So if I’m reading this right, Jesus is saying that if you’re entrusted with large sums of someone else’s money, the right thing to do is to make a bunch of risky investments, hoping great risks will yield great rewards, and the wrong thing to do is to play it safe and hide the money where it won’t be subject to market forces, ensuring that the principle won’t be lost.  Is that right?  Then that settles it: Jesus is to blame for the global financial meltdown.

            That’s the good news for today.  Amen.

            Not quite.

            In recent weeks, we’ve heard a parable about lamp oil that had nothing to do with lamp oil.  We’ve heard a parable about a wedding garment that had nothing to do with clothes.  We’ve heard a parable about vineyards that had nothing to do with grapes, and we’ve heard a parable about day laborers that had nothing to do with day laborers.  So even though today’s parable is about money and investments, it should come as no surprise that it really has nothing to do with investments or money.

            There are plenty of interesting questions this parable raises, but the most interesting question to me is, who is God?  Not who is God in this parable—most of us understand God to be the master who went on the journey—but who is God to you?  To take a phrase from the twelve steps, who is the God of your understanding?

            It’s an important question to ask, and not just for twelve steppers.  Because how you answer that question determines how you live in relationship with that God.

            The third slave in our parable today saw his master as harsh, possibly somewhat greedy, and demanding, and therefore acted out of fear.  He believed that the master’s wrath would be great if any of the principle were lost, so he chose take what he understood to be the safest course of action, and he hid the money out of sight, out of mind, the quintessential buried treasure.  And that action of the slave’s helped determine the action of the master, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

            This parable stands alone in the gospel, with no ability to cross reference to see if this third slave’s view of the master is correct.  We don’t know if the master was indeed harsh, greedy, and demanding; we only have the slave’s testimony that he was.  But there is some evidence in the parable itself that the slave may have been somewhat misguided in his impressions of the master.

            First of all, how harsh, greedy, or demanding could he be if he entrusted so much money to three mere slaves?  It’s only an accident of the English language that ‘talent’ has its own meaning separate from the actual, biblical one.  This parable is not talking about gifts or abilities; it’s talking about money, and a lot of it.  One talent is worth fifteen years’ wages for a laborer.  In modern terms, we’re talking roughly four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  Per talent.  The master entrusted a total of eight talents with his slaves, or about 3.6 million dollars.  The first slave got two million, two hundred fifty thousand, the second slave got nine hundred thousand, and the third slave got four hundred fifty thousand.  What kind of harsh, greedy, demanding person entrusts that kind of money to three unskilled houseworkers?