Last week a caller named Rick called in to Tell Me Everything to take me, Desimber Rose, and host John Fugelsang to task. He started by intimating that my status as a Marine Corps veteran was false with a somewhat incoherent non sequitur about the tumble rate of rounds fired from weapons. I don’t happen to have a chart handy to know what the various tumble rates are and I don’t have any interest in knowing them. That said, when I was in the Marines, I fired a lot of weapons including the M16-A2, M-249 s.a.w; M-60 machine gun, .50 caliber machine gun, and once an grenade launcher, all of which are extremely lethal killing machines. This is simply a fact of my time in the Marines and not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about unless it is to advocate for meaningful gun control legislation because AR15s are so often used in mass shootings. Rick it appears doesn’t share my concern for America’s children. His call just got weirder from there.

Rick went on to say that John always “talks about the sermon on the mount but skips the last 31 verses” and then claimed that Jesus was not a liberal, but instead preached about capitalism. To attempt to substantiate this claim he brought up the “Parable of the Talents” in Matthew saying that Jesus was preaching capitalism because the parable is about investing money. He seemed to be having trouble connecting ideas and certainly lacked Biblical knowledge. The Sermon on the Mount is in Matthew chapters 5-7 and is the first of the “Five Discourses” in Matthew’s gospel. The Parable of the Talents is in Matthew 25:14-30 and is not part of the Sermon on the Mount, nor is it “the last 31 verses” as Rick mentioned. I still have no idea what he was on about there. He was obviously attempting to do some sort of “Gotcha!” with the Bible to prove his 21st century right wing views.

Was Jesus preaching about capitalism as Rick so confidently asserted? No, of course not, is the short answer, because to claim that is anachronistic. Capitalism as an economic system did not exist in the Ancient Near East in the first century when Jesus was alive and teaching. Rather, capitalism started to develop in the 16th century and was “spearheaded by the growth of the English cloth industry during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.” Capitalism involves a lot more than merely exchanging money for goods, investing or saving money and as an economic system was entirely unknown in ancient Palestine. Jesus’ parables, according to evangelical scholar Dr. Klyne Snodgrass were contextual to Jesus’ ministry and therefore, “Any interpretation that does not breathe the air of the first century cannot be correct.” Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, pp. 20, 25. As seen above, capitalism was not an economic system that existed in Jesus’ day and therefore he was definitely not preaching about capitalism in the Parable of the Talents.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine notes in her book, Short Stories by Jesus, that throughout the hundreds of years since Jesus’ original telling of the parables that they have been “allegorized, moralized, christologized, and otherwise tamed into either platitudes such as “God loves us,” or “Be nice,” or worse, assurances that all is right with the world as long as we believe in Jesus.” (Levine, p. 4) Professor of New Testament, Dr. Greg Carey, echoes Levine in his book Stories Jesus Told: How to Read a Parable writing that, “Jesus’ parables are often misunderstood for several reasons. First, because too many preachers wish to tame Jesus by simplifying his message…Jesus was far edgier than that, far too committed to God’s work in the world we live in now.” (Carey, p. 9) Rick’s attempt to turn the Parable of the Talents into a banal and anachronistic analogy about capitalism tames the parable and rids it of its provocative intent.

Snodgrass’ discussion of this parable (pp 519-543) places this parable in the category of “parables of future eschatology” which means that despite the fact that some preachers and scholars have tamed it to mean something about monetary stewardship and the subsequent success that stewardship would ostensibly bring, it had nothing to do with those quite quotidian things. The stewardship in the parable was rather contextual to overall Jesus’ teachings about the coming Kingdom of God and its future. It was a story told to the disciples to prepare them for the time between his death and the coming Kingdom — an indeterminate amount of time in which the disciples would need to know how to be stewards of the God’s kingdom in that interim between Jesus’ death and the parousia (the second coming). That is hardly quotidian or banal. A shocking detail from the parable which alerted Jesus’ hearers that this is not a story about a universal maxim is just how much money a ‘talent’ was in that time. A talent was a measure of monetary weight between 60 – 90 pounds depending upon the location. A single talent then was equivalent to approximately 20 years worth of wages for a day laborer. In other words, this is not about saving or investing money. Jesus was saying that the Kingdom of God was of astronomical, mind blowing, almost incomprehensible value, therefore those charged with maintaining and building God’s kingdom were to be given enormous responsibility. It is worth noting that the parable of the talents speaks to how his disciples should live in the “now and not yet time of New Testament eschatology,” (p542) and then is immediately followed by the Parable of the Sheep and Goats. The latter outlines further what behaviors are indicative of living in God’s kingdom. Both are challenges to Jesus’ initial followers and subsequent converts and definitely not mere platitudes or universal maxims like “a penny saved is a penny earned.”

Capitalism is nowhere to be seen in the Biblical canon. Our 21st century capitalism is literally predicated on putting monetary profits above all other considerations including the habitability of the only planet humanity has to live on. Even a perfunctory reading of the Gospels would dispel this anachronism because Jesus taught a lot about giving wealth away and not storing up treasure on Earth. Further, the New Testament “alarmingly enough, condemns personal wealth not merely as a moral danger, but as an intrinsic evil,” according to David Bentley Hart in the Introduction to his translation of the New Testament (Hart, XXVI). Capitalism, particularly deregulated capitalism, seems to me to be in total opposition of what Jesus taught. Though modern conceptions of socialism are also anachronistic in terms of the Bible, there is much more in the New Testament that “looks like” socialism in a positive way and nothing that I can find that even remotely affirms the free hand of the market or deregulated capitalism. Sorry to disappoint you Rick.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider picking up a copy of my latest book Theological Musings Volume 2 from Quoir Publishing.