I've always been the cautious one with money. Conservative allocations, a bigger cash cushion than most advisors recommend, a general suspicion of anything that sounded like risk. I've called this wisdom for thirty years. Reading the parable of the talents again this year, in the middle of deciding how to allocate a retirement account I actually have to live on soon, I started to wonder if I'd been misnaming it.
You know the story. A master entrusts three servants with money before a journey: five talents, two, and one, each according to ability. The first two invest and double their portions. The third digs a hole and buries his, then hands it back untouched when the master returns.
“But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money… His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.'”
Matthew 25:14-30
The Servant I Recognized
I always identified with the first two servants when I read this as a younger man, the ambitious ones, the doublers. Reading it in my late fifties, staring at a retirement account and feeling the pull to move everything into the safest, most conservative option available, I recognized the third servant instead. Not because I'm lazy. Because fear and caution can produce the exact same bare hole in the ground, just with better excuses.
The third servant wasn't punished for losing money. He didn't lose a cent. He was rebuked for burying it, for letting fear of the master turn caution into paralysis, and paralysis into a kind of unfaithfulness that looked, on the surface, almost prudent.
The Word That Convicted Me
"Wicked, lazy" is strong language for a man who technically preserved the capital. But the master's complaint isn't about performance. It's about stewardship. Paul, the apostle and not me, puts a phrase to this that's been sitting with me:
“Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.”
1 Corinthians 4:2
Faithful, not just safe. I'd been treating those as synonyms my whole financial life. Reading this parable again, I'm not sure they are. Faithfulness with a trust means actually putting it to use for the purposes of the one who gave it, not hiding it where it can't lose value, and also can't do any good.
What This Doesn't Mean
I want to be careful here, because I don't think this parable is an argument for reckless risk with retirement savings at fifty-seven. The point isn't that more risk equals more faithfulness. Some of the men I've watched chase aggressive returns right before retirement got burned badly by timing they couldn't control, and I don't think the master would call that faithful stewardship either. That's its own kind of burying, just dressed up as boldness instead of fear.
The point, as I read it now, is that fear itself, not wisdom, not prudence, makes a poor foundation for financial decisions. The third servant says it himself: "I was afraid, so I went and hid your talent in the ground." He names his own motive. It wasn't discernment. It was fear, wearing discernment's clothes.
What I'm Actually Doing With This
I haven't overhauled my whole portfolio because of one parable, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who told you they had. But I've started asking a different question when I feel the pull toward the most conservative option available. Not "is this wise," but "is this actually wise, or is this just fear finding a respectable word to wear." Those turn out to require different answers more often than I expected.
My wife and I have kept a real cash cushion. The parable isn't an argument against having one. But we've stopped letting fear alone dictate every decision beyond that cushion, and started asking what faithful stewardship of what we've been given actually looks like, rather than just what feels safest at eleven at night.
I don't want to stand in front of the Master someday having buried what I was trusted with, however good my excuses sounded at the time.
God bless,
Paul