Jesus (30 page)

Why is the servant punished so cruelly? After all, he didn't lose the money; and no one told him he was supposed to invest it. Besides, he might have lost money if he had. For most readers today, the harsh treatment is shocking. It's also poignant, writes Donahue: the poor man is describing what he thought was a prudent action and then almost
proudly
returns the original to the master. How sad it is to imagine someone who thinks he is doing a good deed punished instead and to see his world shattered.
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Is Jesus holding up this unfortunate person as a model of foolishness? What's going on?

The most common interpretation, which you will hear advanced in most sermons and homilies, is that the parable is a warning to those who do not use their “talents” in life. Perhaps because the word “talent” in English automatically carries that meaning, most preachers inveigh against “burying our talents” and encourage us to do the best we can with our “God-given talents,” or there will be hell to pay.

But most parables cannot be exhausted by a single interpretation. For his part, Donahue surmises that the problem with the third servant is the way he reflexively judges his master, assuming he is a “hard” man, when the master has done nothing to justify this charge. Indeed, to entrust such a large sum demonstrates an almost exorbitant level of generosity and trust. Additionally, the third servant names his motivation for hiding the talent as fear.

“It was timidity that spelled his downfall,” writes Donahue in
The Gospel in Parable
, “which was not warranted by anything known directly about the master.” The servant views his master as “hard” though he had been treated fairly. Falsely imagining himself as a victim, the servant created a situation in which he became “with tragic irony” a real victim. In a sense, the man created a “master” of his own making, rather than letting the master be himself.
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Perhaps we are to take from this story not the idea that we are to “use our own talents,” but rather the idea that we are to let God be God.

That same lesson can be drawn from a similar parable, in which a master pays laborers who have worked only one hour the same wage that he pays to those who have worked a full day.
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Many current-day readers also find this parable, usually called the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, nearly scandalous. That someone working for just an hour would be paid the same as someone working many hours more seems unjust. The story never fails to annoy the capitalist mind. But the master has an answer to those who question him: “Are you envious because I am generous?” The lesson here may be: Let God be generous. As with the timid servant in the Parable of the Talents, the angry laborers have already decided the master is ungenerous.

But the interpretation of the Parable of the Talents that prompted discussion in my community was even more unusual than Donahue's. Barbara Reid believes that a key to the parable is remembering that Jesus was not operating in a capitalist system in which wealth could be increased by investment.
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At the time, she suggests, people would have believed in a “limited good,” where there was only so much wealth to go around and where increasing one person's wealth meant taking it away from another. “One who amassed large amounts for himself would be seen as greedy and wicked,” she writes. The third servant, she believes, is the
honorable
one, because he refused to cooperate with a system in which the master continues to accrue large amounts of money while others are poor.

Reid sees the parable as a warning “about the ease with which people can be co-opted by an unjust system,” while also encouraging disciples to expose unfettered greed. She believes that the last verse shows what happens to those who “blow the whistle” on the rich and powerful. The disciples therefore are not to take the man going on a journey as a stand-in for God and not to take the parable as an encouragement to use their “God-given talents.” Although this is an important lesson, Jesus's listeners may not have understood the parable in that way, since “talent” did not have the connotation that it does in English.

In Reid's view, this parable, like many other parables, is about the need for the disciples to be faithful during the time between Jesus's departure and his coming again and to go against the prevailing attitudes. “In contrast to slaves, who live in servile fear of a greedy master who metes out cruel punishment to those who will not go along with this program for self-aggrandizement, Jesus's disciples live with trust in God, whose equitable love emboldens them to work for justice here and now while awaiting ultimate fulfillment.”

When I first came upon Reid's interpretation I had to read it three times. It was almost the opposite of the traditional explanation.

So which is it? While my money is on the traditional explanation, the parables will never give up all their meaning. That's why I enjoy preaching about them. Nothing so riles up an audience as a parable that they don't “get” or “like.” That's what C. H. Dodd meant when he said they “tease” the mind into active thought.

“That parable really seemed to bother the congregation,” I once told the pastor of a church after a homily I had preached.

“Good!” he said.

Saying that the parables may be difficult to grasp, however, does not mean that Jesus did not intend for listeners to get the point. Even the most open-ended parable was designed to convey a message, if only to his inner circle, and even if they failed to grasp that message on the first hearing.

To that end, let's look at perhaps Jesus's most famous parable and think about how it might tease our minds into active thought about the reign of God. Perhaps you can imagine yourself standing by the Bay of Parables listening to Jesus, alongside the original hearers of these stories, surrounded by the rocks and the grass and the bushes and the thorns and saying to your companions, “What in the world does he mean by
that
?”

“T
HERE WAS A MAN
who had two sons,” said Jesus, in the best short-story intro in history.
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“The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.'” Immediately Jesus's listeners would have perked up. The young man is asking for an early distribution of his inheritance, which is tantamount to saying to the father, “I wish you were dead.”
Rotten son!
the listeners would think.

Sometime later, the son moves to a far country, where he squanders all he has “in dissolute living.” The Greek
asōtōs
is sometimes translated as “careless living,” but “debauchery” is closer to the mark. After he spends his wealth, a famine grips the land, and the now impoverished man hires himself out to a swineherd, who gives him a job feeding pigs.

Tending the pigs of a Gentile would have meant that the man was as alienated as a Jew could possibly imagine.
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In his poverty, he envies the pigs: “He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything.” Not surprisingly, the man comes to his senses (
eis heauton de elthōn
, literally, “came to himself”), apparently repents, and remembers his father's farm, where the hired hands have more than enough to eat.

Either out of honest remorse or simple hunger, the man decides to apologize and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” The “hired hand” is the
misthios
, the one to whom wages were due, but nothing more, certainly not a personal relationship. The son is saying to the father, in essence, “Imagine now that
I
am dead.” Already Jesus's story is setting up the listeners to think about matters of life and death.

The son sets off toward home. You can imagine Jesus's listeners expecting, as in other parables where miscreants are dealt with harshly, that the younger son will be severely punished. If the steward who failed to invest was cast into outer darkness, how much more will a greedy son suffer! But while the son was still far from his home, his father “saw him and was filled with compassion.”

Let's pause here. We may be so familiar with the story that we overlook something that may have surprised its original audience: at this point the father hasn't heard his son express any remorse yet. Jesus says that the father was “filled with compassion” simply upon seeing him. The Greek is the wonderful
esplagchnisthē
, he felt it in his guts—the seat of feelings in the Hellenistic world. It's the same word Luke uses to describe Jesus's emotions when seeing the hungry crowd before he feeds them in the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, and that was used earlier in Luke when Jesus meets a widow in the town of Nain, whose son has just died. It is also used to describe the Samaritan's reaction upon seeing the beaten man in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
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We are meant to feel for people in our guts, to be moved to compassion, and to act.

Then the father does something marvelous. The English translation says that he “ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The original Greek is far more beautiful.
Kai dramōn epepesen epi ton trachēlon autou kai katephilēsen auton
can be translated, “And running, he fell upon his neck and fervently kissed him.” It recalls the tender scene in the Book of Genesis where Joseph, in service to the Pharaoh, is overcome with emotion at being reunited with his brothers (who had sold him into slavery), falls upon them, and kisses them. Joseph cries so loudly that all of Pharaoh's household can hear him.
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The scene of the father weeping over his wayward son is a beautiful, human scene. But it must have awakened complex emotions in Jesus's listeners. Who could fail to think of one's own father's embrace and the deep-seated human need for parental love and acceptance? At the same time, who could not feel confused by the father's apparent approval of the son's leave-taking and debauched living? What was going on?

For the shocked, more shock follows. The father calls for a special robe to be brought out—
prōtēn
, the first, the best one—and placed on the son; and he offers a ring for his finger. He orders the “fatted calf” brought out, that is, the calf fed specifically on grain (rather than left to graze in the field) and marked for special celebrations. “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” Luke Timothy Johnson rightly calls these “extravagant” gestures.
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In Luke's Gospel, this parable follows the Parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, so early readers would have made the connection to God's seeking out and welcoming the lost. The shepherd carries the sheep around his neck in a tender gesture; the father rushes to kiss the son's neck in a tender gesture. You can feel the father's joy and his relief: My son is home! The father is prodigal—lavish, extravagant, and overly generous. The story could easily be called the Parable of the Prodigal Father.

In my work as a spiritual director, I have found few other passages that can so help people facing difficulties in their relationship with God. Often we can be trapped by our own preconceived notions of how God judges, how God reacts, and how God relates to us. Some of these come from the unhealthy ways that other authority figures, like parents or teachers, may have related to us, rather than from the ways that God actually relates to people. We end up withdrawing farther from a God of our own making, rather than drawing closer to the God who made us.

A young man once told me that he couldn't bring himself to pray because he kept imagining God judging him for not only everything he did, but also for everything he thought. Distractions in prayer, angry thoughts about a coworker, and frequent sexual fantasies were all reasons that he was sure God judged him. I invited him to think about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, his face became wreathed in a smile.

“I love that parable,” he said. “But what does that have to do with God?”

“Everything!” I said. “Here's an image of God not from your own mind, but from Jesus's mind. Why not pray with
his
image of God?” A look of relief washed over the young man's tired features.

The story, though, may offer us an image not simply of God the Father, but of Jesus himself. For the Parable of the Prodigal Son comes in the fifteenth chapter of Luke. And how does that chapter begin? With the “Pharisees and the scribes” grumbling about Jesus. “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” they say.
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Thus the parable may be Jesus's response to that critique. Those who complain about eating with the sinful are compared, unfavorably, to the soon-to-be resentful elder son. Like most of the parables, the Prodigal Son can operate on many levels, highlighting Jesus's acceptance of sinners, the acceptance or nonacceptance of Jesus by the Pharisees and scribes, and God's acceptance of all.

But there's more to this story than even acceptance. Everyone now starts to celebrate. The father's joy is magnified in those around him. Some of Jesus's first listeners may have thought,
Well, they're celebrating now, but wait until that son gets his comeuppance!

Those hard-hearted sentiments are now expressed by the older son, who has so far remained on the story's sidelines. The dutiful one is working in the fields when he hears music and dancing at the house. At this point, I always wonder if Jesus is not telling a parable, but recounting a tale based in real life; that small detail of hearing the music and the jealousy it sparks lends it the ring of truth.
What's that?
you can imagine the elder son thinking.
A party? Why wasn't I invited?