NOTES for Mat 25:28
The logic of the Kingdom is strange logic from the point of view of this world. There is no leveling there, which sometimes seems to us like justice. Even when we speak of the old world so familiar to us, we sometimes still understand that there are things that cannot be divided either equally or "fairly."
For example, love. Or talent, not the talent from the Gospel parable, where money is meant, but the talent we mean when speaking of a talented person. Here we submit to the inevitable: there are things that belong only to the one to whom they are given by God, and to no one else.
Why, then, does God act as He acts? Did the one who returned his master's money intact and safe act badly? Reasoning in human terms, he did nothing bad; he fulfilled his duty: he did not increase his master's wealth, but he did not squander it either, returning what had been received for safekeeping intact.
Still, even reasoning in human terms, one can guess that money lying in a hidden store not only brings no income, but sometimes loses value. When the matter concerns spiritual life and the Kingdom, the situation looks even more unambiguous. Spiritual life is always dynamic. When God created the human person, He breathed into his "nostrils," as the Hebrew text reads literally, His breath, the breath of life, and the person became alive. Breath is a process; there can be no stopping here, for stopping is equivalent to death. And the Kingdom, as it opened on the day of Pentecost, is also the breath of God breaking into the world in order to transform it.
Everyone who wants to participate in its life, and even simply in spiritual life, the very life that unites a person with God, must become part of a process where the small becomes great, a sprout becomes a branching tree, one breath becomes a mighty stream of life, in short, a process where one talent gains ten. Such is the logic of the Kingdom, the truth of its life. If one does not participate in it, he will not keep his minimum, even if it was given by God. Because this minimum is only a seed sown by God, which can either sprout and bear fruit or rot, something God, most likely, will not permit. There is no third option.