a33rd Sunday 2020
Proverbs 31: 10-13, 19-20, 30-31; 1Thess 5:1-6; Matthew 25: 14-30
What is today’s Gospel about? Is it about making the best use of our talents? If not, what is it about?
As Our Lord recounted the parable, it wouldn’t have been about using talents in the sense that we understand the word. In biblical times, a talent was not a natural gift, but a piece of metal, the highest form of currency in the Graeco-Roman world. Consequently, the New English Bible translates the word as “bags of gold”.
What message then did Jesus seek to convey? Did He wish His followers to be financial speculators? Surely not: the desire for money-making would be at odds with the rest of His teaching. What did He have in mind?
This parable has to be understood in the setting in which we find it. It is set among a whole list of prophecies and parables of the return of the Son of Man, and of judgement. It follows immediately last week’s parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, and is followed in its turn by that great parable of judgement, the sheep and the goats, which we shall hear next Sunday, the Feast of Christ the King.
So it is a parable of judgement, and a call to be alert, alert to the presence and challenge of Christ, the Son of Man, and of His forthcoming return as judge, when judgement will be based on our response in life to the responsibilities and the call which He has given us.
It is not so much our talents, in the sense of outstanding abilities, which we are required to use to the full, but our opportunities, the situations in which we find ourselves, and which speak to us of the presence and the demands of God. This may entail putting any special gifts at God’s service, as St. Paul urges us to do: more importantly, though, as St. Paul also says, it involves making our every action an item in God’s service, performed as if at God’s orders.
What does this mean in practice? It seems to be rooted in what Jean Pierre de Caussade, the 17/18th centuries French Jesuit, and other writers have called “the grace of the present moment”. God is among us: we live, as Karl Rahner wrote in the twentieth century, in a permanent Advent, because God is always a God who comes.
Every moment, therefore, is a moment for serving God, for using His gifts to build His Kingdom. This may involve something very small, such as biting back the angry retort or the wounding criticism. It means showing compassion, putting ourselves in the shoes of the other person, recognizing as far as we can, and as next week’s Gospel will remind us, that this other person is Christ, even if his/her behaviour may not seem very Christ-like.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not His”. Yet Christ plays also in the less lovely limbs, and the less lovely eyes, inviting us by our response to that apparently less lovely person to draw out the Christ who dwells in him/her, so that the same Christ may transform ugliness into beauty.
You and I may feel, rightly or wrongly, that we haven’t been endowed with outstanding talents, though some may well have been so. What every single one of us has been given, and is being given, is the indwelling Christ, who invites us to be a presence of Him in our everyday circumstances, thus ensuring that His investment in us has not been, and will not be, wasted.
