Jesus Praises Whistleblowing That Exposes Growth Economics
The “Parable of the Talents” (Matthew 25:14-30), as it’s been called, continues to be one of the most widely known of the stories Jesus told. It is also widely misunderstood. A “talent” has been misconstrued as a skill or spiritual gift. It is neither. Jesus was speaking about MONEY, a measure of money equal to 6000 drachmas. A drachma was the the daily wage for a worker in the Graeco-Roman economic system that was used in the first century. A talent, then, is to be understood as equal to 20 years wages calculated as a drachma per day and a six-day work week. Five talents, then, equals 100 years of work. For a slave to be given five talents and make that much more while his master is on a journey means there’s a whole lot of injustice and corruption going on.
Furthermore, Jesus was NOT…
identifying God with the slaveowner. Jesus described him in the story as a “harsh man” who exploitatively “reaped where he did not sow and harvested where he had not scattered seed”—nothing like the God Jesus embodied.
praising the two slaves who doubled their owner’s investments. They would have had to engage in unjust practices, underpay workers, and extract excessively from nature in order to get that size a return.
A rule of thumb about the parables Jesus told is that he was either exposing what is or proposing an alternative.
What Jesus was doing in this parable was exposing the economic system of Rome’s Empire that made such injustices and exploitation legal. And in a wider sense, he was rejecting an economy, like we have today, whose primary measure of strength is to grow.
Which leads, then, to an inversion of the hierarchy of the three slaves. The two who doubled their master’s investment flip to the bottom in moral rank, while the slave with one talent, who refused to participate in the system, is the one Jesus affirms while acknowledging that society and the economy will treat him severely.
With this story, Jesus blows the whistle on…
economics that measures its strength by how much it grows;
a system that rewards the ones who are most economically, socially, and ecologically unjust;
a system that criminalizes dissenters (whistleblowers) who follow a morality of sufficiency that is practiced throughout creation but transgressed in a system that relies on growth.
In the face of the moral failures Jesus exposes in the economic system, the “Parable of the Talents” needs to be given a new name, something like the “Parable of Whistleblowing Growth Economics.” The graphic for this renamed parable is of a mand and woman planting 20 years of wages in the ground. What they plant never sprouts. Nothing grows. It just remains there dormant—safe but not participating in an economy of growth.
In our time, Edward Snowden has been called a whistleblower and is paying a high price. His comments on whistleblowing elucidate how Jesus’ story relates not just to a few heroes, but gives economic guidance to us all.
The question is often asked, “Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor for releasing documents classified by the National Security Administration?”
Snowden was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. in 2009. By 2013, he had become familiar with how the surveillence of the National Security Administration reached into the everyday lives of private citizens. Later that year, he copied and released classified documents revealing numerous U.S. surveillance programs around the world. The U.S. government brought a number of charges against him. He has been given temporary asylum in Russia. A 33-year old, Snowden continues to speak with insight on many issues of government intelligence and citizen freedom. Why did he do it?
I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.
He doesn’t see that following his moral compass makes him a traitor or a hero; he was simply doing what all of us are to do, namely, our civic duty.
As for labeling someone a whistleblower, I think it does them—it does all of us—a disservice, because it “otherizes” us. Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes—even though what they have done is heroic—is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.
Substitute “growth economics” for “surveillance” and we Snowden has us ask ourselves, “Do I want to participate in a society that persists in growth economics despite its exploitations of people and Creation?”
To devotees of MultiEarth growth economics, Jubilee economics is “wicked and lazy.” Jubilee provides no ladder to climb into extraordinary levels of assets. Practicing Jubilee does not make us heroes, we’re just doing our moral and spiritual duty.
Why in the U.S. has there been so much inability to recognize this straightforward, commonsense meaning to this parable? It must be because we’re so acculturated to see growth as good, high return on investment as good, maximizing profits as good that we’re blind to the obvious meaning. We see it through the lenses of capitalism and the assumption of progress that growth is good.
For all these reasons, we need to retell the “Parable of the Talents” as the “Parable of Whistleblowing Growth Economics.” In growth economics such as capitalism, the economic rewards, of course, flow to those with more, not to those who refuse to participate, choosing instead to practice the far more cooperative economics of Jubilee. Dissenting from growth economics can bring hardships of many kinds, including punishment by those in power. We are seen as “worthless” and are sent into margins of society, what Jesus’ parable describes metaphorically as “outer darkness where’s there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
What alternative is there to growth economics? Jubilee qualifies. And take a look at a steady state economy.
