GOSPEL MEDITATION # 14

The Parable of the Talents

Matthew 25:14-30

1. Find a quiet place without distractions.
2. Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace.
3. Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing or cant the Jesus Prayer.
4. Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself.
5. Slowly and carefully read the passage of Scripture.
6. From memory, determine the central points.
7. This parable is remarkably similar to the Parable of the Ten

Minas of Luke 19:11-27.

8. A talent, some commentators say is worth 20 years of labor.
9. A very wealthy man before leaving on a long journey gives 5 talents to one servant, two to another, and one to still another.
10. The servants with five and two talents put the money to work and each doubled their money as a result.
11. The third, however, thinking the boss was an exacting and difficult person, hid his one talent in the ground.
12. An accounting is given when the master comes back. He finds the one with five talents now has ten to give him. The master says he is “a good and faithful” servant. Likewise with the servant who had two talents, now has four, is also “a good and faithful” servant. And to both of these he says, “I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”
13. The servant who hid the talent in the ground did not hear the master’s words of praise and reward.
14. The Master scolds the “wicked and slothful” servant and tells him he should have at least gotten interest from the money with bankers.
15. This servant now has his talent taken from him. And this procedure, the faithful servant is given more while, the unfaithful servant suffers loss and loss to the extreme.
16. The unfaithful servant is now cast into the outer darkness, a place of pain and torment.
17. The point of the parable: the faithful servant goes about his or her work using what the Master has given each one.