent. I’ve found nothing since to match the theatrical solemnity of the Good Friday ceremony.)

But as a young woman I couldn’t be doing with the rules, particularly with regard to sexual behaviour. As a practising Catholic, I was still going to regular confession throughout my late teens. This became a round of admitting to all sorts of nefarious (for my confessors) sexual activities and then promising I wouldn’t commit them again. I also knew of course that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep good that promise, so I was caught on a treadmill of consistently making what was known as “a bad confession”. It took me a long time to solve this Catch 22. I didn’t want to be à la carte Catholic; with the absolutism of youth, I wanted to live out my religion, no half-measures. Then like a lightning bolt - a moment of epiphany I’d call it wearing my secular hat - I hit upon the obvious solution. I would give the whole game up.

My mother was bitterly disappointed – the first of her brood to leave the church. She didn’t rant or rail, didn’t argue with me or try to change my mind, but she took it as a personal failure.

Ours was a religious household. Strictly enforced, though I didn’t experience it that way as a child. It was just how things were. Sunday Mass was attended as a family, no exceptions. The daily Rosary was the same. My father escorted us to weekly Saturday confessions, making sure we did our duty. He was an anxious, dutiful believer. During Lent he would measure out his one full meal and two collations with a weighing scales at the table. He once went to confession and when the priest asked if he had any general questions about his faith, he admitted he found it hard to pray. The priest replied tartly that if he found it hard to pray he’d find it a damn sight harder to get into Heaven. Cold comfort for the conscientious.

It wasn’t just the observance of the rituals that were sewn into family life. The language of the Bible infused the everyday, frequently finding its way into domestic dramas, even though it took me many years to recognise the source. If you were late struggling out of bed in the morning, my mother would greet you with – “the dead arose and appeared to many” (2 Samuel :1-27). If you’d disgraced yourself in some way, she might berate you with “how the mighty have fallen”. (Matthew 27: 52-53)

Matters of faith often cropped up in family discussions, the parables, in particular. My mother had very firm views on them, usually linked to our behaviour in the future – what we might do, or what we might fail to do. The parable of the Prodigal Son was often invoked. Don’t expect the fatted calf here if you make a mess of your lives, she would warn. She was a widow by then and the responsibility of rearing four of us alone was a heavy burden. She was keen for her children to go out into the world and become financially independent. She’d provided a good grounding, offering educational opportunities to a higher level than she’d had, and she felt there was no excuse for us.

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard was another sore point with her. Though by no means a socialist, she was outraged at the injustice of the late coming workers getting the same rate as the ones who’d slaved all day in the fields. But it was The Parable of the Talents that really foxed her, perhaps because it couldn’t be so unambiguously applied to our personal destinies. Furthermore, in her cautious heart, she would have backed the third servant in the story, who is utterly disowned for playing it safe.

For the uninitiated the Parable of the Talents, according to Matthew (25: 14–30), tells of a master leaving his house to travel, and entrusting his money to his servants, or his slaves, depending on the version you read. The first servant was given five talents, the second, two, and the third received only one. (In money terms a talent was equal to 6000 dinar. The daily wage at that time was approximately one dinar, so one talent was the equivalent of almost 20 years of labour.) After a long absence, the master returns and asks the servants to give an account of what they have done with the talents. The first and the second servants have doubled the value of their money by investing with bankers. The third, however, has buried his.

When the third servant pleads his case he gets short shrift.

“Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.”

But his master replies: “You wicked and lazy servant! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.” He orders the third servant to hand over his talent to the first servant who had already made a profit of five talents. “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless servant, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ (Weeping and gnashing of teeth also featured in my mother’s admonitions to us.)

On the face of it, the parable seems to be an unapologetic endorsement of aggressive capitalism and usury. (This from the same chap who drove the money-changers out of the temple.) If you see the talents in financial terms, the punishment meted out to the third servant seems excessive. He safeguarded the money, didn’t he? Even if you define the talents as natural abilities (or God-given gifts if you’re a believer) rather than currency, the moral of the tale still seems to be – monetise, monetise, monetise.

But there are other readings. One might see the talents as neither money nor natural gifts but as the Gospel message itself. The master is Christ who is about to leave his disciples but will be coming back, just as Jesus’s followers believed the Kingdom of God was close at hand. The servants who double their profits represent those whose belief has “matured” in his absence. The keepers and expounders of the faith, in other words.

Equally, though, couldn’t the parable be seen as a critique of the economic system of masters and slaves at work in first century Palestine? Perhaps we’re being gently nudged to consider the position of the hapless third servant because he challenged his master, and thus the whole rotten system. He could be the equivalent of our modern day whistleblower. Matthew does not make any valued judgement on the justice of the treatment meted out to the third servant. He merely states the status quo, or the terms and conditions, if you will, of a life in faith.

No less a poet than John Milton also worried away at the meaning of the parable in his famous sonnet, “When I Consider How my Light is Spent”. The poet queries whether God will judge him harshly because his talent – the gift of sight, is “lodg’d with me useless”.

“Does God, exact day-labour, light denied?” he asks, remembering the harsh treatment of the third servant. The answer he comes to is that amassing wealth to prove one's worth is not the only way to serve God.

“. . .who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

(The stand and wait line was another proposed by mother when she was in comforting mode – showing her range of quotable wisdom.)

We think of the parables as being moral messages simplified for an unsophisticated audience, but were they instead complicated layered narratives, where the real meaning was deliberately left ambiguous and wide open for reinterpretation? If the dinner table discussions in our house prove anything, they show what good stories the parables were, giving room for speculation, debate and argument.

However, it has to be said, we were immature believers. (We were not alone in this. How else to explain vice-grip the institutional Catholic church had on the nation for well over half a century? We were like easily-led children, cowed by authority, yearning for rules and regulations, and craving certainty.) When we discussed the parables around the table, we related to them primarily as stories about real, concrete situations that we were trying to apply to our lives, rather than narratives replete with metaphor and symbolism.

That said, the parables were one of my first introductions to fiction – before I could read, I heard them in church being told and retold, and then being talked about at home. They were an early grounding in the art of narrative. So though I may have left the institutional church behind, the resonance of these stories stayed with me as I found my second great vocation in life – writing - which perhaps is the secular substitute for my erstwhile religious devotion. Another version of the talent parable, you could say.

Nothing from childhood is ever really lost, something I tried vainly to explain when I informed my mother I had “lapsed”.

Which brings us back to that wet day in the 1990s when I stood at the end of a Dublin church waiting for her. When she arrived and saw me standing there, her face broke into a beatific beam.

“You’ve come back!” she said.

Half a lifetime fell away and we were back at the fork in the road where my loss of faith set me on a different path to hers.

I had to disappoint her for a second time. Though equally I could have said – I’ve never really left.

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