Hiding your Talents

We've all heard or read the parable recorded in Matt 25:14-30. There's just something that I've been thinking about, and it throws a little light on this parable.

I've wrote this before, but in a mythology class I took in college, the professor made a good point, and it's never left me. In any ancient literature, what isn't documented is information that everyone knew and took for granted. Sometimes this information can be useful when trying to reconcile an understanding of an ancient account without adding modern preconceptions. This story lacks just such information.

When I first heard this story about a man who buried the money that his master entrusted to him, I thought that it was silly. People today just wouldn't take a large sum of money out to the backyard and bury it behind the garage, it's just doesn't make sense in the 21st century. However, in the 1st century, it wasn't so abnormal.

Two thousand years ago, it was extremely common to bury money for safekeeping. If you'd like proof of this, go to eBay and see the coins that people with metal detectors have unearthed and are for sale. There are literally tons of coins that have remained buried for nearly two thousand years that sell every year, some of which are still covered in dirt. I have four that are sitting on my nightstand at home. Of course some of the coins had fallen and were just never picked up, but many more were intentionally buried for safekeeping.

My Nelson's Study Bible says in the commentary for Matt 25:18 that burying money was considered the most secure way of keeping money. The risks were very low that you'd lose that money. In fact, the only risks you took was that someone else knew where you buried your money and would take it, or you'd forget where you buried it. Roman soldiers would often bury their money before going on their campaigns in an effort to keep it safe for when they returned. Many hordes of coins that have been found are suspected to have belonged to these soldiers, many of whom never made it back.

Matt 13:44 tell of a man who discovered a treasure buried in a field, who sold everything that he had in order to buy the field. We can assume that this treasure would have been buried for the same reason that the third servant buried his talent, to keep it safe. Of course these stories are both parables and didn't actually happen, but two separate parables in which we find money being buried seems to indicate that the practice wasn't considered as absurd as it might seem today.

In fact, burying money was the conservative approach for hanging onto money. It is only recently that this became a less acceptable way of saving money. We hear stories of buried treasure that date back only several hundred years and even today you still hear about people who have hidden their money in mattresses, flour canisters, toilet tanks, in walls or even in coffee cans buried out in the back yard. Some of today's most secure modern banks rely on underground vaults, and that is really nothing more than burying valuables with style.

So what we see is that not only was hiding money considered the conservative approach, it was the accepted approach. It is analogous to having a savings account today. So when this servant was entrusted with an amount of money that would have paid the salary of a common laborer for twenty years, it is understandable why the servant would have been afraid to lose it and decided to hide it seeing that that was most reasonable security measure of the day to protect against loss (Matt 25:25). Bring this up to today, and the servant could just as easily have started a new bank account and put the money in there, safe and secure until he needed to return it to his master. In today's modern economy where so many investment specialists are just trying to focus on not losing all their assets, they might well have commended this servant on his conservative approach.

Matt 25:27 brings another aspect of this story to light. The master tells the lazy servant that he should have put his money out to the exchangers so that he could have earned a share of their profits. So what the master is saying is that he should have given his talent to someone like the other two servants, someone who would have made enough profit that would have justified paying interest for the use of that money.

I look at the other two servants as it seems that we overlook them while concentrating on the lazy servant. The fact remains that they each doubled their masters money. They used their money to make more money, that's called investing. Now the economy in ancient Judea isn't like our modern economy, but still some basics about investing remain. They took risks to make their profit, and for the first servant to have taken the annual salary of 100 workers and double that, he may have taken some large risks.

We aren't told what the two servants did to make their profit or how long the master was away, but regardless, we can safely infer that the two servants put themselves out and took more risks than the third servant, and that their risk taking was rewarded. We've all heard this parable explained in a way that teaches us not to be lazy but to be productive, but is it possible too that there is added meaning that we need to learn to not be conservative with the use of God's gifts to us, and instead not only to use the gifts God gives to us, but to use them liberally, and be willing to take risks? What do you think?

Oh, and by the way, I've heard the parable of the talents applied to our natural talents or rather gifts and skills. While it's a good application, it's not perfect because how can you give your talent out to someone else and collect interest on them? What this parable is about is money, not about skills. So what can we learn from a parable that says the kingdom of Heaven is like a master who leaves servants in charge, and that his servants are good stewards who can make money?

I see another application for this parable that deals with our churches. Could this parable be applied to the growth of our churches? Is it possible that we can have an expectation that our churches are supposed to grow and prosper? I'm not speaking strictly financially, but neither am I ruling this out. Also, I'm not laying all responsibility for this growth strictly on the pastor, but I'm not recusing him either, I'm referring to the local church as a whole. Still, I see a parallel between a man who hides money in the ground and a church that has had no growth in several decades.

A servant who isn't willing to go and use what his master has given him outside of his circle of influence isn't going to see any growth. A church that isn't willing to go and use what God has given them outside of their circle of influence isn't going to see any growth. A servant who is playing it safe, being conservative and just focusing on hanging on to what they have and a church that is just playing it safe, being conservative and just focusing on hanging on to what they have will both have the same result, not much. Maybe I'm way off base here with my interpretation and application here, but if a church wasn't experiencing any growth at all for an extended period of time, I can see how it could be because they as a group weren't using the gifts that God had given the church to grow, and were instead just keeping their gifts hidden, or in other words just holding onto those gifts for themselves. Additionally if a church is experiencing growth, I can see how it could be because the are using the gifts that God gave them to grow. If this is an acceptable application of this parable, it certainly puts a new spin on Matt 25:27.

You might be asking yourself what my point is by now, and it's just this. I can see a clear application in this parable directed to our churches to reach out beyond ourselves using the gifts God has given us to bring more people out of darkness and into the light. We are a light to the world, and to be honest I see this parable more as a statement to not hide our light than to not use our talents. We are children of the King, with a great treasure laid up for us (Matt 6:20-21, Col 3:2). And this is the wonder of the richness of God, it cannot be diminished by sharing what we have with others. Remember that song you learned to sing in Sunday School when you were just a child:

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.
This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.
This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine, let it shine let it shine, let is shine.

Hide it under a bushel? NO! I'm going to let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? NO! I'm going to let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? NO! I'm going to let it shine, let it shine let it shine, let is shine.

So my message to you my friend is to reach out to someone using the gifts has put into you, they are worth sharing with. Let your light shine. And don't forget, if you don't you aren't hiding money, you are hiding yourself in an attempt to hide what Christ has done for you. What you're trying to hide is Christ.