The Parable of the Minas

AM Psalm 72 • PM Psalm 119:73-96
Deut. 31:30-32:14 • 2 Cor. 11:21b-33 • Luke 19:11-27

What is a mina, and why had I never heard of it before now? The mina was a measure of weight and currency in the ancient Middle East. One mina was worth about three months’ wages for an agricultural laborer. The parable of the minas (sometimes called the parable of the ten pounds) found in Luke 19:11-27 is similar to the parable of the talents, found in Matthew 25.

Sometimes in reading and trying to understand parables we ask what they mean for us today, but I am interested in another line of questions: what was the context within which Jesus spoke it, and what was his purpose?

The parable of the minas (or pounds) comes at the very end of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, to which Luke devotes a big chunk of his gospel, and which includes teaching (much of it in parables), healing, feeding a multitude, and conversations with various individuals, including, lastly, the tax collector Zacchaeus, to whose house in Jericho Jesus invites himself for dinner. In another reflection written about a year ago I quoted Cynthia Bourgeault as saying that some of Jesus’ parables were like “spiritual hand grenades” designed to blow up our comfortable ways of thinking and give us a new way of seeing. In Luke’s long account of the journey to Jerusalem we get a whiff of hand grenade, and not just in the parables. Jews hearing the account of Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus would have been discomfited, to say the least.

Luke then says, “As they were listening to this (Jesus’ conversation with the tax collector), he went on to tell a parable, because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately.” The parable he told was the parable of the minas/ten pounds.

Although Jesus had foretold his death in Jerusalem three times on the trip, his disciples didn’t grasp what he was saying, nor did they understand that the Kingdom of God was already being fulfilled, as he had said when he preached from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah in his hometown of Nazareth: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Written by Bob McMath

...who is glad to be back in church and in the choir!