“I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth”

(Matthew 25:25)

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart”

(Psalm 27:14)

If ever there was a parable of life, not only of the kingdom of God, but also of our ever-circling years, it is the parable of the talents. Here Jesus is saying to us: “This is the way life is, wherever you find it, in first-century Palestine or west Tennessee in 1988. Here is a parable of your life, and its overarching moral is, `Life is hard for the fainthearted. Therefore, be of good courage. Wait on the Lord and he shall strengthen your heart. “‘

A wealthy man of the ancient East prepared to take a journey. Calling in three trusted servants, he disposed of his property by assigning a given amount to each. Five talents of silver, or about $5,000, he gave to one. To another went two talents, or $2,000. To a third he gave one talent, or $1,000. He knew the ability of each man, and he divided his wealth accordingly. This is not an improbable situation. In an economy without savings banks, government bonds, and commercial stocks, what better way to safeguard and invest one’s resources than to place them in the hands of reliable people? I once knew a bank president who made such a remarkable success of running his bank that every January 1, stockholders in his bank received great big dividend checks, so much larger than the earnings from other banks in the city. The secret of his success? Why, he banked on people, not commercial collateral. He had an uncanny insight into human nature. He instinctively knew what people could be trusted with loans and with how much.

The master in the parable, having allocated his talents, went away and was gone a long time. Meanwhile, the servants were left to their own devices. So God, the Creator, endows us with whatever in his wisdom he knows is best for us and then leaves us in freedom to employ his talents and his time according to our inclinations.

Our human endowments differ. All men and women are not created equal in the sense of having equal capacities for business, literature, and government leadership. God gives to a Michelangelo five talents in art, to an Einstein five talents in science and mathematics, and to multitudes of his other children two talents or one, as it pleases him. All people are not equal in ability, but all are equal in that their Creator and Heavenly Father has endowed them with certain inalienable abilities. Each has been entrusted with his or her peculiar talent, which is needed and of incalculable value in the divine economy.

We return to the parable, which says that, at length, the master returned. He called in his three servants. (So the parable teaches not only endowment and freedom, but also judgment. We are called to give an account of our stewardship. We are free to use our talent as our heart directs, but our use will be judged by his standard, not ours. And that standard is revealed. The talent bestowed by God is not an outright gift, but a loan, an investment, and God will have an accounting.)

The five-talent man reported, “I have gained five other talents.” “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” said the master. “Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” The servant who had received two talents of his master’s money came in with a similar report — he had gained two others. For him the master had the same commendation and reward: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

Then came the fellow with one talent to report. Of course, you know Jesus told the story principally for this man. He stood in the center of the stage. The floodlights were on him. His report? “I know, Master, that you are a hard man, difficult to deal with, expecting the well-nigh impossible, so I was afraid and went and hid thy talent in the earth. Here it is. I give you back what is yours.”

Whereupon the gracious master, who had just been so generous with his praise and rewards for his other two servants, turned on the poor, scared creature with vehement rebukes: “Why you wicked and fainthearted servant! So you knew me to be hard, expecting the impossible. All right, take his talent, which he would not use for me, and give it to the man who will make the most use of it. And throw this foolish, cowardly man into the cold darkness, where in remorse he can grind his teeth over his failure. For to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away.”

Harsh and cruel treatment, you say, for the kingdom of God? Perhaps so, but Jesus is just enunciating a universal law of life. These are not just the ethics of the kingdom, mind you; here is the stern law engraved in the granite of the centuries. Withhold a native endowment, refuse to employ a God-given faculty, and it will wither and die. If left unused, whatever God has given will be taken away, while the man who uses what life has endowed him with finds life adding to his endowments as the years roll by.

The failure of the one-talent man and his stern condemnation by the Lord of Life is a result, please notice, not of his greed or his tight-fisted stinginess, but entirely of his fear. “I was afraid and went and hid my talent.” The man was not dishonest. He was not a drunkard, nor was he wasteful. What was wrong with him? He was afraid to hazard in use what his lord had entrusted to him.

“Life,” Jesus is saying, “is hard for the fainthearted.” As George Buttrick says in The Interpreter’s Bible: “A man must venture for Christ at risk. He must not be content with `things as they are.’ He must break new soil. We miss the point of the story if we fail to see that Christ requires of his followers the hazard of the untried road.”

The writer Charlotte Bronte said, “Better try all things and find all empty than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.” And John Milton in his Areopagitica says, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexer­cised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

Life is hard for the fainthearted. God has so ordained it. He who gives lavishly to all men demands we risk with gallant abandon our all for his kingdom. To shrink back in cowardice is to find life difficult and hard with all its stern judgments against us. Therefore, my wish for you is for courage. But courage is not had by wishing! If wishes were horses beggars would ride and cowards would all brave men be. No knave is proud of his shrinking, faint heart. But how can he change it? Where does courage come from? It is not necessarily an innate endowment, impossible of cultivation, else Jesus would not represent God as sitting in judgment on the man who fails because he lacks courage. Yes, courage can be cultivated, and that particular brand of courage exemplified in hazarding one’s talents for God is born of faith.

Why was the fellow who buried his talent in the earth afraid? He tells us: “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed.” He was afraid because he had an utterly erroneous idea of his master’s character. So, also, to many people God is a policeman who almost hopes to catch people in wrongdoing. They do not know God, the generous, trustful father expecting the best of his sons and daughters, waiting at the end of the day with a reward larger than the promised wages. The world, which he has created, is even that kind of a world — it finally rewards the venture of faith.

Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay “Old Mortality” says, “To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.” Immortality, everlasting life, heaven, waits for the one who believes courageously in life. You must enter the kingdom now, by taking the Lord’s largess and employing it for him. Then, and only then, comes the reward: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

The cure for cowardly fear is faith — a good, long look into the face of the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, a confident belief that he will keep his promises, live up to his commitments — and then stepping out into life on the basis of that trust. That kind of faith will destroy fear.

James Stewart, in his book The Gates of New Life, tells of Robert Stopford, who was one of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s men: “Stopford was commander of one of the ships with which Nelson chased to the West Indies a fleet nearly double in number. And Stopford wrote, in describing the experiences and hardships of that desperate adventure: `We are half-starved, and otherwise inconvenienced by being so long out of port, but our reward is — we are with Nelson! “‘

At long last we shall all discover that the success or failure of our life’s voyage will be reckoned, not by what we made out of the years, but by whether or not we have been with the great captain of our souls and what in love and faith we’ve risked for him. Faith and courage do grow together for every one of us when we make the venture of comradeship with Christ and volunteer for service in his name.

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.”