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| Closing of Antioch 2014 - Start a Fire |
Fear of failure is the enemy of faithfulness, because it makes us bury our talents instead of using them. God doesn't condemn us for our failures, but for our lack of faithfulness. Thus, there is nothing to fear and everything to gain, so go and make a difference in the world!
Happy feast day of St. Elizabeth of Hungary!
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Homily:
33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Ready or not, secular Christmas has descended upon us. Much like this winter weather hi-jacked fall
and arrived before its time, secular Christmas is already in full-swing. This is not unexpected, though. Retailers hoping to profit off of this “season
of giving” risk starting earlier and earlier each year in hopes of catching an
extra share of gift-givers’ money.
“Christmas only comes once a year”, they say, and so they know that they
cannot waste any time.
My older sister has long been possessed by this “spirit of
Christmas”. It begins on Thanksgiving Day
where we not only ingest turkey and dressing, but also the sounds Christmas
music already playing on the radio in order to “prime the pump” for what follows
next. For on the Friday after
Thanksgiving, a coordinated onslaught by Christmas décor completely obliterates
any sign of fall harvest motif. It’s as
if Christmas Day was the Saturday after Thanksgiving and so no man, woman, or
child could be left to rest until this transformation is complete.
What my sister and retailers both demonstrate is that when
we know the day and the time that something important is going to happen we
have no problem making preparations; even to the point of putting aside everything
else so as to ensure that the preparations are complete. As Christians, however, we often fall far
short of these expectations. We know
that Jesus has come to save us and we believe that he desires a personal
relationship with us, which is why we celebrate events like the day of his
birth—Christmas—because they invite us to know him more deeply and so consider
him like a dear friend or family member, but when it comes to preparing for his
coming again in glory, we often miss the mark.
We go along with our lives like Jesus’ coming won’t be during our
lifetimes and we put off the work of building his kingdom in preparation of his
coming.
This, however, is exactly what Jesus is warning us about in
the parable of the talents. In biblical
terms, a talent was a unit of weight and it was not a small unit. A talent of silver, according to some
historians, was worth nearly 15 years of daily wages in Jesus’ time. Therefore, the amount of money that the
master is entrusting to each of the three servants—even in its smallest
quantity—is incredibly large. Even
though our modern sensibilities cringe at the idea that one man seemed to do
something very risky when he buried the money instead of investing it, his
action would have been seen as an acceptable way of protecting the money he was
entrusted with: because if you buried it and it was stolen, you wouldn’t be
responsible; but if you invested it and lost it through bad investments, you
would be responsible.
As Jesus often does in these parables, however, he takes
the expected outcome and he flips it. In
this parable, the servants who were risky with their master’s money were
rewarded, but the one who avoided any risk was punished. Perhaps it’s too easy, however, to conclude
that it is because of the profit that the servants made that they were rewarded
and that because the one servant didn’t make any profit that he was
punished. I think that there’s something
more to this parable.
If we look at the part where the money is distributed, we
see that the master distributed the talents “to each according to his
ability”. In other words, the master
knew the responsibility that he was giving to his servants, and he knew his
servants well and so also knew how capable they were (or weren’t) to handle his
money, and so he calculated how much to give to each servant so as to ensure
that his money would be safe while he was away on his journey. Two of his servants trusted their master’s
assessment of them and went and traded with his money, each according to his
abilities, and each made a profit. The
third servant, however, failed to trust his master—in fact, he was afraid of
him—and so he washed his hands of the responsibility that his master had given
him by burying the money until his master returned.
It is for this failure of trust that the third servant is
punished. When the master returned and
saw the profit from the work of the first two servants he said to each of them,
“since you were faithful in small
matters, I will give you great responsibilities.” In other words, they were rewarded for their
faithfulness, not for their profit. When
the third showed his complete lack of faith in his master, fueled by fear, he
was punished: not because he didn’t make a profit (he did what was accepted to
be the safest way to protect money), but rather because he failed to trust his
master and his master’s assessment of his ability to make a profit. Perhaps he wasn’t even a bad person (I want
to believe that he was a nice guy), but he had no faith and so he was punished.
This is why this parable is such a valuable lesson for
us. God has given to each of us faith
according to our ability to make a profit from it for the building of his
kingdom. We, therefore, are called to
trust in his assessment of our ability and to go out and trade with it. Our trading is the building up of God’s
kingdom of justice and peace in the world.
And when the master returns—that is, when Jesus comes again in glory—we
will each be rewarded or punished on account of our faithfulness: that is, whether in faith we went out and worked for
God’s kingdom, even at the risk of failure, or in fear we buried our talent in
the earth, preserving what we had been given, but preventing it from growing
and producing fruit.
My brothers and sisters, as we approach the end of the
liturgical year, our liturgy reminds us that Jesus’ coming is still close at
hand and, therefore, that we must be vigilant in our work to prepare for his
coming. Just as each of us will prepare
our homes to celebrate the remembrance of Christ’s birth, so too we must remain
committed to preparing our world for his second coming as if the day were as
close at hand as Christmas Day is to today.
And there is no reason to fear, because our Good God knows us and he
knows our abilities. Thus, he gives each
of us faith to accomplish some work for the building of his kingdom according
to our abilities. Blessed John Henry
Newman, a brilliant theologian from the 19th century in England,
summed it up perfectly when he said:
“God
has created me to do some definite service.
God has committed some work to me which he has not committed to
another. I have my mission—I am a link
in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. I have not been created for naught. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of
truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep the
commandments. Therefore, I will trust in
God. Whatever, wherever I am, I can
never be thrown away. If I am in sickness,
my sickness may serve God; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve God; if I am
in sorrow, my sorrow may serve God. God
does nothing in vain, but knows what all is about.”
Let us, then, be about the
work that God has committed to each of us, so that when Jesus, our master,
returns, we may receive the reward that faith has won for us.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – November 16th, 2014
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