At first glance,
Jesus’s “Parable of the Talents” in Matthew 25:14-30 seems straightforward —
and it is. The message is obvious,
especially to an audience that understands English, a language in which by coincidence the
word for the unit of measurement used, the talent, is the same as the word
commonly used for ability, capacity, or aptitude, i.e., talent. The message of the parable is, use
the gifts God gave you, or you will be held answerable for wasting them.
A man going on a
journey calls in three of his servants.
To one he gives five talents (30,000 Drachma, an immense sum of money; a
Drachm was the basic daily wage), to another two (12,000 Drachma), and another
one (6,000 Drachma). The first two
invest the money and double it. The last
buries the money for fear of losing it.
When the man returns, he rewards the first two, and punishes the third. The lesson?
Don’t waste your talents through non-use.
The problems
start when we think about the parable.
For one thing, it seems somehow different from all of Jesus’s other
parables. All the others start with a
familiar situation, e.g., a poor
woman is treated unjustly by a judge, a son wants his inheritance now so he can live it up, a man plants a
fig tree, some bridesmaids fall asleep waiting for the bridegroom to show up, a
vineyard owner goes to the market to hire day workers, a steward is caught
stealing, etc., etc., etc. — all things
that could or did happen every day.
The parable of
the talents, however, starts with what seems to the modern listener to be an
extremely contrived situation, almost a fantasy. An employer calls his servants in and hands
over huge sums of money? Today’s hearer
tends to imagine a rich man ringing the bell for his butler, chauffeur, and
gardener, and then giving them bags of cash saying, “Take care of this while
I’m away.”
Huh? Doesn’t the rich man have an attorney or an
accountant to handle business matters, or a financial advisor, you know, a
steward? Why didn’t Jesus, contrary to
his usual practice, use an example out of everyday life? What’s with this obviously artificial
situation? Why not say a man had three
sons, and go from there? That wouldn’t
be unusual, and wasn’t uncommon, even today, for parents to give children
responsibilities to train them to be adults.
It gets even more
incomprehensible, however. Two thousand
years ago you didn’t hire servants. You
bought slaves. The word in Matthew’s
Gospel in both Greek and Latin can be translated today as either servant or
slave, depending on the context, but originally there was no context
issue. If you were a servant, you were a
slave. Period.
(Strange but
true: Pliny the Younger wrote to the Emperor Trajan asking what to do about
people who had managed to get themselves enrolled as public slaves — i.e., government workers — to get the
pay and benefits, but who were really free born. Trajan’s answer: If they have been on the
rolls for ten or more years, keep them on.
If less than ten, boot them out and let them work or starve like any
other freeborn person.)
Now the parable
really sounds surreal. A master calls in
his slaves and just hands over huge
sums of money, no questions asked? Uh,
yeah, uh, Kingfish. . . .
Then we add in
the fact that slavery in the ancient world was somewhat different from, say, that
practiced in the United States. Not
better, certainly, but different.
For example, if
someone had been wrongfully enslaved (meaning he or she was not a war captive,
convict, or born a slave), and could
dig up some evidence to that effect, and
could persuade a free man to be an advocate and take the case to court (slaves
had no rights and thus had no standing to bring a lawsuit, even for liberty),
the slave could be granted his or her freedom and compensatory damages, i.e., pay for the work done while a
purported slave.
It wasn’t all
that common, of course, but it wasn’t unusual, especially since kidnapping
people to sell them into slavery was a bad problem, and it was also customary
to abandon unwanted or unacknowledged children, sometimes tossing them down the
Great Sewer in Rome, but more often just exposing them. If a passerby wanted a child or a slave, he
or she could pick and choose.
If the child was
raised as a son or daughter, no problem.
Nobody bothered about birth certificates, just register the kid as your
own for the next census — and a mother who was a Roman citizen who had three children got a special status. Raised as a
slave or purchased from a kidnapper . . . another matter. No bill of sale, or the purported slave
purchased from a kidnapper might have proof of freeborn status in a hall of
records somewhere, especially if he or she was a Roman citizen.
A well-treated
slave probably wouldn’t do anything, even if he or she found out how he or she
had been acquired, but a cruel master might have problems . . . especially if a
purported slave won his or her freedom and got a sympathetic judge to set the
amount of compensation. And sympathy for
slaves was not unheard of.
Some people ran
scams, of course. Selling yourself into
slavery was illegal, even — or especially — for debt. Some rich man, however, might want or need
someone with special abilities, and a freeborn person with those abilities might
need money fast. A self-sale would go
through, the work would be done, and at a convenient time the purported slave
would produce evidence of freeborn status and an illegal sale, and be set
free. If no one complained and no one
got hurt, the Roman courts wouldn’t take any notice.
If no one got
hurt, that is. Romans could be
horrifyingly cruel to slaves, and it was perfectly legal, but needless cruelty
was considered not quite the thing, and it was generally not socially
acceptable. The poet Martial once made a
rather pointed epigram about a master who had cut out his slave’s tongue,
noting that, while the slave could no longer talk, everybody else could — and
did. That was the end of one man’s
social — and thus political — career.
The Emperor
Augustus did better than that. He
once attended a dinner given by a man who was notorious for his cruelty to his
slaves, and one of them broke a valuable goblet while serving. Augustus immediately broke the goblet he was
using, effectively letting the master know he would be out of favor with the
First Citizen if he punished the slave for the same "accident."
And the proscription lists for people who were out of favor or had just
annoyed someone with power were very recent memory. If you were out of favor, you’d better commit
suicide quick so your property would not be confiscated and your family left to
starve.
So, obviously, a
slave was not anyone you would trust with huge sums of money . . . or was he or
she?
That’s what we’ll
look at on Monday.
#30#
