The gate was never there

The Buried Coin

There’s a moment in the parable of the talents that I keep returning to. A master, before a long journey, hands three servants different sums of money — five, two, one — and leaves. He never explains the amounts. He never says anyone earned them. The distribution is simply given, unequal and unjustified, the way most of what we wake up holding is given. When he returns, two of the servants have put the money to work and doubled it. The third dug a hole and buried his, and hands it back exactly as received: intact, accounted for, safe.

What strikes me is the question the master does not ask. He never asks whether the servants deserved what they were handed. The whole reckoning turns on a different axis — not deserve but use. And the one who is condemned isn’t condemned for losing the money or squandering it. He’s condemned for burying it.

Listen to his own defense, because it gives him away. He says he was afraid. He knew the master was exacting, so he hid the coin to keep it whole and return it unaccusable. That is the anguish of deserving in its purest form: so preoccupied with the ledger, so afraid of being found wanting, that he renders the gift inert to keep it safe. He chooses the closed loop. He’d rather hand the thing back unspent than risk the open, unanswerable question of what it was for. The parable treats this not as caution. It treats it as the one real failure.

I’ve come to think the buried coin is the truest picture we have of a particular trap. We spend enormous energy litigating whether we deserve what we’ve been given — the warmth, the morning, the roof, the unearned fact of being here at all. And that litigation feels like seriousness, like moral care. But it is, often, just a hole in the ground. “I don’t deserve this” is a strangely comfortable thing to say, because it’s a question you can lose, and losing it asks nothing further of you. The coin stays buried and unaccusable. The deserving-question is where we go to avoid the use-question.

So the real question is not whether I deserve what is in my hands. The thing is already in my hands; the gate I imagined I had to pass through was never there. The real question is whether I can make good use of it.

But here I’d part ways with the parable, and the parting matters. The parable runs on a returning master — someone who reckons, rewards, casts out. The use is demanded by someone, for a verdict. Take the master away, though, and the obligation doesn’t lighten. It loses its alibi. The servant at least had the dignity of being seen, of his use mattering to a judge who would weigh it. Strip the judge out and there’s no inspection to pass, no approval that would finally close the account — and also nowhere left to hide the coin. You make good use of what you’re holding not to satisfy a returning authority, but because the having itself, unearned and unwitnessed, turns out to be the only claim being made on you.

That’s the cost of the relief. The morning gives you the fact — here, warm, held — without asking you to deserve it. What you say back is not gratitude exactly, and not guilt. It’s something closer to the quiet assumption of a duty: this is mine, undeniable and unearned, and the only question worthy of the having is what I now do with it.

The gate was never there. The hands, and what they’re holding, are. The rest is use.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co