Servants, lending, and reckoning

Meaning

Servants, lending, and reckoning occur in the opening catalogue of Christ's parables. A king settling accounts and a noble lord lending property to servants are offered as familiar figures through which the condition of the Church is represented. The economic language therefore supplies a teaching analogy, not a contemporary accounting practice. Responsibility for entrusted goods is the common feature. The author invokes such ordinary examples to make room for his own difficult material-spiritual comparison without claiming that all parables have one identical referent.