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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
November 16, 2008 Year: A
Prov. 31:10-13, 16-18, 20, 26, 28-31; 1 Thess. 5:1-6;
Mt. 24:36, 25:14-30
USE YOUR TALENTS AND BE READY
First Reading...
"A capable wife, who can find her?
She is far more precious than jewels.
The heart of her husband trusts in her,
and he will have no lack of gain.
She does him good, and not harm,
all the days of her life.
She seeks wool and flax,
and works with willing hands.
She considers a field and buys it;
with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.
She girds herself with strength,
and makes her arms strong.
She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.
Her lamp does not go out at night.
She opens her hand to the poor,
and reaches out her hand to the needy.
She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
Her children rise up and call her happy;
her husband too, and he praises her:
'Many women have done excellently,
but you surpass them all.'
Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,
but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
Give her a share in the fruit of her hands,
and let her works praise her in the city gates." [Prov.
31:10-13, 16-18, 20, 26, 28-31]
Second Reading...
"Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers
and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to
you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of
the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they
say, 'There is peace and security,' then sudden
destruction will come upon them, as labour pains come
upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape!
But you, beloved, are not in darkness for that day to
surprise you like a thief. You are all children of light
and children of the day; we are not of the night or of
darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do,
but let us keep awake and be sober." [1 Thess. 5:1-6]
Gospel Reading...
"Jesus said to his disciples, 'About the day and
hour of the coming of the Son of Man, no one knows,
neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the
Father.
For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his
slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he
gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to
each according to his ability. Then he went away.
The one who had received the five talents went off at
once and traded with them, and made five more talents.
In the same way, the one who had the two talents made
two more talents. But the one who had received the one
talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his
master's money.
After a long time the master of those slaves came and
settled accounts with them. Then the one who had
received the five talents came forward, bringing five
more talents, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me
five talents; see, I have made five more talents.' His
master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy
slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will
put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of
your master.'
And the one with the two talents also came forward,
saying, 'Master, you handed over to me two talents; see,
I have made two more talents.' His master said to him,
'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been
trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of
many things; enter into the joy of your master.'
Then the one who had received the one talent also came
forward, saying, 'Master, I knew that you were a harsh
man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where
you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went
and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is
yours.'
But the master replied, 'You wicked and lazy slave! You
knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and
gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have
invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I
would have received what was my own with interest. So
take the talent from him, and give it to the one with
the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be
given, and they will have an abundance; but from those
who have nothing, even what they have will be taken
away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the
outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing
of teeth." [Mt. 24:36, 25:14-30]
Life Experience:
A talented young man by came in and wished all of us
“good morning” and went to sea shore for spending time
with his friends on a Sunday. Evening we received a
shocking news that he got drowned in the sea and we
could not digest this fact. We were all thrown in the
dark. The young man had to join a new job after having
finished his study just the following Monday. All this
changed the entire life of the family. This incident has
been the talk of the town for at least year now. Life is
precious and can never be substituted with anything
else.
The man came in tears. I had never seen
him weeping ever. He was a jovial parishioner. He told
me that his wife has been diagnosed with cancer. He wept
saying that she has to undergo chemotherapy and he was
uncertain about her life. Yes, it is true what Jesus
said: 'About the day and hour
of the coming of the Son of Man, no one knows, neither
the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father
Hence I invite you to reflect your
present state of your life, and deeply be thankful to
God. Every moment you live without major problems of
health or other, be deeply grateful to God that he has
been good to you. Your attitude is to add flavour to
your life, so that God be praised through you.
Parable of the Talents:
St. Matthew's Parable of the Talents, which is the name
given by most Christians to the story we have just read,
St. Matthew's Parable of the Talents is actually only
one of a collection of three stories which our Lord
taught on the subject of shrewd stewardship. The third
is the tale recorded by St. Luke in chapter 16 of his
Gospel that is known as the Parable of the Crafty
Steward or the Parable of the Dishonest Manager or some
similar wording of the same theme. While we do not have
time today to address this third parable itself,
anything we do say about the other two needs to be heard
in the context of all three stories, and for that
reason, I urge upon you the reading later, but not too
long from now, of the Parable of the Crafty Steward.
The
two stories of our dynamic duo, the second one of which
is also recorded by St. Luke, but in the 19th chapter of
his Gospel, are quite enough to keep us occupied. This
morning's reading is known as the Parable of Talents.
The story recorded by St. Luke in chapter 19 is known as
the Parable of the Ten Talents. In St. Luke's story, if
you will remember, Jesus posits not so much a landowner
as a lord or crown prince who has to leave his kingdom
and travel to a far country in order to be made king.
Before he leaves for his coronation, the lord calls 10
of his slaves to him and gives each a mina, small
fortune with which each is told to "do business" for the
crown prince until he can himself return to them as
king. Each of the selected slaves takes his mina and
begins to deal with it. Meanwhile, however, many of the
other citizens and slaves of that land become restive
and begin to speak of rebellion against their absent
lord. They go so far, in fact, as to in the end,
actually plot out an insurrection.
Well,
of course, as we know, the lord does return and he does
return as king, fully empowered and totally in command
at last. Shortly thereafter, he calls the 10 slaves and
asks of each of them a financial report about their
success in using his trusts. We are, interestingly
enough, only told about three of the reporting slaves.
The other seven simply disappear in the ensuing action.
We are told thus that the first slave reports to his
master, rather proudly in fact, that he has made 10
additional minas out of the one entrusted to him. The
king is deeply pleased, and as a reward, gives the
profitable slave lordship over 10 cities, one city for
each of the minas he has earned. The second slave
reports, with equal pride and identical wording, that he
had made five minas out of his one. He, too, is praised
by the king and given the oversight of five cities, one
for each of his earned minas.
The
third slave is the last from whom we hear, for his story
we are led to understand, is very sad indeed. Like the
fearful slave of today's Gospel, this slave has also
chosen to hide his mina away where it will be safe from
theft and from corrupt usage until his master's return.
He explains this decision, as does our fearful servant
in St. Matthew, by saying, to quote one translation, "I
was afraid of you, for you're a tough man; you collect
what you didn't deposit and reap what you didn't sow."
So far, our two stories are, in other words, pretty
parallel, having only minor differences but the same
point.
But
now the king of our second rendition responds to the
overly fastidious and fearful slave rather differently
and far more clearly and emphatically than does the
landowner in St. Matthew's telling of the story. The
king says, and I quote, "I will judge you by what you
have said, you evil slave! If you knew I was a tough
man, collecting what I didn't deposit and reaping what I
had not sown, why didn't you put my money in the bank?
And when I returned, I would have collected it with
interest." And then the king said to those standing
nearby, "Take the mina away from him and give it to the
one who has 10 minas."
Understandably, here, as in the story of the talents
itself, those who are standing there and hearing this
judgment are outraged. Being moral subjects, they
protest that giving another mina to a man who already
had 10 is unfair - pretty much the same accusation
against the king that the fearful slave had already made
to his own undoing, but moral insurrectionists
apparently learn very slowly. So the king turns to the
protesters and delivers one of the most frequently
quoted lines of Christian scripture. He says, "I tell
you that to everyone who has, more will be given; and
from the one who does not have, even that which he does
have will be taken away." After that, the king summarily
orders the slaughtering in his presence of those who had
plotted his overthrow and the story is ended.
If we
never know what happened to the other slaves in St.
Luke's story, we also never know what exactly happened
to the fearful one beyond his being stripped of his one
mina. In St. Matthew's story, as we have read, we find
that the fastidious or anxious servant, and not a group
of insurrectionists, is the one exiled to the outer
darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing
of teeth. Either way, however, the question - the
central, the overriding, the compelling question--still
remains.
If we are to understand, as obviously we are, that the
Messiah is the king or lord or master in both stories,
and if Jesus who is telling the tale, is Messiah, then
what are we to make of these pictures of himself and of
his nature that he has left us? What are we to make of a
lord who rewards one of our own kind for using the ways
of the world to enrich the king upon his return? More to
the point, what are we to make of a lord who condemns,
exiles, strips bare one of our own kind, for electing to
not use the ways of the world to enrich the king upon
his return? Usury, which is the word to translate what
our more cautious, more socially correct contemporary
translations refer to as "bearing interest," usury was
and is a sin in Judaism, and in a lot of other places as
well. And nowhere do nice people ever go around reaping
crops they didn't sow? What's happening here?
Well,
for one thing, if we are honest with our texts, we have
to say that the nature of sin and spiritual error is
being defined in a very uncomfortable, unconventional,
and un-codified way. If we are honest, we would also
have to say that it is being defined in much the same
way that Jesus was given to defining it during his
teaching life. To the ongoing consternation of the
religious, we know he ate on the Sabbath from the grain
he and his disciples gathered along the roadside as they
walked. He refused to stone an adulteress, as the law
required, and then made it impossible for others to do
so. He talked in depth and publicly to a Samaritan who,
even more damning, was a Samaritan woman. He sat at
table with flagrant sinners including whores and Roman
toadies. Over and over again, by act as well as word, he
pushed against the moralist and the derivative codes of
religion, but never more clearly and incontrovertibly
than here in our three parables.
Lest
there might be any mistake in the minds of those around
him about the difference between Torah - the law - and
moralist and derivative codes, Jesus very explicitly
tells his students and through them, us, that not one
jot or little of the law as given by God at Sinai will
pass into inefficacy until the kingdom itself comes. He
says as well that anyone who teaches or empowers another
to break Torah would be better off thrown into the sea
with a millstone tied around his or her neck than to do
such a thing. But he just as clearly defines Torah by
saying that all the Law and the prophets are summed up
in this: "You must love the Lord your God with all your
heart and all your mind and all your soul and your
neighbor as yourself...for in this all the law and the
prophets are indeed fulfilled."
Not
all the derivative codes, not all the moral principles,
not all the accepted rules and customs of society are so
summed, just all the Law and the prophets--just, in
other words, all the demands of the crown prince, the
landowner, the master, who rejects the moral servant and
rewards the obedient ones - rewards the obedient
servants whose guiding principle was - there's the real
question, is it not? Whose guiding principle was what?
We
hear a great deal, and very, very frequently I might
add, about Jesus' summary of the law and the prophets,
but almost without exception, what we hear about is that
second part, the part about loving our neighbors as
ourselves. It is a good principle, that one, a good
summary of the divine imperative, a good compass for
determining direction, but it is also only half of the
Messiah's whole summary. It is, to be precise, the
second half and occupies thereby, or so we are told, the
subordinate or secondary position. Love your neighbor,
in other words, while it may be of great social good, is
of no spiritual or religious use without its other and
primary companion piece of "Love God with all your
heart, all your mind, and all your soul."
To
know God, as the moral slave knew, is to be afraid. To
know God, really know God to the limits of human
observation, is to concede that he does indeed make his
rain to fall upon the just and the unjust alike. To know
God as far as observation will take us is to
acknowledge, as the fearful slave acknowledged, that
he's a tough man, playing by rules we can easily
question and often find deplorable. Such knowledge, much
less the rather ubiquitous evidence of it that surrounds
us, would make almost any thinking person afraid, and
thus it was that the unprofitable slave took up the
shield of playing it safe in order to hold his fear at
bay.
But what of the profitable servants in both our tales?
Were they not also afraid? Of course they were! Common
sense alone teaches us that no slave is without fear of
the master, not any servant of the boss. Moreover, the
profitable servants were clearly thinking and observant
folk who knew as surely as did the fearful one what was
the nature of the king. Why then did they not likewise
fall into heaps of terror, or at the very least, into
heaps of paralyzing anxiety?
Because, it would seem from both our stories, because
they loved the master, the landowner, the king. Or if
love be too weak and abused a word nowadays to be
applicable here, and I suspect it is, then let us say,
as do the parables, that the profitable servants yearned
toward the master. They positively glowed in the light
of him and his approval. They also yearned so completely
that they gambled with his goods in pure blind faith
that that was really what he meant for them to do. They
yearned so completely, in other words, that they
believed his intentions--his spirit, if you will - as
they understood it, and they gambled themselves on
fulfilling it. They, in short, loved the master with all
their hearts and souls and minds, for this is the first
and great commandment, and all the others are secondary
unto it.
And
the only proper response to such stories as these, it
seems to me, is to pray that God may give each of us
such grace and faithfulness in our times as he gave to
those faithful servants in their storied ones.
Conclusion:
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There is no point in brooding over lost
opportunities
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Cash in on the present occasion and try
to develop your talents
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Try to offer the fruit of your wok to
God, and God alone
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This is the way you can pray and
sanctify everything you do
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Such attitude will lead you to be
thankful and you will be just before God.
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Try your best not to waste time and
talents.
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Lost time will never be ours.
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