The man who received one bag of gold went off and dug a hole in the ground and buried his master’s money.
In today’s parable from Matthew a rich man, upon his departing for a distant land, distributes much of his wealth to three servants: 5 talents to one, 2 talents to the second, and 1 talent to a third. A talent was a lot of money – and worth today (if gold) around $800,000! So the third fellow was not short-changed with his allotment of only one. Often translators of this passage use other words more adapted to modern minds – and so one translation describes one talent as a bag of gold. So when the third fellow buries his bag of gold instead of investing it – it brings to my mind all those pirate stories about buried bags of god, treasure chests deposited by pirates on some remote island.
Which then raises the question; why would pirates or anybody want to bury a bag or even chest of gold? I can understand people in the ancient Near East doing it because armies were crossing the landscape over and over again – and for the time being, why not dig a hole and bury your money? But pirates! I would think they would want to spend their ill-gotten doubloons at the nearest neutral port. And yet people love buried treasure stories – like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Stevenson himself refers to another buried treasure story – which he admits plagiarizing – published by Washington Irving in his Tales of a Traveler in 1824. It’s about a Dutch resident of old New York named Wolfert Webber who in the days when the town of New York occupied only the tip of Manhattan made his living cultivating cabbages on his ample farm. He did well until more people moved nearby and began to steal his produce. Costs also began to rise. He made less income, worried about his daughter’s dowry and moodily frequented an old tavern. It was there he heard of treasure buried all over Manhattan Island from prior times.
Over the next year he dug up every square foot of his farm; ruining his cabbage harvest, exhausting himself. He found nothing. He then engaged in a futile night escapade near Corlears Hook (today at the west end of the Williamsburg Bridge) in search of buried gold. It turned violent and sent the now old Wolfert home broke and broken – and resigned to die.
But while writing a will handing over his now worthless farm to his son-in-law, his lawyer exclaimed, “The whole farm?” He then told Wolfert that the city of New York was about to lay out streets through his land, making it worth more than any buried treasure. All he had to do was then break it up into lots and collect rent for years to come. Needless to say, that was better than growing cabbages. He recovered quickly and became rich!
Which was basically the moral the rich man in today’s parable tried to teach his third servant – never bury a bag of gold but invest it to increase its worth, as did the other two servants. Yet beyond that lesson there is another lesson in today’s parable worth more than many bags of gold – namely that taking risks like believing in the grace of God and loving one’s neighbor can pay off far more than doubt and fear ever will.