1 Thess 5, 1-6 / Mt 25, 14-30
Jesus, our rabbi, is teaching us today in parables. That means he wants us to really think. He wants us to think not on a surface level but deeply – not many pious ideas but deep in our guts where we keep our certainties. Be warned: Jesus wants to upset those certainties of ours. What he wants for us is no less than our transformation – a completely new way for us to enter into life.
Absolutely critical to understanding Jesus’ parable is the meaning of the word “talent”. First of all, a “talent” is a sum of money; it is not a personal ability or gift. In fact, in Jesus’ day a talent was a huge sum of money, 6,000 denarii. That would be the equivalent of what the average Jew would earn over the course of twenty years. So in the parable we are talking in terms of huge amounts of money.
The story begins with the man going on a journey. He gives three of his servants enormous sums of money. To the first he gives five talents, to the second two talents and to the third he gives one talent. The point is not the difference in the amounts given but that they were each given an enormous sum of money. Clearly this man – the master - is extravagantly generous.
But the action of the parable and its point revolve around the third servant. After dealing with the first two servants the master comes to the third. Listen closely to how Jesus describes the third servant as he presents himself to the master:
Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.
Every detail, every indication so far in the story is that the master is an extremely generous man who becomes overjoyed when the servant receives his gift and does something with it. But the third servant doesn’t see the master this way at all. He says the master is a demanding person and is, in fact, an unjust man: he harvests where he did not plant.
The obvious question – the question Jesus wants us to ask – is where did he get this idea – this dark image of the master? Certainly the other two had no such image. Jesus tells us in the story where the image comes from. The servant says: …out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Fear! Fear as a way of life – or, perhaps better said, fear as a way of not living. Jesus is addressing the kind of fear that would take a surprising rainbow suddenly appearing in the sky and make it into a menacing threat! That’s what Jesus wants us to ask about ourselves. He wants us to address our own fears.
Jesus wants us to get honest about the role of fear in our own lives. How does fear work in us? Does it work in us as it did in the servant? Try to get into the guts of the servant – into his basic life-certainties. Allow Jesus’ parable to get us into ourselves – into our own guts where we keep our certainties about life. Does our gut tell us that this day, that life itself are given as gifts – as blessings from a God who is Infinite Goodness and whose only joy is to see that the blessing be received, enjoyed and expanded further?
Or, does fear prevent us from receiving what is clearly intended to be a gift? Does it prevent us from even recognizing the gift as a gift? And does fear prevent us from recognizing the goodness that prompted the gift – the goodness of the giver? In our everyday lives has fear made us suspicious of goodness? Has goodness become suspect? Has God become suspect to us – a threat to us – somehow not wanting our good and welfare?
We are moving toward the end of our liturgical and church year. And we are moving toward Advent. The Church asks us to reflect on our lives. If there be fear in us, then let Advent call us out of fear. Let Jesus transform us and introduce us to a wholly new way of entering into life. It is time we learned that rainbows are not sinister and that God only wants to call us into his joy.
Fr. Pat Earl, SJ
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