Discovered help from fourth-century bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea, for interpreting today’s Parable of the Talents, in order to read it with Middle Eastern eyes, where the one-talent hoarder is the hero of the story and the master is Archelaus, son of Herod the Great...

... whose extortion and over-taxation of the people via appointed overlords lead to exorbitant, concentrated wealth, and to forms of usury viewed as immoral by ancient Judaism, where burying the talent is rabbinical agrarian wisdom...

... & where refusal to join in abuses that lead to wealth concentration by those who “reap where they do not sow & pick up where they do not put down” will lead to violent death in this present world but in the world coming to this world when God arrives you are blessed forever.

I was then able to baptize the story by reading the parable from another angle, where a benevolent father invests his image in us, takes fear of God from our hearts by our experiences of his perfect love, and then makes us bold risk-takers in the world for the sake of love...

...investing our lives in death to self, accepting burial, because we know God has our back, even if we make mistakes in the trying, and that unlike inert precious metals the seed of ourselves as image-bearing humans will produce tremendous fruit for the kingdom.