From small things to theosis

The parable of the talents

The kingdom of heaven, says Jesus, is like a Lord who is about to set out on a journey somewhere far off and for an unspecified duration. He entrusts all his wealth to his slaves, and though he does not tell them when he will return, two out of three realise that he expects a return on his investments. The Lord has given them only what he thinks they can handle, and when he returns he is pleased to find that two of them have doubled their money. The third, however, who the Lord did not trust with much anyway, was so afraid of his master that he hid his wealth in the dirt. He thought it would be enough simply to give back what he had received. It was not. He ended up thrown out into the darkness, while the two faithful slaves took what he once had, and entered into their master’s joy.

There are echoes here of Jesus’ previous Kingdom parable about the ten virgins, wise and foolish, waiting for the coming of the bridegroom. We see again the division between those who have prepared for the coming of the Lord and those who have not, again the reference to the darkness which awaits the unprepared, and again it is made clear that when He comes, it will be too late for those in the light, like Lazarus looking across the underworld to Dives, to help those whose folly has condemned them to the dark. Doubtless, then, the “Lord” or “Master” in this parable refers to Christ and His second coming in judgement, which is presumably the reason why it is prescribed in the Sunday lectionary in the lead-up to Advent.

This parable, then, is part of the story of the Fall and Redemption of humanity and Christ’s role in it as saviour and judge. We would be unwise, however, to leave it there, as though it were an allegory from which a single point can be decoded. There would be little point in Our Lord speaking in parables at all, if all he wanted to do was convey a message that would be better translated into plain speech. The reason for using parables, or any kind of myth-making, is that the symbols deployed in them contain deeper layers of meaning. This is not, I must stress, to say that every parable is patent of infinite interpretations according to the whim of the reader. Rather, when the symbols deployed are read in the wider nexus of scriptural imagery, their deeper senses float closer to the surface.

First, we need to consider the overall story of the parable. It is tempting to focus only on the ending, and to muse on the darkness to which the unfaithful servant is condemned. However, this is to ignore Jesus’ repetition, twice, of the reward for the faithful servants: that is, entry into the joy of the Lord.

Granted that the Lord is Jesus himself, what is this joy of which He speaks? We have to remember not to interpret this parable as some standalone text, or to dissect it from the tradition of the Church of which it is a part. Like the rest of the Gospels, this text was recorded and included in the canon of scripture not by disinterested observers for the sake of historical record, but by those who already believed in the divinity of Christ. His joy, as the eternally begotten Son of God and second person of the Trinity, is to gaze eternally upon the face of the Father of whom He is the image. Jesus proclaims that this particular joy is accessible to us, through Him. In the sixth Beatitude, at the beginning of the sermon of the Mount in Matthew 5, He declares, “happy” or “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” To join in the Lord’s happiness is to join specifically in that joy, the joy of the Beatific Vision.

The early Christians were not carrying around personal codices, portable copies of the Bible for personal and private study. These did not exist. Rather, the Gospels were compiled primarily to be read out loud, in the communal celebration of the Eucharist. In the Epistles of Saint Paul, many of which were circulated before the compilation of the Gospels was even completed, we learn that the earliest Christians believed that through the Eucharist, Christ had given them, “though many,” the gift of becoming “one body” with him. That is, Christians become constituent parts of the Lord’s Risen and Ascended body, and so even while we are here on earth, through the Eucharist, we begin albeit dimly to see with His eyes, and so to join in his perpetual vision of the Father.

So how do we get there? The answer, according to this parable, is by being “faithful in small things.” Here we might draw again on the wider nexus of Christ’s teaching. We might recall how He once told his disciples to prioritise the little ones, the children, and that to enter the kingdom of heaven one must become like a little one. He said also that anyone who harms one of these little ones would be better tying a millstone around their own necks. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, He says that anything we do to the least of people, we do also to Him, whether those are good things or bad, and so receive our due desserts. Beyond the words of Christ in Scripture, we can look also to the continuation of His Body, the Church, and those organs of it which most closely resemble Him: that is, to the Saints.

The focus on small things calls to mind the “Little Way” of Saint Therèse of Lisieux, her prioritisation of the small acts of goodness and kindness in daily life that can lead us step-by-step to a closer walk with God and, by making ourselves smaller, increasing our likeness to the image of Him who made ourselves nothing for our sakes. St Therèse too reminds us that each of us is invested only with as much as the Lord knows we can handle. Yet even if we only have a little, whether it is a little money, a little kindness, a little courage, or a little prayerfulness, we have only to invest it wisely, and just for playing our allotted part, we receive no less reward than those who have been given virtue in heroic measure — though theirs is the greater peril, since they are expected to yield a commensurately greater store for the Lord when He returns.

These talents that we have been given serve a similar function to the lamp-oil in the story of the ten bridesmaids read at mass last Sunday. There is no point in just letting the lamps burn out in daylight so there is no fuel left when the night draws in. But also, to make a connection to another well-known parable, no one with any sense places a lit lamp underneath a bushel. The light needs to be set on a stand so that it can shine out and illumine dark corners. Still less should the light, like the unfaithful slave’s single talent, be buried in the earth. Hiding treasure is the reverse of one of Jesus’ other popular motifs. Hidden treasure is buried only to be raised up resplendent from the soil. The burial motif hints at Jesus’ own entombment and descent to the underworld on Holy Saturday. So, in the parables of the kingdom, the only thing we might legitimately bury would be a mustard seed, which springs to life and abundance. We therefore bury our dead as seeds of the Resurrection bodies. But we do not bury our virtues, however small. Such coin grows in the bank, not in the garden.

The garden offers a segue into the encompassing narrative of which this parable is only part, like one of the smaller Russian dolls in a set. The story of the Fall and Redemption is a much bigger doll, but not the biggest. The outer doll, as it were, is the story of Creation and Incarnation: namely, that we are created to become, by the divine-human work of Christ, one with God. Theosis is the purpose of our existence.

This transfiguration of creation is expressed by a movement from the agricultural imagery of Genesis 1-3 at the beginning of the Bible, to the urban imagery of the new Jerusalem in the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John at its end. Humanity begins in the garden of Eden, which Adam like the slaves in the parable is commanded to till and tend as a faithful steward, and indeed to multiply. It ends, though, in a city. To get from the garden to the city requires human creativity, human technology, the work of human minds. This is reflected in the mixed imagery in the parable under consideration: the unfaithful slave speaks in agricultural imagery of the Lord “reaping where he has not sown” and “gathering where he has not scattered,” but the Lord responds by alluding to the urban pursuits of banking and interest. To be clear, this is not a carte blanche for untrammelled technological advancement: the perils of this are clear enough in the stories of Cain and Prometheus, if weapons of mass destruction and the social media site formerly known as Twitter are not enough to show the perils of technological abuse. Rather, “increasing our yield” must mean using our intelligence to make the best possible use of what we are given. It is in this that humans come closer to the image of the Creator, as lesser co-creators working with Him.

Again the Church must remember that it is not merely Christ the man who speaks to us in parables, but the preexistent Logos and Wisdom of God who spoke all things into being, the “master craftsman” of Creation personified in Proverbs 8. It is Christ as God Incarnate, the Creator Logos become carpenter, who literally embodies the fullness of that human-divine potential. The Incarnation is not merely an afterthought, a pragmatic solution to the Fall, but rather is the overarching narrative of all existence. The Incarnation incorporates the saving acts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection on the “eighth day,” the day greater even than the Sabbath, the seventh day when God at rest proclaimed the final goodness of His works. Christ the Incarnate Word is therefore both the origin and completion of Creation, its Alpha and its Omega. So, while this parable refers to the Lord’s departing and returning at a specified time, it is framed or layered in the bigger story that starts with God’s command to Adam and Eve to till the Earth, and ends with the completion of the heavenly city. We have to see His judgment in the light. He comes not to destroy what He, through us, has made, but to perfect it. He makes us living bricks into the new Jerusalem. But the bricks must be baked solid, and the time for the baking is now.

As we approach Advent, we need to resettle our gaze on the coming of the Lord, and invest all the resources we have been given in the building of the New Jerusalem. This demands fidelity in small things, even when we are despondent in the face of the great woes of the world that we cannot fix. We may feel impotent, and fear to stand and fight in a world torn by wars of many kinds, to join the great fray with the bold; but that fear must not hold us back from doing the little things we can do. That is all the courage Christ demands of us. It was fear that drove the unfaithful servant to bury what little he had been given: “I know that you are a hard man,” he says to his returned Lord. And indeed, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: but it is not its end. Those who end in fear will end in darkness. Let the fear of God spur us on to purification, victory over our unruly passions; to illumination, the glimpse of God’s glory in the little things, the little ones, the scrap of bread and drop of wine; and so to perfection, oneness with God in the Heavenly City, the masterwork of the Carpenter who uses our humans hands to do His divine work, and offers us His eyes that we may ever behold our Father’s glory.

It may sound a daunting quest, but it starts simply, with fidelity in small things.