Zephaniah 1.7,12-18, Psalm 90.1-12, Matthew 25.14-30
The Second Sunday before Advent, 19 November 2023, Austwick
This is the parable of the man who liked to dig. It’s a simple story because he was a man of simple tastes, who happily lived a modest life. He liked to dig the tiny plot he rented from his master, to grow enough veg to keep him and his wife in simple meals. He enjoyed his herb bed too, and nurturing the flowers and the hedges at the edges of his piece of ground, where he watched the bees and birds and other small creatures enjoying the fruits of his patient labour.
The man who liked to dig had plenty of time to enjoy these simple pleasures, for unlike his neighbours, he was content with what he had. They spent their days wheeling and dealing to raise revenue for their master, a harsh man whose only concern was with getting richer and richer, and who pressured them to find ever more inventive ways to increase his wealth, by reaping where he hadn’t sown, and gathering where he hadn’t scattered seed.
Their reward, such as it was, was to move up higher in his business, to take on more responsibilities with even more pressure to succeed. They had to be competitive, they had to be ‘creative’ with their accounting, they spent their time building houses they’d never live in and planting vineyards whose wine they’d never drink. Their work was to force the peasant tenant farmers to take on more and more extortionate loans to plant their crops, making money from the loans and, in the years when the crops failed, taking possession of the farms when the farmers defaulted on their mortgage payments. [1] It gave them some sense of security, but there was little satisfaction in their work, still a vulnerability, and a gnawing sense of unease at the cut-throat nature of the business they were in.
One day, the man who liked to dig was digging in his plot, collecting carrots for the day’s soup, when one of his master’s many messengers stopped by and said, ‘The master is going away and wants you to take care of this for him.’ He gave him a talent, a weight of gold larger than the man who liked to dig had ever seen before. He took it, turned it over in his hand, and said, ‘Yes, I’ll look after it for him.’ And when the messenger left, you can guess what he did next: he looked after it in the only, and best, way he knew; by digging a hole for it and burying it.
You will have worked out by now that this parable of the man who liked to dig is an upside-down version of the story which usually gets called the Parable of the Talents. It invites us to ask the question, what if this parable is about being happy not to spend your life striving for wealth and prestige?
That’s the question which John Milton posed when he reflected on the parable in his sonnet When I Consider How My Light is Spent. Is God really the cruel and somewhat crooked taskmaster portrayed in the parable, Milton wonders, and concludes ‘that waiting, rather than amassing wealth to prove one's worth, is the proper way to serve God.’ In the poem, while he worries over his limited accomplishments in life, Patience comes along to remind him that God does not need ‘man's work or his own gifts’. He observes that those ‘who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.’ And he famously concludes that
Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait. [2]
Seen this way, the parable celebrates those who are like the man who liked to dig, engrossed in a gentle way of life, patiently waiting in creation, applying their hearts to the gracious wisdom of the Giver of life, standing ready and open to the Creator.
Seen this way, the parable agrees with the words of the Psalmist which we recited this morning:
The days of our life are three score years and ten,
or if our strength endures, even four score;
yet the sum of them is but labour and sorrow,
for they soon pass away and we are gone….
So teach us to number our days
that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. [3]
And the parable underlines the judgement of the prophet Zephaniah which we also heard today: ‘Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath,’ he said. [4] Better the content man who liked to dig, than the egomaniacal Master, and those entrapped in his cruel business which dehumanised them as they sent others into extreme poverty.
The parable is quite explicit about the effects of this dehumanising business world: it’s a world in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or as the master in the story puts it, ‘to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’ It’s the ancient world, and it’s our world today.
The man who liked to dig had found a way to thrive outside this exploitive system. And that so upset and challenged the master whose whole being was wrapped up in that way of life, that he had the man who liked to dig ‘thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. The man who liked to dig may have only whistled at the birds out in his little plot of land, but he had unwittingly become a sort of whistle-blower, who by burying his master’s talent in the ground had taken it out of circulation so that it couldn’t be used ‘to dispossess more peasants from their land through its dispersion in the form of usurious loans’.
In doing so he had innocently unmasked the so-called ‘joy of the master’ for what it was - the profits of exploitation squandered in wasteful excess. Hence, the man who liked to dig is punished for revealing the truth, rather than for failing to make a profit. [5]
As punishment he was removed from his little plot of land, had his modest livelihood taken away. But, I like to think that he kept his sense of dignity, his self-respect, his self-worth. We have every reason to believe that he would, this contented man who had always applied his heart to the gentle wisdom of creation.
Was he imprisoned for his crime against the system, as so many debtors are? If so, then I like to imagine the man who liked to dig, at the end, finding his place again, tending the prison garden, nurturing fruit and vegetables for his fellow-inmates to enjoy, growing herbs to enhance their meals, growing flowers for the prisoners to appreciate, and for the bees and birds and the other small creatures within the prison yard, to also benefit from the fruits of his patient labour.
Notes
Thanks to the author of Talents—Another Parable Misunderstood by American Christians, 15 November 2020, posted on the Messy Inspirations blog.
[1] William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, p.159-162.
[2] Wikipedia: When I Consider How My Light is Spent.
[3] Psalm 90.10.
[4] Zephaniah 1.18.
[5] Wikipedia: Parable of the Talents: As social critique, citing William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, Chapter 9, The Vulnerability of the Whistle-blower: The Parable of the Talents, p.150-168.
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