The Two Parables
The Ten Budgets is based on Luke 19: 11-27
The basic form of this parable – servants entrusted with money by someone going on a journey – appears in the Gospels in two versions. The version in Luke is told just before Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and is a parable for the crowd. They thought the Kingdom of God was going to appear immediately; this parable (according to Luke) is partly a warning that it won’t.
The version told in Matthew 25:14-30 appears to be a going-away parable for the disciples; told after the cleansing of the Temple and just before the Last Supper.
Some commentators (such as Tom Wright) have suggested that the nature of Jesus’ initial ministry, with its travelling from place to place, meant that the parables we have in the Gospels were very likely retold again and again. As with these two versions, Jesus reused basic parable patterns, adapting them as he needed to emphasise different points.
Choosing a Version
If we are in a position to choose one or the other of the two parables, which one would it be?
The favoured version, highlight of school assemblies everywhere, is Matthew’s. Its going away theme can be applied to a great many situations and the possible interpretation of ‘use the talents you’ve been given’ is so common that the English word ‘talent’ derives from Matthew’s Greek ‘talanton’.
Luke’s version, on the other hand, is more concerned with opposition and judgement. The theme of ‘The Kingdom is not yet’ is explicitly stated and the hearers (the crowd) are being asked to consider both who they are in the parable (humble slaves or disloyal envoys) and what they’re going to do while the Kingdom is ‘not yet’. Will they oppose the Kingdom? Work to increase it? Hang on to what they’ve got?
In Matthew’s version, the servant-slave who hangs on to what they’ve got, risking nothing, becomes the judged. That’s appropriate if we remember that Jesus was telling this version to the disciples who will have to carry on Jesus’ work. For the more general crowd the ‘judged’ become those who actively oppose the coming Kingdom. The servant-slave who doesn’t risk will lose what he has – but that’s his only punishment.
Luke and the Citizens
In Luke’s version, the man in the parable is going on a journey to get royal power – and some people don’t want him to have it. This fits with Jesus knowing that his ‘Triumphal Entry’ will, ultimately, appear to be a failure. The crowd will welcome Jesus; the established authorities won’t.
One danger in retelling this parable is that Luke uses the Greek word for ‘citizens’ – and most translations stick with that word. But the concept of ‘citizenship’ has changed a great deal between Jesus’ time and ours – for Jesus, ‘citizen’ would have meant a very different thing. Citizens were a much smaller percentage of any community and they had a higher status than most. If Luke thought ‘politai’ was the right word, he didn’t mean ‘all adults’; he was talking about a smallish group who held (or could aspire to) political power.
This is important because one of Christianity’s dark sides is its tendency to take the historical division between those Jews who followed Jesus and those who classed him as ‘just another failed Messiah’ – and then act as if that division is still vitally important in modern times.
To translate Luke’s word ‘politai’ as ‘citizens’, with its modern implications of ‘most inhabitants’, is to risk continuing that historical division. Luke is talking about a small, relatively powerful group, not all the Jews of Jesus’ time. Yet, someone listening to the parable nowadays will hear ‘citizens’ as ‘most people’. When we look at the parable’s context, just before the Triumphal Entry, we see that interpreting Jesus’ meaning as ‘most people oppose him’ just doesn’t make sense. ‘Most people’ are going to be the ones welcoming Jesus; a small, relatively powerful group is going to be his opposition.
‘Citizens’ may be a technically correct translation, but what it encourages is an assumption that most Jewish people in Judea and Galilee hated Jesus; didn’t want him to be king. If we take that untruth out of the parable and apply it to modern life – it becomes a dangerous lie.
Growth
The parables are often used to describe the growth of God’s Kingdom, God’s nation. In this parable, I’d suggest that’s why the successful servant-slaves become merchants, traders.
In Jesus’ time, the main source of wealth was land and, as the old joke goes, land is something very difficult to make more of. If any ancient peoples (the Romans, anyone?) wanted more land, the only way to get it was to invade and conquer other peoples.
The image that created of wealth was, for most people’s, an image of something that could only be gained at the expense of other people. To grow a kingdom’s wealth, the wealth of some other kingdom had to be decreased. For the Romans to be wealthy, they had to take away the wealth (mostly by taxation) of people in Judea, Galilee …
When Jesus talks about God’s Kingdom in the parables, he uses images of growth. The images he uses are, by and large, non-damaging. They are images of seeds that grow, yeast that spreads through bread, images of full barns and a hundred sheep. In this parable the image is of the servant-slaves increasing their wealth by trading, not by conquest. God’s Kingdom – God’s nation – grows in a way that’s beneficial to everyone, not by taking something away from others.
Retelling
The easiest and most common way to retell this parable is to simply change ‘noble’ to ‘boss’, or maybe ‘entrepreneur’ (an option I might try with the version in Matthew).
If one possible reading of the parable is that it’s talking about the Kingdom of God and the way it’s going to grow, then we could use the very common identification of ‘Kingdom’ with ‘Church’. That has a couple of advantages – as well as being a metaphor for ‘growth’, the parable still retains the sense of possible opposition and of a victory that’s going to come in the long term, not the short.
It has another advantage as well. As I said above, the version in Matthew is frequently used to expound on ‘use the talents you’ve got.’ But what we can lose, when we say that, is the sense that the servant-slaves in both parables aren’t working for their own advantage. When they double, triple, quintuple their money, they’re not doing it for themselves; they’re working for their master, for the household/kingdom as a whole. They’re rewarded, yes – but the reward is so extravagant, it’s obviously not something they would have ever expected.
Most people in the UK are at least vaguely familiar with the idea of a church with Bishops (even if they don’t go to one), of the idea that there might be some opposition to particular Bishops and that people who belong to a church might have projects and budgets. So using ‘church’ is using imagery they’d know; it also keeps the original question. Who are we in this parable? Are we the people helping to grow the Kingdom? Are we opposing it?
Or are we just trying to hang on to what we’ve got?
Previous Parable: Mushrooms and Toadstools (Matthew 13:24-30)
Next Parable: The Three Employees (Matthew 25: 14-30)
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