What about the risk?

The Gospel reading for Tuesday, Proper 10 in Year 2, is the parable of the talents from Matthew 25:14-30.  A master leaves five talents with one servant, two with another, and one with a third. The first two trade and double their master's money by the time he returns, but the third buries his single talent in the ground just digs it up when the master comes home. The master is delighted with the first two and increases their responsibilities, but deprives the third servant of the single talent.

When I was a child, this seemed like a terribly harsh parable, and it still seems harsh to me today.  Nothing in the story suggests the master expressly instructed the servants to invest or trade.  Of course, any trading involved risk, even the risk of total loss. What if the first two servants had lost everything? What would the master have said then? In explaining his very conservative approach, the third servant says that the master had a reputation for being extremely harsh, such that the third servant was afraid to do anything riskier. Nothing in the parable suggests that the third servant had the wrong idea about the master's harsh character: the master fairly exploded when the servant merely failed to produce a gain, and who knows what the master would have done if confronted with a loss? It always seemed to me that the third servant was held at fault for failing to follow instructions that he never received after what doing seemed best in light of the circumstances.

It may be that the parable is not so much normative as descriptive.  It may be that no one in this parable is held up as an example of what you should or should not do.  The story may just dramatize what happens in life. If you have ability, and if you don't take a risk, you wind up worse than you were.  Yes, if you take a risk, you may lose everything, but you will lose everything if you don't.  At least if you take the risk, you have some opportunity for gain, of doing something pleasing to God.

It's a hard story. But it's the truth.