Chapter 11
Enter into the Joy
Picture a master about to depart. He has a long journey ahead of him — months, perhaps years. And just before he goes, he calls his servants to him, not to hand them a list of rules, not to tell them what to keep their hands off, but to place something in their keeping. He opens his chest. And what he takes out is no small change. It is a fortune. One talent — a single lump of silver — was worth roughly sixteen years of a day-laborer's wages; five talents were a capital with which you could buy a business, a fortune of royal proportions. That is what he lays in the hands of his servants. To one five, to another two, to a third one, each according to what he can handle. And then he does not say: "be careful, do not lose it." He turns and goes. He leaves his goods in the hands of men. He dares to entrust it to you.
That, says Jesus, is how it goes in the Kingdom.
"For it is like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, each according to his own ability; and he went on his journey" (Matthew 25:14–15). Notice what happens here before a single servant has done anything, before so much as one figure lies on the table. The first word of this parable is not a demand. It is a gift. The master gives away what is his, into hands that did not deserve it, and leaves it to them. And at the end, for those who do not betray that trust, lies the word ready that is the highest note of this whole book.
That is still to come. But first: where does this story stand? For the place already says everything about the hour in which we live.
The Center Panel
This parable stands on the Mount of Olives, in Jesus' last great discourse before the cross — the answer to the disciples' question about the sign of His coming and the completion of the age (Matthew 24:3). And that whole answer turns on one posture: how do you live in the time when the Lord is away? For He is coming — but not at once, and not at an hour you can calculate.
Matthew sets three images side by side. Just before the talents, the ten virgins (25:1–13): the bridegroom stays away long, and whoever is watchful goes in with him to the wedding while the foolish are left outside. The expectation — watch, for you do not know the hour. Just after the talents, the judgment of the sheep and the goats (25:31–46): the Son of Man comes in glory and separates the nations. The outcome — a separation, according to the deeds. And precisely between these, wedged between the watching and the separation, stands the working: the talents.
For you can keep the lamp burning and meanwhile bury your talent in the ground. The virgins watch; the talents are put to work — and you need both. The master's absence is no holiday. It is a time of testing. And you stand in the middle of it.
The Two Who Dared
The glory must come first, so look first at the first two.
"He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and made another five. So also he who had the two gained two more" (25:16–17). At once. No hesitation. No meeting, no risk analysis, no weighing and balancing for months on end. The master has scarcely turned the corner before the first servant rolls up his sleeves. He sets the capital in motion — he trades with it, lends it out. He has understood what was given him: not a burden to guard, but an opportunity to use.
Whoever first heard the parable recognized this at once. Wealthy landowners often traveled away for long stretches — to Rome, to Alexandria — and left their affairs in the hands of trusted slaves. For a slave there was not the watered-down "servant" we imagine; the trusted slave was a steward who managed an entire estate, lent out money, kept the books, and gave an account upon his master's return. To such a one a genuine fortune was entrusted. That is the first wonder of the story, even before the profit: that the master dares this.
And then he returns. "After a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them" (25:19). After a long time — Matthew stresses it, for it is the backbone of the story. The absence really lasts, and lasts long. But he comes. And when the first servant stands before him with his ten talents, the word falls toward which this whole age runs:
"Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master" (25:21).
Not "tidy profit, keep it up." Not "here is your bonus." The master does not praise the result — he praises the man. Good and faithful servant. Not "successful" but faithful. For it was never about the return for him, but about whether this servant could be trusted with what was his. And so it turned out. Therefore he may come in — not into a reward beside the master, but into the master himself: into his gladness, into his feast, into the deepest of what gives him joy.
In Depth — "Enter into the Joy" (Matthew 25:21)
The reward the faithful servants hear is no sum of money. It is an invitation: eiselthe eis tēn charan tou kyriou sou, "enter into the joy of your master." (Well documented from the text.)
Three things stand out. First: the reward consists in the joy of another — not the servant's own gladness, but the joy of his master, into which he is admitted. No possession that you receive, but a feast into which you are taken up.
Second: both faithful servants hear exactly the same words. The one with two receives no lesser praise than the one with five (25:21, 23 — word for word identical). The reward does not hang on the size of the profit but on the faithfulness, and faithfulness with two can be just as complete as faithfulness with five.
Third: the proportion "over a little — over much." Even a royal capital of five talents is here called "a little," measured against what is to come. The reward for faithful management is more entrusted authority — a foretaste of the reigning that a later part of this book will draw out in full. (The link to ruling over cities, Luke 19:17, is a weighed but well-grounded reading: the same line, sharpened in another parable.)
This is the same "well done" with which this book opened at the judgment seat. There the believer stood before the bēma; here the servant stands before his returned master. One voice, one moment, one joy — and it is to be won, today, with what you have in your hands.
This is what you live toward. Not toward a safe arrival, not toward a bare-minimum entry, not toward a life that made no mess. Toward this: the gaze of your Lord, the joy in His eyes over you, well done, and then, flung wide, the door inward. For this you received the talent. For this He left it in your hands when He went — not to let you fail, but because He longs to see you come here, with something in your hands.
For readers, with this parable, often think at once of the sternness, the judgment, the outer darkness — that is still to come, and honestly. But that is not where it begins, and it is not who the master is at heart. He is extraordinarily generous: he entrusts fortunes, praises abundantly, shares his own joy, promises more. Soon someone appears who saw this master very differently — and his mistaken image became his undoing.
The Capital in Your Hands
For otherwise the parable remains a story about someone else, long ago, in a strange land. It is about you.
The master entrusts you with real capital. No pious figure of speech; it is precisely what stands there. The word for "entrust" does not mean "give away" but "place in the hands" — it remains the master's, but it lies in your hands, and you manage it on His behalf. And what is that capital? Everything you did not bring forth yourself and yet have at your disposal. Your gifts — that one thing you are good at, that way people listen to you. Your time — the hours you never get back. Your money, your position, your influence. The opportunities another does not get. The people God sets in your life. The gospel itself, entrusted to you to pass on. All of that He laid in your hands when He went, with that one trust: do something with it.
The question, then, is not: have I grown rich, have I achieved much? The question is: what do I do with what is entrusted to me? For at the end the master asks no account of what you had, but of what you did with it. And that takes the wind out of every comparison. He gave "each according to his own ability" — to each what he could handle. To one more, to another less, no injustice but wisdom. Never, then: why did I not get what he got? Only: am I faithful with mine? The "well done" does not wait for whoever received the most, but for whoever was faithful. And that can be you. With your two. With your one, even.
And this entrusting does not leave Him cold. The Letter to the Hebrews paints the posture for the long interval: not to sit still until the Lord comes, but to endure, to exercise patience in order to "receive the promise" (Hebrews 10:36). And set beside it the sharp reverse, which strikes directly at the third servant: "we are not of those who draw back" — who shrink away — "to perdition, but of those who believe, to the saving of the soul" (Hebrews 10:39). The buried talent is precisely that drawing back: you pull your hands away, you wait passively. And the master who opened his chest for you is "not unjust, to forget your work" (Hebrews 6:10).
Then, at last, the man with that one talent.
The Man Who Buried His Talent
The whole dramatic space of the parable goes to him. The first two are settled in a few lines; with the third the story slows down and shows how it went wrong.
"But he who had received the one went and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money" (25:18). Where the first two set the capital in circulation, he takes it out. Under the ground, beyond reach, dead. And note — this was legally defensible. In that world, without vaults, the ground was the safest place of keeping, and the law held that whoever immediately buried entrusted money went free in the event of theft. By the standard of safety this man did well. He lost nothing. He gave it back intact.
And precisely there lies the sharpness. For the master asked no safety. He asked fruit. And when the servant stood before him with his untouched talent, there came no "well done." There came a reproach that goes through marrow and bone:
"You wicked and lazy servant [...] You ought to have put my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. Therefore take the talent from him [...] And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (25:26–30, abridged).
This is hard, and it is not made softer than it is. But before the weighing: why did he do it? The servant explains it himself, and his explanation is the key to the whole chapter.
The Root: a Wrong Image of the Master
"Master, I knew that you are a hard man, reaping where you have not sown [...] and so I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground" (25:24–25). There lies the root, open and bare. Not laziness alone — though he is called lazy too. Not stupidity. The root is fear, and that fear springs from an image. The Greek word for "hard" means "harsh, merciless, rough" — an exploiter, a taker, someone who reaps what he did not sow and who calls you to account for every fault. That is how this servant saw his master. And because he saw him so, he dared nothing. Whoever supposes that the master is a hard reckoner stiffens, hides, holds his hands still out of pure dread of doing something wrong.
And here the parable touches the deepest nerve, deeper than the talent itself. For was that image true? Look back at the first two servants. Toward them this master was not hard but abundantly generous. The hardness existed only in the eyes of the one who distrusted him. The third servant did not serve the real master; he served a hard master who never existed — a phantom of his own making, and that phantom paralyzed him.
Who God is — or rather, who you think God is — determines how you serve Him. That is the lesson beneath all the lessons of this parable. The man who held his master for an exploiter buried. The men who knew him as someone who wanted to share his joy dared to put their capital to work. The same capital, the same charge, the same absence — an opposite image of God, and out of it an opposite life. The one image freezes you; the other sets you free.
And the master takes him at his own word — the sharpest thing in the scene. Did you hold me to be hard? Then you had all the more reason to do at least the safe minimum: the money to the bank, so that it at least bore interest. Even if your image were true, your doing nothing was indefensible. The distorted image of God is no excuse; it is the sin itself.
In Depth — The Hard Master Who Never Existed (sklēros, Matthew 25:24)
The third servant justifies his doing nothing with an image of his master: "I knew that you are a hard man" — sklēros anthrōpos, a "hard, merciless, rough" man (compare our word "sclerosis," hardening). In the parallel parable of the minas stands austēros, "stern, sour" (Luke 19:21), with the same drift. (Well documented from the text.)
Two things. The first: this is the servant's image, not necessarily the true image of the master. The parable itself contradicts it, for toward the first two servants the same master is precisely generous, praising, and joy-sharing. The hardness exists chiefly in the eyes of the one who distrusts. (A weighed reading, strongly borne by the text.)
The second: the master takes the servant at his own word — "by your own word I will judge you," says the king in the parallel (Luke 19:22). Did you hold me to be hard, then you had all the more reason for at least the safe minimum. The distorted image of God is no extenuating circumstance but the very heart of the unfaithfulness.
In this lies the deepest lesson of the parable. Whoever sees God as a reckoner who only takes and punishes is paralyzed and hides; whoever knows Him as the master who wants to share his joy dares to venture what was entrusted to him. Who you think God is determines how you serve Him. The fear is the root, the burying the fruit — and beneath the fear lies a lie about who the Master is.
The Western Believer and the Buried Talent
This parable is not about a man from the distant past. It is about us — and, I fear, precisely about the comfortable, pious, Western believer.
For note what the third servant's sin was. He did not steal. He did not squander the money on drink and women. He did not commit fraud. He did nothing shameful. He left something undone — kept his talent neatly stored and did nothing more. And that, not the gross deed but the tidy neglect, is precisely the sin against which this parable writes with the sharpest hand. The man who buried his talent led, by every outward standard, a blameless life. He was no scandal. He was only barren.
And recognize yourself here, for I recognize myself. How many of us received a talent — a gift, an opportunity, a calling — and have neatly buried it? Not thrown away, not abused, simply buried. We are busy. A career, a family, a calendar that overflows. Tidy people who sit in church on Sunday and through the week work hard at a life that contains nothing wrong whatever — and bears nothing whatever. We put away that one thing we were good at, because it was too frightening, or too uncomfortable, or because we compared ourselves with someone who could do it better and thought: what is the use. We let our time be swallowed up by things that will not matter in a hundred years, and the talent that could have borne lasting fruit still lies under the ground.
It is a Western danger par excellence, for we have so much in which to bury it. Three reasons drive us to it.
There is the fear, as with the servant himself. We do not dare. What if it fails? What if I make myself ridiculous, what if it comes to nothing, what if I fall short? And rather we bury it safely than take the risk. But safety was never the charge. The master asked no keeper; He asked a man who would put his capital to work.
There is the comparison. I have only one talent, and look at him with his five. What does mine amount to? Why should I trouble myself with that one meager gift when others have so much more? And so we put it away, embittered or dejected, and we miss the whole point — that the servant with two entered into exactly the same joy as the one with five, because it was never about the size but about the faithfulness. Your one talent, faithfully employed, wins the same "well done" as another's five.
And there is the laziness — that too must be named honestly, for the servant is called not only afraid but also "lazy," sluggish, listless. Sometimes we bury not out of fear and not out of comparison, but simply because putting capital to work costs effort and burying is easy. We are busy enough; why lay still more upon ourselves? And so the gift slides onto the heap of "someday, when I have time," and that time never comes, and the talent stiffens under the ground while we tell ourselves we are keeping it. That is the venom: this sin requires no malice, only ease. You need only do nothing.
And this strikes the writer of these lines just as hard as the reader. For I know the little sum I unconsciously make: I am in, I am saved, so the rest is bonus — and you cannot burn yourself on bonuses, can you? I know how often I said "I have no time for it" about precisely the talent He entrusted to me. It is my parable, this one, no less than yours.
The Outer Darkness: How Heavily Does It Weigh?
Now the heaviest word. The parable ends not with a mild reproach, but with: "cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (25:30). No light matter. And it would be cowardly not to lay the knot honestly, for here serious interpreters stand opposed to one another. The one reading hears loss of salvation: the man is cast out, into the dark, away from the feast, on a line with the goats who go away "into the everlasting fire" (25:41, 46). The other hears loss of reward: all three are servants of the same master, and the third — saved, but ashamed — misses his reward and his joy, "saved, yet so as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15). The full weighing stands in the In Depth box below.
But this stands fast, however you weigh the nature of the darkness, and here lies the brake on all over-interpretation: the parable forbids us to calculate who this third servant precisely "is." It holds the mirror up to us. The point is no refined doctrine about degrees of punishment; it is a grave warning: to do nothing with what God entrusts is no neutral safety but a breach with the Lord. Whoever buries what is entrusted out of fear and distrust falls outside the joy.
In Depth — The Outer Darkness: Salvation or Reward? (Matthew 25:30)
The heaviest interpretive question of the parable is what "the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" precisely means for the third servant. Serious interpreters stand opposed here. (Disputed.)
For "loss of salvation" much pleads. The man is called "wicked," "lazy," and "unprofitable"; the talent is taken from him; he is "cast out." The formula "weeping and gnashing of teeth" Matthew uses elsewhere unambiguously of the rejected (8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13). And the placement weighs heavily: immediately after this the Son of Man separates off the goats "into the everlasting fire" (25:41, 46). On this reading the third servant is the nominal Christian whose true state the reckoning lays bare.
For "loss of reward" pleads that all three are douloi, servants of the same master, and that the third received a talent and kept it. The darkness would then fall within the household: not hell, but the ashamed servant who is saved but misses his reward and joy — "saved, yet so as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15).
Weighing. Honestly weighed, the first reading weighs more heavily within Matthew: the language is too sharp and too consistent for mere loss of reward, and the juxtaposition with the goats presses toward a definitive judgment. (A weighed reading.) At the same time the parable need not — and may not — settle how the third servant is lost or whether he ever truly believed. It establishes that whoever buries what is entrusted out of fear and distrust falls outside the joy, and it forbids us to calculate who he precisely "is." The brake on over-interpretation lies there: not to diagnose him, but to let ourselves be mirrored.
And here the two tracks of this book come together in the sharpest way. For whether you stand before the bēma as one saved whose work burns up, or as the third servant in the outer darkness — in both cases it holds: there is a joy you can miss. The whole book has argued that salvation and reward are two different things, that the believer need not fear for his salvation but can indeed forfeit something immeasurably precious. And the talents lay this beside it: the burying of the gift is no small fault that turns out all right, but a deed that places you outside the feast. However you read the third servant — doing nothing is never safe. That is precisely the lie that brought him down.
"To Everyone Who Has, More Will Be Given"
And just before the outer darkness falls a word that first sounds unjust and, on closer thought, is a law of the Kingdom. "Therefore take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away" (25:28–29).
Our first reaction is resistance. The rich man gets still more, the poor man loses even the little — is that fair? But do not read it as an economic law about rich and poor. Read it as a spiritual law about using and neglecting. The Kingdom is no static possession in a vault; it is a living capital that grows through use and dies through neglect. The gift you employ multiplies. The gift you bury withers away, until you lose even the ability to use it.
You know this from your own life. The language you speak, you keep speaking; the language you let lie, you unlearn. The courage you use grows; the courage you never call upon evaporates. No cruelty of God, but the nature of a living Kingdom. That is why "burying" is not the safe option it seems: it looks as if you are keeping the talent, but you are letting it die. There is no neutral ground. Either you put it to work, and it grows — or you bury it, and you lose even that.
What This, Then, Asks
What does this mean for the week that lies before you? A parable that stays hanging in the clouds has not done its work.
It means that you dig up that one talent again. You know what it is — that gift you have put away, that thing of which you know deep within that God gave it to you and that you are letting it lie. It means that you begin to weigh your time differently, not by what presses but by what lasts. It means that you take the risk where you have until now safely buried — write that letter, enter that conversation, even though you do not know whether it will succeed. For the master asks no guaranteed return; He asks that you set the capital in motion. The profit is His concern. The work is yours.
And it means that you stop waiting for the great moment — one of the slyest ways in which we bury. We tell ourselves that later, when circumstances are better, when the children are bigger, when work grows quieter, we will employ our gift. And so the talent stays in the ground, not out of evil intent but out of perpetual postponement. But the master praised no servant for what he intended. He praised what they did, at once, with what they had. "He who is faithful in the least is also faithful in much" (Luke 16:10) — and conversely: whoever waits until it is great enough to be worth the trouble is already unfaithful in the least. The least is the only thing you have in your hands today. Begin there. The one talent, this week, this conversation, this deed.
And above all it means that you let your image of the Master be set right. For as long as you see Him as a hard reckoner lying in wait for your faults, you will keep burying — fear always buries. See Him as He is: the master who opened his chest, who wants nothing more than to see you come back with something, who already has the "well done" on His lips and the door to His joy already ajar. That Lord you do not serve out of fear. That Lord you serve because you trust Him — and whoever trusts his master dares to venture.
In Depth — Faithful in the Small, and What the Parable Does Not Reward
The key "you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much" (25:21) Luke puts elsewhere as a saying: "he who is faithful in the least is also faithful in much; and he who is unjust in the least is also unjust in much" (Luke 16:10). (Well documented.)
Two things follow from this for the reckoning at the bēma. The first: the standard is faithfulness, not size. The servant with two receives the same praise as the one with five, because faithfulness with two can be just as complete. This guards against envy and pride at once: do not compare your gift, for the joy does not hang on the amount.
The second: doing nothing is no neutral fault. The third servant is not condemned because he suffered loss or made mistakes in his trading — he is condemned because he did not trade. His passivity is no prudence but unfaithfulness; "lazy" (oknēros) stands in the text beside "wicked" (ponēros). (Well documented from the text.)
In this lies the warning that bears this whole part of the book: the sin the parables point out is almost never a gross deed but a neglect. The laborer who grumbles, the servant who does not forgive, the servant who buries his talent — none of them did anything shameful. They left something undone. And precisely that burying, that tidy, pious, busy neglect, is what misses the joy.
The Forward Look: More Than Joy Alone
And the master promised, beside the joy, something more that reaches further than we think. "You have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much." No empty phrase — a promotion: more entrusted, higher authority, a greater task.
In the parallel parable of the minas this is sharpened: there the faithful servant receives "authority over ten cities," another over five (Luke 19:17, 19) — literally reigning in the kingdom. That whole theme, the reigning with Christ, comes up in full in a later part of this book. But the talents already point somewhere. Whoever was faithful with the small of this age — that one gift, those few years, that bit of influence — is set over the great in the age to come. The faithfulness of now is the training for the reigning of later. The talents in your hands are not the end goal; they are the trial upon which an unimaginably greater entrusting follows.
Do you understand now why this is the climax chapter of the steward at work? Here everything comes together: the entrusted capital, the long absence, the daily choice between working and burying, the reckoning that surely comes, and — for whoever was faithful — the highest word a man will ever hear, followed by a promotion beyond your power to imagine. Working, forgiving, giving out — and now this: putting to work what He gave you. The last and highest of the four kinds of labor, because it runs straight out into the "well done."
And Will I Stand There with Empty Hands?
And so the chapter ends where it began, at the glory, for the glory has the last word.
The master is away, but He is coming back. No threat; a promise. And when He comes, then there is — for whoever did not bury the talent but employed it — no tribunal and no shame, but a face full of joy and two words that lift your whole life. Well done. And then, flung wide, the door. Not into a reward you may keep in a corner, but into the joy of your Lord Himself, into which you are admitted and which you will never leave again.
The season is not over. The master is still on his journey. The talent still lies in your hands — or, if you buried it, then still in the ground where you can dig it up, today even, this ordinary week. There is still time to set it in motion, to let your image of the Master be set right, to shake off the fear, the comparison, the sluggishness, and to put your own capital to work. The reckoning is coming — but it is not yet. It is still today.
And here I turn the pen one last time toward myself, for I know the man with that one buried talent from too close. I know how easy it is to call it "someday" and never mean it. But when I see Him before me — that Lord who opened his chest and went on his journey with all his trust in my hands — then I do not want to stand there with a clean, untouched coin and the words "I was afraid." I want to stand there with something. Not with five, not necessarily with much, but with mine, faithfully employed. And that holds for you just as hard. He returns. And when He sees you come with something in your hands, then you will hear it, the two words for which you were made, and the invitation that this whole book pursues:
Enter into the joy of your master.
There is a harvest coming. That must be said of this field first of all, before a single stalk of tares comes up for discussion — for at the end of this field stands an ingathering that surpasses everything. "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father" (Matthew 13:43). Shine like the sun. That is what the wheat runs out into: not the silent standing in the soil, but a radiance that lights the whole field, brought into the Husbandman's barn, forever. With that prospect you must walk into this part, for without that sun everything that now follows is read too dark.
But until that harvest the wheat does not stand alone. Among the grain tares have come up, sown in the night by a hand no one saw, and they look exactly like it until the ear forms. The net that is dragged through the sea brings up all kinds — edible and inedible, mingled. That is the field as it now is, and as it remains until the last day: mixed. No pure field, no holy remnant you can point out with the naked eye, but wheat and tares growing up together, good and spoiled fish in the same net. And precisely there lies the first lesson of this part, and it cuts two ways. Outward: it is not yours to weed the field — that work is reserved for the angels, on a day you do not set. And inward, much sharper: are you sure that you are wheat? For the tares of this parable are no thistle you recognize from afar. They are darnel, they stand among the grain, they look like the grain — and the difference shows only at the fruit.
That is the weighing. Two parables draw it: the tares among the wheat, and the dragnet that is hauled up. Both end at the same place — a separation at the end of the age, the angels who do the work, the furnace and the barn. But they point, as you will see, each to its own side of our heart: the one, our impatience, which wants to draw God's harvest forward and so would tear up the wheat; the other, our false rest, which supposes that being dragged along in the net is the same as being kept in the vessels. It is not so. To be in the net is not to come into the barn. And that must be said, sharply and in time, as long as the separation has not yet fallen.
And then, when the field has been weighed, this part turns toward the most precious thing hidden in it. For that same field — the world, the field in which sowing and separating happen — contains a treasure. A man stumbles upon it, hides it again, and with joy sells all that he has to buy that one field. A merchant finds one pearl, and does the same. Here the tone changes from weighing to longing, and here lies the deepest glory of the whole part hidden — for the question of who, in those parables, sells everything opens a door that most readers have never dared to open. Is it the man who gives everything for the Kingdom? Or is it the King who gave everything for man? Both ways are taken honestly, and they turn out not to exclude one another but to fit into each other: because He first sold everything for you, you can with joy let go of everything for Him.
Three times the same field, then, and three times a different gaze: the field weighed, the field separated, the field as hidden treasure. First the seriousness of the separation — live as wheat, bear fruit, do not rest in the net. And then, as the crown of the part, the worth that is worth everything, and the Merchant who paid first.