“The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.” George Orwell provided these marvelous examples of mixed metaphors and inexact, unhelpful language in an essay in 1946.*
In that same essay, Orwell addressed the unfortunate over-reliance on what he called “dying metaphors” - “which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” As examples, he offers: toe the line, grist for the mill, stand shoulder to shoulder, and others. These “dying metaphors” Orwell distinguished from metaphors that are actually already dead. A dead metaphor is a word or phrase that has lost any metaphorical power, and has “reverted to being an ordinary word.” He offers “iron resolution” as an example. I guess you could know that iron resolution is really strong and unbending without knowing anything at all about metallurgy.
This morning, the parable of the talents is a parable of a dead metaphor: the metaphor in question being a talent, which, as metaphors go, is as dead as a door nail.
The English word “talent,” you see, has been in use at least since the late ninth century, and referred then to a specific measure of weight. What exactly that measure of weight weighed is a detail forgotten to history, lost in the mists of time, as it were. Eventually, the word came to refer not to the measure of weight, but to the specific value of the weight of a talent of gold or silver. And with that meaning - of the monetary value of a specific ancient measure of weight - the word “talent” found its way into the English translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew.
Now, we are told that a talent was a large sum of money - about the value of something like sixteen years of wages for a laborer in the ancient world - not an amount to be cast aside like an old glove. And the parable of the talents tells of a man who “entrusted his property” to his servants, while he was away on a long journey. You know how it goes. To one he gives five talents, to another two talents, and to another one talent. No instructions are given; but the responsibility is implied and, we take it, also understood: “make something of these talents while I am away.”
Surprisingly to us, for most of the church’s history this parable has not been read as an exposition on the virtues of compound interest, or the importance of a well-thought-out investment strategy and diverse asset allocation. More shocking, still: the financial aspect of the parable faded from any significance, as if it was printed on fax-machine paper.
Along with the quickly fading financial implications of the parable, so too, the financial definition of the word “talent” disappeared like writing in the sand. What was left in its place was a new meaning of the word talent, which came to be defined, not as a measure of weight, or of the value of that much gold or silver, but as something more important: a “mental endowment” or “natural ability,” according to the OED, which tells us that this meaning comes “from the parable of the talents in Matt.” And specifically, the dictionary goes on, the word refers to a gift or ability that is “divinely entrusted to a person for use and improvement.” So the word “talent” now had a new and ordinary meaning. The metaphor was killed. Dead as a Dodo.
In that essay, Orwell wrote that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” he wrote, “one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
And this morning, if we turn to the parable of the talents, the question for us isn’t whether or not we know what the meaning or etymology of a “talent” is. No, the real question is whether or not we can tell this parable to ourselves with sincerity, or if we are reading it because we have to. Can this parable speak to us anymore? Or is it an exhausted idiom: something that must be endured, like a trip to the dentist, until we can wrap up here and go pour ourselves a cup of coffee? This question of sincerity does not hinge on the meaning or interpretation of a “talent;” it swings on the disposition of our hearts, and the status of our faith.
Notice the words Jesus uses to begin his telling of the parable: “it is as if.” It is as if. With those words we are reminded that the parable itself is a metaphor: “a thing regarded as representative of symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.”**
It can be slightly tiresome, I’m sure, for a preacher to stand in a pulpit and tell stories in order to shed meaning or cast light on stories that were told by a preacher in order to shed meaning or cast light on something in the hearts and minds of the original audience. All the more so if the preacher is always preaching to the choir.
But that metaphor (preaching to the choir) implies that the preacher is engaged in the task of converting the already converted. And when it comes to talents and how we share them - that is to say, when it comes to what we are willing to give to God and to God’s church - I’m never exactly sure how completely the choir is committed to the anthem… especially if the anthem is being sung in the key of green, as it were - that is to say, especially if we are talking about money.
The dictionary tells us that talents are “divinely entrusted to a person for use and improvement.” And the parable tells us the same thing. “Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.” You take what’s been given to you and you make something of it; you find a way to make it grow; you cause it to increase; you allow it to multiply. Or, to put it in the words of the parable, you are faithful over a little, and God sets you over much… and you enter into the joy of your master!
Today is one of many days that the church asks you to consider what you have done and what you are doing with all that has been entrusted to you. We work on the assumption that everything we have has been given to us by God; there is nothing that isn’t a talent, to use the terms of the parable.
I could try to rephrase this question, as I have before, and I am sure I will again. But another important question is this: Is this metaphor dead or not? Is it dying? Is the parable just a dead or dying metaphor? Or does it have life in it still? Am I whistling in the wind?
It would be easy, at this point, to say that it’s up to you to keep the metaphor of the talents alive. And to encourage you in your generosity, to stir up in you the sense of responsibility that you have to keep the old metaphors alive, etc., etc. But to do so would be to fail to understand the Resurrection even as so much as a metaphor, let alone as a truth that’s truer than the North Star. For, bringing new life to that which is dying or dead is not actually your work or mine. It is always, only, and ever the work of Jesus.
To be sure, it’s work in which we all have our own part to play. But it’s so much easier to get our part right when we see that we are only responding to what Christ has done and is doing in our lives and in the world; when we know that we are only participating in the new life that he has already prepared for us and for all things.
The worry of every preacher who stands up to talk about Christian stewardship, about the need of the giver to give, about your talents and how you should make them grow by sharing them with the church, and about the reward of entering into the joy of our master is that no matter what we say, all you will only hear is this: “The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.”
If Orwell was right, such worry places the cause of anxiety on the wrong heads. If “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity;” if there is a gap between my real aims and the aims I declare on behalf of the Lord, maybe then I (or any preacher) am nothing but a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
So let me try to be plain and clear. Everything we have comes from God, and God has entrusted nearly everything on this earth to our care, and God has given us all this so that we can make something of it; we can find a way to make it grow; we can cause it to increase; we can allow it to multiply. More to the point, God asks us to be faithful in a little, so that we can be set over much, and so that we can enter into joy!
What you do with what God has given you matters - not just to the church; it matters to you! Take what God has given you and make something of it, find a way to make it grow, cause it to increase, allow it to multiply!
Every single day of the year we try to demonstrate here that investing in the ministry of Saint Mark’s is a good way to accomplish those goals. And we hope that this message rings true.
Build your house on solid rock. Don’t hide your lamp under a bushel. Put new wine in new wineskins. Sow seeds on good soil. Have faith even as small as a mustard seed. Let the yeast leaven the dough. Go and buy the field where the treasure is hidden. Sell all you have in order to acquire this one pearl of great price. Get dressed and come to the wedding banquet! Stay awake, and keep your lamps burning! Take your talents and put them to work for yourself, for the world, and for the Lord! The teachings of the Lord, just as his parables are not dead or dying. God has given them to us to keep us alive, and to give us new life, when our time in this life comes to an end.
And your talents, your gifts, all you have to offer are not dead or dying metaphors. They are seeds and soil, wine and wineskin, they are mustard seed and yeast. They are banquet, and treasure, salt and candle flame. Your talents are pearls that adorn a new way, a new hope, a new life.
Don’t bury your talents. Make something of what God has given you, and watch it grow like topsy, grow like the the grass after the rain, like a flower turning its face toward the sun… grow like someone who knows herself to be a child of God and who has been given a great many gifts, a great many talents, and who delights to make them grow!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
15 November 2020
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
* George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946, Penguin Books, available thanks to the Orwell Estate on www.orwellfoundation.com
** from Oxford Languages/Google
Rembrandt: The Parable of the Talents