Being Afraid, I Went and Hid Thy Talent

A Reflection on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Beloved in Christ,

Notice in today’s Gospel that of the three servants in the parable of the talents, only one returned to his master exactly what he had received. Nothing was missing. The talent had not been squandered. It had not been stolen. It had not been lost through carelessness. The servant had guarded his master’s property so successfully that, after a long absence, he could return it intact.

“Behold,” he says, “here thou hast that which is thine.”

And this is the servant whom the master calls wicked and slothful.

And at first glance there is something almost perplexing about it. The other servants had taken what belonged to their master and put it to use. They had exposed it, presumably, to all the ordinary uncertainties of commerce. The servant with the one talent had done nothing so hazardous as that. He had buried the money safely in the earth, preserved it, and returned every bit of it. Yet the others are called faithful, while he is condemned.

The difference here is not simply that they accomplished more. The servant himself tells us what has happened: “Being afraid I went and hid thy talent in the earth.”

He was afraid.

His fear did not arise from nowhere. It was rooted in the way he had come to regard his master. “Lord, I know that thou art a hard man; thou reapest where thou hast not sown, and gatherest where thou hast not strewed.” Whether this description is just or unjust is almost beside the immediate point. It is the master whom the servant believes himself to serve. And because he regards his master principally with fear, he concludes that the safest course is to do nothing at all.

He cannot lose what he does not risk. He cannot be blamed for a bad investment if he makes no investment. He cannot fail at a task he refuses to undertake… and so he buries the talent.

There is a kind of spiritual life which can proceed according to much the same logic! We may become so afraid of doing something badly that we do nothing. We may become so conscious of our weakness that weakness becomes an excuse for inactivity. We may compare the little entrusted to us with the abundance entrusted to someone else and conclude that our own offering could hardly matter.

Sometimes the fear concerns not what we might do, but what we have already done. We look backward upon years badly spent, opportunities neglected, sins committed, relationships damaged, duties left undone, gifts wasted. We know very well what “ought to have been.” And because what actually is seems so poor beside it, we begin to suppose that there is little worth offering to God now. Thus the talent remains buried.

But in the parable, the servant was not condemned because he had received less than the others. This must not be overlooked. One servant received five talents. Another received two. The last received one, “to every one according to his proper ability.”

And in their return, they still were not equal. The servant with two talents did not return five more. He returned two. And he heard precisely the same words as the servant who had returned five: “Well done, good and faithful servant: because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” The master did not ask why he had failed to equal the other servant. He asked faithfulness according to what had actually been entrusted to him.

Had the third servant been faithful with his one talent, there is nothing in the parable to suggest that his poverty of gifts would have counted against him. The tragedy was not that he had little, but rather that he buried what little he had.

This distinction matters enormously in the Christian life. We are remarkably prone to measure ourselves according to gifts we were never given, circumstances we never possessed, opportunities that belonged to someone else. Another has greater knowledge. Another has greater strength. Another has more time, more money, greater eloquence, a happier history, fewer wounds, fewer responsibilities, a temperament better suited to some particular work.

Perhaps all of that is true. But the Lord does not ask the servant with two talents why he did not produce five. The question is simpler and much more searching: What have you done with what was placed into your hands?

And the master’s answer to the fearful servant contains a curious detail. “Thou oughtest therefore to have committed my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received my own with usury.”

The parable is hardly intended as a commendation of usury. The force of the master’s reply lies elsewhere. If the servant really believed himself incapable of doing what the others had done, there remained nevertheless something, even something very modest, which he could have done. His excuse therefore fails.

Fear had persuaded him that there were only two possibilities: accomplish something great, or preserve the talent untouched. The master tells him that this was never true. There was always another possibility.

This is worth remembering whenever we are tempted to think that our life is too badly ordered, our abilities too meagre, or our history too compromised to be placed at the service of God.

We need not bring God the life we wish we had lived. We cannot. We can bring Him only the life that is actually ours.

The years already spent cannot be lived again. The words already spoken cannot be unsaid. The opportunities already missed cannot be recovered in precisely the form in which they first appeared. Repentance does not transport us backward in time and permit us to construct a spotless history. It does something better. It turns toward God now.

This is why the words of the Apostle stand so beautifully beside the parable: “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Not yesterday, when we ought to have acted. Not tomorrow, when we imagine ourselves stronger. Now.

There is a peculiar temptation in regret. Once we recognize that we have buried something entrusted to us, we can begin to regard the burial itself as irreversible. We have neglected prayer for so long that beginning again seems almost artificial. Or we have been away from the Church so long that returning feels embarrassing. We have failed so many times in the same struggle that another attempt seems pointless. We have allowed some ability to lie unused for so many years that we imagine its proper season has passed. We have made choices whose consequences cannot simply be erased, and we wonder whether a life containing such things can still become an offering acceptable to God.

But the Gospel does not tell us that a buried talent ceases to belong to the master. It remains his. And while there is time, what has been buried can be dug up.

This is repentance in one of its simplest forms: not pretending that the burial never happened, but refusing to leave the talent there. The Christian life does not begin – or begin again – when we finally possess something impressive enough to offer God. It begins when we take what is actually in our hands and turn it toward Him. Perhaps it is very little. Then be faithful with very little. Perhaps the strength once possessed is gone. Then be faithful with the strength that remains. Perhaps there is no opportunity to accomplish what once might have been accomplished. Then do the good which can be done today. Perhaps all one can presently manage is a hesitant prayer, a first act of repentance, an apology long delayed, a small work of mercy, another attempt at a virtue repeatedly failed. Do not despise it because it is small. Do not bury it because it is imperfect.

It is very easy to read the parable chiefly as a warning, and certainly its warning is severe. The unprofitable servant is cast into the exterior darkness. But fear has already caused enough trouble in this story. The faithful servants do not end in fear. They end in joy.

“Well done, good and faithful servant.” These are the words spoken alike to the servant of five talents and the servant of two. Their reward is not merely that they have escaped punishment. Nor does the master simply return their profits and dismiss them. “Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” That is where faithfulness tends.

The servant who buried his talent imagined his master principally as one from whom he must protect himself. The faithful servants discovered the master as one who invited them into his own joy.

Perhaps this is why fear is so capable of burying the gifts of God. Fear tells us that we must first become worthy, first repair everything, first make ourselves useful, first ensure that what we offer will succeed. Only then may we approach. The Gospel tells us instead to be faithful with what has actually been entrusted to us.

God does not ask us to return to yesterday and use the talent properly from the beginning. Yesterday is no longer ours to give Him. Today is. And so, if the talent has been buried, dig it up. However small it seems, however long it has lain there, however much we wish we had done differently with it, bring it again into the light and place it at the service of the One to Whom it has always belonged. For “now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

And beyond the fear, beyond the regret, beyond even the labour of faithfulness, there remains the Master’s invitation: “Enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

20 September 2026