The Treasure That Never Fails

A man goes away and leaves his own money

Begin with the arithmetic, because English has quietly ruined this parable. A talent was not a knack. The word meant a balance, a set of scales, and then the weight laid on them — near twenty years of a working man’s pay. Our modern sense comes from this story, which means the reading everyone has heard, use your gifts and don’t waste your potential, is an accident of language running backward into the text.

Nor is it their wage. Matthew is precise: the man called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods (Matt 25:14). His goods — his substance, the actual contents of his house, put into other people’s hands. Then he leaves. Unto one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one; to every man according to his several ability (25:15).

Not according to merit. According to what each could carry, and that is the tone of the whole thing. The measure is not a ranking; it is a mercy. God gives himself to creatures the way water is given to a cup — shaped to what the cup can hold, the restraint not stinginess but love doing the arithmetic of a small vessel. Nothing is withheld that could have been received.

What the third servant believed

Two servants trade and double what they hold. The third digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money (25:18). At the reckoning he explains himself, and his explanation is the most important speech in the parable:

Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: and I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine (25:24–25).

Read it slowly, because before it is a report of what he did it is a confession of faith. A hard man. A creditor. One who reaps where he has not sown — who takes what is not his, who will come back counting, who cannot be given to but only paid off. Having believed that, there was nothing else he could do with the money. You do not trade on behalf of a man you expect to be robbed by. You keep the coin intact so that on the day of reckoning you can set it on the table and say: there thou hast that is thine. Nothing lost. Nothing gained. Nothing risked — and nothing received, either.

So the other two are not harder workers. They believed the giver differently, and everything followed from that. And they were right about him. God is not a hard man because God is not a man at all — not an especially large one among the others, not a rival with interests to defend, nothing you could be in competition with. He has nothing to gain from you, which is precisely why he can give without taking. Even his leaving is the room love makes; a gift that had to be stood over would not have been a gift.

I do not hide her riches

Solomon, who was given more than anyone in the older Scriptures and knew exactly where it came from, says the third servant’s sentence inside out in a single breath: I learned diligently, and do communicate her liberally: I do not hide her riches. For she is a treasure unto men that never faileth: which they that use become the friends of God (Wisdom 7:13–14).

A treasure that never fails — to those who use it. That is the parable’s own verb, sitting in the Wisdom books centuries early. Holy Wisdom is not stored; she is spent, and she is inexhaustible only in the spending. She goeth about seeking such as are worthy of her, and meeteth them in every thought (Wisdom 6:16); she exalteth her children, and layeth hold of them that seek her (Sirach 4:11). Those are not the verbs of something kept in a box. They are the verbs of something that comes looking for you while you are still deciding.

She cannot be banked, because she was never a quantity. And she cannot be finished: The first man knew her not perfectly: no more shall the last find her out (Sirach 24:28). Gregory of Nyssa made that limit the definition of blessedness — “this truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him” (The Life of Moses 2.239). What you have not finished receiving cannot be put away for later.

Matthew knows both motions and sets them twelve chapters apart. The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field (Matt 13:44) — he covers it over only long enough to sell everything he owns and buy the ground it lies in. Two parables, two men, two holes in the earth. One is digging treasure up and spending his whole life to get at it; the other is putting treasure down and walking away. The kingdom is the un-burying.

The day he was walking toward

Paul names the buried talent without telling the parable at all: We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain (2 Cor 6:1). Grace received in vain is not grace refused. It is grace accepted and then kept — taken in, set somewhere safe, and left there.

Then: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (6:2). Paul is quoting Isaiah (49:8) and reaching for a word with a history. Accepted is the word of the acceptable year of the Lord — the verse Jesus read aloud in Nazareth before closing the book (Luke 4:19), and behind it the fiftieth year Leviticus appointed, when debts were cancelled, land went back to the families who had lost it, and slaves walked home (Lev 25:10).

Which is exactly what went wrong in the third servant’s mind. He prepared for an audit. The day he was walking toward was a year of release. He had the day wrong, and the wrong day made the hole look like prudence.

Paul then gives his own accounting, and it is a doubled talent written out as a life. He names the stock he traded with, none of it his — by pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned (6:6) — and then the ledger: as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things (6:9–10).

Having nothing — he kept no principal. Possessing all things — nothing given him ever stayed long enough to become his. And making many rich: his profit was other people. That is what a doubled talent looks like, and it looks nothing like a fuller barn. Basil said as much to a congregation certain its storehouses were its own: “the bread which you keep belongs to the hungry; the coat which you preserve in your wardrobe, to the naked; the shoes which rot in your possession, to the shoeless” (I Will Tear Down My Barns 7). He is not scolding the rich. He is telling them what they are holding.

And the wealth handed over is not only what is in your two hands. It is the field, the weather, the whole world. Creation is not the room in which worship happens; it is the substance given out to be worked and handed back. That is what a loaf is — wheat somebody traded with, ground and waited on and baked, carried up to an altar and returned as more than it was. No one at that table made any of it. Everyone at that table increased it.

The one who carried instead

Israel had done the burying at scale, and remembered it. One of the old books outside the canon tells of Wisdom going out to find a dwelling among the children of men, finding none, and returning to take her seat among the angels (1 Enoch 42). The house had been purged, and it lost more than its idols; she survived mostly in the books of a people who missed her.

She is not a fourth person in God, and she never was a goddess. The books that praise her most tell you what she is in the same breath they praise her: the breath of the power of God, the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God (Wisdom 7:25–26). A breath is not a second speaker. A mirror does not rival its light. What went into the ground was never God’s own brightness, which cannot be buried. What went into the ground was the creature’s readiness to hold it.

And then a girl in Nazareth, handed something immeasurable and handed it by measure, was told what she was being given and asked for nothing safer. Be it unto me according to thy word (Luke 1:38). Every clause of it is the third servant reversed. He said I was afraid; she was told Fear not (Luke 1:30), and did not bury. He gave back exactly what he received, unchanged and on time. She carried hers until it had a face.

The old hymn had sung of Wisdom’s tabernacle caused to rest in Jacob, a cedar, a vine bringing forth pleasant fruit (Sirach 24:8, 13, 17). The Church sings those same words of the Virgin, and stops there, and is right to stop. What comes back at the Annunciation is not a goddess resuming a throne. It is the creature’s own capacity to bear, unstopped at last — the hole filled in, the treasury opened, a dwelling found.

Enter into the joy

There is one more hole in this gospel, and it is the only one that gave everything back. The master is himself handed over, buried, and raised the third day; that grave is the single burial in Scripture which was not a hiding. Maximos the Confessor put the whole method of reading into one line — “he who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows also the inner principles of all things” (Chapters on Knowledge 1.66). Every other ground in this story is read from that one.

So notice what the faithful servants are not given. Not a bonus, not a percentage, not a larger allowance of silver. Well done, thou good and faithful servant… enter thou into the joy of thy lord (25:21). They are not paid; they are let in — brought inside the life of the one they were trading for, which was the point of the money all along. “He was made man that we might be made God,” Athanasius wrote (On the Incarnation 54). That is the wage scale of this parable: the return on a gift used is the giver himself.

The outer darkness at the end is real, and this reading will not talk you out of it. But it is not a punishment invented at the reckoning. It is the dark of a hole, and the man had been standing in it for years.

So let the question be yours. What have you put in the ground? Name it plainly — the gift that went quiet, the prayer you stopped praying, the thing you were good at and let go because using it meant being seen and possibly failing, the love you keep in reserve in case it is not returned. Then ask the question underneath it, the only one the parable really asks: what do you think the one who gave it is like? Because the hole is never dug by laziness. The man tells you himself — I was afraid. Fear digs, and fear always has a picture of God in it, and the picture is usually of a hard man.

The other two servants were not braver. They simply were not afraid of the one they served. And the treasure they had been handed was never going to fail them, because they never once tried to keep it.

Behold, now is the day of salvation. Not the day of the audit — the day of release. Dig it up.