• The first act is the distribution
• What today’s Gospel does not read
• A record that will not fill a page
• An account is a thing said out loud
• Two barrows and a tap
• Where this leaves us

To every one according to his proper ability. That is the closing clause of the parable’s opening move, and everything that happens afterwards is measured against it. According to his proper ability is where the parable begins, and beginnings are load-bearing.

The first act is the distribution

Take the parable in the order it is actually told. A man is going abroad. He calls three of his household, he divides his property among them in three unequal portions, and only then does he leave. There is no interview in it and no trial period. The amounts are settled, according to his proper ability, and the journey begins.

Which means the grading has already happened before the story has any events in it. Not one of the three earned their portion, and not one was handed a portion in order to find out what they could carry. The five and the two and the one were arrived at by a man who already knew three people accurately, and the text says so out loud: according to his proper ability. It is a piece of knowledge before it is a piece of generosity.

That is a stranger sentence than it looks. Most arrangements a person meets in ordinary life run the other way round. You are given the standard portion first, and the sizing—if it ever comes—arrives afterwards, as a correction, usually after something has gone wrong. Here the sizing comes first and comes right, according to his proper ability, and the work is what follows from it.

Hold the order in place and a great deal falls out of it. The two servants who are commended did not receive equal amounts and were never expected to produce equal amounts. What each of them returned was doubled, which is the same proportion twice over, because the proportion was set at the start according to his proper ability. The arithmetic of the ending is entirely determined by the arithmetic of the beginning, and the beginning is according to his proper ability.

For anyone reading this with no belief attached to it, that is a claim about how a fair demand is constructed and it needs no theology to stand up. A demand is fair when the person making it has taken the trouble to find out what the other person actually has. Everything else is a load issued by the box, sized to a category rather than according to his proper ability.

What today’s Gospel does not read

There is a third servant in this parable, and the Church does not read him this morning. The passage appointed for St. Nicholas stops at verse twenty-three, on the second Well done. The frightened man, the buried talent, the unprofitable servant and the outer darkness are all outside today’s reading, which ends twice on joy and has no punishment in it anywhere. What is left inside it is the handing out according to his proper ability and the two accounts that follow.

That is worth sitting with, because the famous half of this parable is the half that was left off. The version most people carry is a warning story. The version the Missal appoints for a bishop’s feast is a distribution story, and the sentence it turns on is according to his proper ability. Two men are handed unequal amounts according to his proper ability, two men bring back what those amounts could make, and the reading closes.

I am not going to pretend the third servant is not in Matthew’s text; he is, four verses later. What is true is that the day’s own arrangement declines to read him, and a day’s own arrangement is not an accident. On the feast of a man about whom almost nothing can be established, the Church reads the half of the parable where the sums are set according to his proper ability and both accounts come out well.

A record that will not fill a page

Now the man himself, and the honest shape of what is known. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there is scarcely anything historically certain about St. Nicholas except that he was Bishop of Myra in Lycia in the fourth century. He was born at Parara, a city of Lycia in Asia Minor. He was cast into prison during the persecution of Diocletian and released after the accession of Constantine. He died on this date, in 345 or 352.

The rest is thinner still. His presence at the Council of Nicaea is doubted, since his name appears in none of the old lists of the bishops who attended it. The numerous miracles he is said to have wrought, before his death and after it, are described as outgrowths of a long tradition. In 1087 Italian merchants stole his body at Myra and brought it to Bari. That is the substance of the file on the most-invoked bishop in the Western calendar, and it is a small consignment issued according to his proper ability.

And his Collect this morning asks that by his merits and prayers we may be saved—a request that leans its whole weight on a record we cannot read. The prayer is not embarrassed by this and neither should we be. It is asking on the strength of something it does not itself possess in writing, which is close cousin to what no power of our own said three and a half weeks ago, and to what yesterday’s abbot said in any merits of ours. Both prayers ask on a ground the person praying did not lay, which is the petitionary form of according to his proper ability.

Set that beside the Gospel and the pairing is exact. Whatever this man was given to work with, it was not a large or well-documented consignment. A name, a city, a century, a prison. And the day still stands, sixteen hundred years on, because the deposit was never the measure of the man—it was measured to him, according to his proper ability, and the measuring was somebody else’s work.

An account is a thing said out loud

Here is the part of the parable that is easiest to miss because it is so ordinary. The servants come back and they speak. Each one stands in front of the master and says the sum aloud: Lord, thou didst deliver to me five talents, behold I have gained other five. Then the master answers aloud, in words the whole household can hear. An accounting, in this story, is a spoken thing that happens in a room with other people in it.

The Epistle says the same and says it about the men in charge. Those who lead are described as being to render an account of your souls—which is a sentence that puts the leaders themselves in the position of the servants, standing up and saying the sum. Whatever else the passage is doing, it is not describing an authority that renders nothing to anyone. The account runs in both directions, and both directions are audible. Each is taken against what was actually issued, according to his proper ability, and against nothing else.

This matters because half of that verse has done a great deal of damage on its own. Obey your prelates, and be subject to them has been quoted for centuries as a complete instruction, with the second half of its own sentence left off, exactly as the third servant is left off today. Taken alone it makes obedience the whole of the relationship and puts the person with less standing permanently in the wrong for speaking. Taken whole, it says the person being obeyed is going to be asked about the souls in front of him, and asked about them by someone who issued each of them according to his proper ability.

The harmful teaching, then, is not that churches ask for obedience. It is that the asking runs one way only—that raising harm done by somebody with standing is itself a breach of the duty owed to him, so that the complaint becomes the offence and the person who made it becomes the problem in the room. That teaching has been used most effectively against people who were assaulted by someone the community trusted, and it works because it converts a description of what happened into an act of disobedience.

I want to name that group plainly, and I want to be exact about the claim, because this ministry named sexual assault survivors two weeks ago on a completely different argument. I was not ashamed was about where a person’s holiness is located, and it refused to put it in a body. Today’s claim is about direction. It is not about where anyone’s worth sits; it is about which way an account is owed, and the answer the Epistle gives is both ways, out loud, with the leaders included.

Weigh the one-way version by what it has grown, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. It has grown rooms where the first question asked about a disclosure is what it will do to a reputation. It has grown a vocabulary in which speaking is divisive and silence is loyal. It has grown decades of arrangements in which the person with the least standing carried the whole cost of keeping the peace, and was praised for it. That is a load that was never sized according to his proper ability at all.

None of that is an argument against leadership, and none of it needs a specific institution attached to make the point. The Epistle read this morning is the correction, and it is in the same sentence as the demand. If those who lead are to render an account of your souls, then the souls are what they will be asked about, and a room that cannot hear from them has removed the only material the account is made of. An account according to his proper ability cannot be rendered by a room that will not let the sum be said.

Two barrows and a tap

There is a story sometimes told of a covered market in a northern town, where a man in his fifties called Vic had been sleeping in the loading bay for most of one winter. The traders all knew him. He was let alone, given tea, occasionally given fish, and never given anything to do, because the assumption in a place like that is that a man in his position is the object of the arrangement and not part of it. It is an assumption that never gets as far as according to his proper ability.

When work finally came it did not arrive as a trial. The hall manager did not offer him a shift or ask what he could manage or suggest they should give it a go and find out. She named one task and described it exactly: at four o’clock, the two flat barrows from the fish stall down to the yard, then the tap off at the wall, and that is all of it, three days a week.

Two barrows and a tap. Not a broom pushed into his hands with the length of the aisle left unstated, and not the standard closing shift that everyone else did, which ran ninety minutes and involved the shutters. One task with edges, sized according to his proper ability before he had lifted anything, by a woman who had spent four months in the same building as him and had drawn her own conclusions.

He did it for two years. It never grew, which is the part that surprises people when the story is told, because the expected ending is that he proved himself and got the full shift. He was never offered the full shift and never asked for it. The barrows went down at four and the tap went off, according to his proper ability, and that was the arrangement.

It did not resolve into anything. The hall changed hands and the manager moved to a site two towns over; the new one had never been told about the barrows, and within a month they were folded back into somebody’s ninety minutes. Vic still comes in on Fridays and the fish stall still keeps him in tea. The arrangement was never written down anywhere, so there is nothing to point at and no one to take it up with. Two barrows and a tap, according to his proper ability, and then a building that forgot it.

Where this leaves us

Put the day back together and it says one thing three times. The Gospel sizes three consignments according to his proper ability before the story starts. The Collect asks on the strength of a man whose file is nearly empty. And the Epistle puts the leaders in the position of servants who will have to stand up and say the sum.

None of the three is a story about output. Output is what happens in the middle, and the middle is not where any of the day’s texts put their weight. The weight goes on the front end, where the loads are graded according to his proper ability, and on the back end, where an account is rendered aloud to somebody who already knows what was issued.

That is a considerable relief if you have ever been handed the standard load. Most people have. The standard load is what institutions issue when they have not done the work of finding out what is in front of them, and the failure to carry it gets recorded against the person rather than against the issuing. According to his proper ability is the sentence that refuses to do this, and it refuses it at the outset, before there is anything to judge.

And if you are the one doing the issuing this morning—in a household, a team, a parish, a family—the parable puts the harder half of the work at your end. Sizing a task according to his proper ability requires knowing a particular person well enough to be right about them. That is slower than issuing the standard portion, and it is the only part of the arrangement the master in the story is described as having done. Sizing according to his proper ability is the work that cannot be delegated.

So take the beginning of the parable home rather than the end. What you were given was measured, by someone who took the trouble, according to his proper ability. The doubling that follows is real work and worth doing, and it is not the thing that decided your standing. That was settled in the first sentence, before you had traded anything at all.

↑ The order resumes below.