Investing God’s Gifts with Courage, 33rd Wednesday (I), November 22, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Cecilia
November 22, 2023
2 Mc 7:1.20-31, Ps 17, Lk 19:11-28

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we have the Parable of the Coins, which is similar to that of the more famous Parable of the Talents, but the main difference is in this Parable, ten people all get the same investment on the part of the nobleman. One multiplies it by 10, another by 5, 7 we don’t know about, and the tenth buries it. Whereas with the Parable of the Talents, which we heard on Sunday, we can focus on how many talents we have received relative to others, today’s Parable has us concentrate on the fact that the greatest gifts we’ve received, we have received to a large degree equally with others: the gift of our life, the gift of time, and, for us as Catholics, the gift of God’s word, the gift of the Sacraments, the gift of the faith, the gift of so many opportunities for charity. How are we investing these divine gifts? Are we bearing great dividends from them? We all know that there are some people who really profit from these common gifts and others who place them in handkerchiefs. Most of us might say we give the Lord somewhere between 1-10. But the impact of this Parable is to get us to take the risks necessary to bear a windfall.
• Before we analyze and apply the Parable to our lives more incisively, let’s first handle a couple of things with the setting of the Parable. The first is about life in general. Jesus told the people the Parable “because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that the Kingdom of God would appear there immediately.” The Parable of the Coins was given to help people know why the Kingdom of God they were expecting politically wasn’t going to appear, but rather, how the Kingdom among them, as it was awaiting fulfillment, was a place in which some people were growing the kingdom by investing the King’s gifts and others were not. How important this point is for us to grasp: time is a kairos of investing in and for the kingdom. The second introductory point involves the setting of the story, which involves history known to Jesus’ listeners but not to people today. Jesus was taking advantage of the infamous story of how after King Herod the Great’s death — who was king at his birth and murdered the Holy Innocents — his kingdom was divided into three parts, but each needed to go to Rome to be confirmed by the emperor in the kingship. The king of Judah, Herod Archelaus, went to Rome but the people sent a delegation saying that they didn’t want him as king. The emperor confirmed him without the title king — he named him tetrarch — and upon the return, Archelaus executed those who didn’t want him to be king. In this month of November, in which we meditate on death and judgment and prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King this Sunday, there’s a spiritual equivalent for those who don’t want to accept God as King. He doesn’t punish or slay them because in a sense he doesn’t have to: they’re already spiritually dead because they’ve self-alienated from the source of life. Similarly, hell is not merciless but merciful, for as CS Lewis once said, there are only two types of people, those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.” Hell is for those who want self-separation, and choose it continually through their actions.
• Let’s get into the heart of the Parable and what Jesus is teaching. The nobleman gives the ten servants a treasure of a gold coin. The coin is actually a mina, which is one-sixtieth of a Talent. Since a talent was 6,000 days wages, a Mina is 100 days wages or a third of a year’s salary; if someone is making $100 a year, it’s $10,000, not an enormous sum but substantial enough. Those entrusted by the King with this Mina make different yields:  the first one makes ten, the second five, and the last just conceals the coin in a handkerchief. We don’t know what the other seven did. We see the incredible reward given to those who proved themselves trustworthy in these little matters, the one who made ten — $100,000, or more than three years’  work — was entrusted with ten cities and the one who made five with five cities. But then we encounter someone who out of fear refused to invest the coin. In St. Matthew’s Parable of the Talents, the Master called the one who buried the talent a “wicked, lazy servant.” Today the newly crowned king says, “With your own words I shall condemn you, you wicked servant.” It would have been interesting if Jesus had given us the example of a servant who had tried to make a profit but actually lost money. My hunch is that the King and Master would have treated that servant rather well, since that would have been a result of bad luck or bad training. He may have been an incompetent servant or an unfortunate one, but he wouldn’t have been lazy and wicked. The Lord is not necessarily requiring us to be successful, but he certainly is asking us to make the effort, almost showing by both parables that if we try to invest, if we don’t bury what he’s given us, we’re bound to make dividends. In the case of the wicked servant, the lazy servant, the problem was his fear. “I was afraid of you, because you are a demanding man; you take up what you did not lay down and you harvest what you did not plant” and for that reason he kept it in a handkerchief. His fear led to his slothful omissions. Jesus, on the other hand, is encouraging us not to be afraid to take risks to invest what he’s given us. He has made us in his image and we see in the Parable that God reaps where he doesn’t sow, taking the risk of giving us freedom. He wants us to do the same. Fear cripples us and is not of God. We need to have the courage to put all that God has given us at the service of him and others, not comparing ourselves to those who are making more or less, just doing the best we can. The reality is, from God’s perspective, that when we get to the most important talents or gold coin involved in life, it seems that it’s impossible not to “make a profit” if we actually make the effort to “trade” with it in life. The most important talent of all is God himself. We have the ability to pray to him and be guided each day, to enter into his life in the Sacraments, to enflesh his word in Sacred Scripture, to be strengthened by his Body the Church (the communion of saints in heaven, the presence of a family of faith here on earth, and the instruction of the magisterium), and to serve him in others. If we make the effort, we will bear great dividends. Jesus promised us about prayer, that the one who seeks finds, the one who asks receives and the one who knocks has the door opened. We could say that the one who invests God spiritually reaps a spiritual windfall. But we have to invest that relationship. The more we invest, the more we receive God’s guidance, the more we really allow him to transform us in sacramental encounters, the more we insert ourselves into the communion of holiness and charity, the more fruit we’ll bear.
• In order to bear great dividends, however, we cannot be overwhelmed by fear about what could go wrong. Just like those on Wall Street, we need to be willing to task risks. We need to confront and overcome our fears, not cave into them like the man with the handkerchief. And we receive so much inspiration from today’s first reading, where we see the courage of this family — a mother and her seven sons — in remaining faithful to God. They refused to eat pork because in the Old Testament God had forbidden it, and they wouldn’t sin against the Lord even in the least way in order to save their lives from torture and death. They illustrate for us the saying of waves of martyrs in Church history: “Better to die than to sin.” Because they were faithful in keeping their Covenant with the Lord in small things — like what they would or would not eat — they were faithful even when threatened with death. There’s a great lesson here. If we’re going to bear great dividends, we need to be faithful in little things, which means we need to be willing to die to ourselves for God each day, to go the way of the grain of wheat, to save our life by losing it. Because the seven sons were faithful in not eating pork normally, they were strengthened to remain true to God when they would have to say no to their persecutors at the risk of their life. The early Church used to prepare catechumens to remain faithful under torture and martyrdom; if they were prepared to remain faithful with God’s help in the supreme tests, they would begin to pour themselves into their relationship with God in the daily tests. We also see in this scene something beautiful about spiritual maternity. Their mother, rather than being overwhelmed by this worldly sentimentality, encouraged all of her sons to remain faithful, speaking in their mother tongue a language they could understand, and reminding them both about the cost of fidelity to God and the reward. She was the one who emboldened them to be faithful. God wants us all not only to be faithful ourselves but to encourage others to similar courage and fidelity.
• Another example of fidelity and of encouraging others toward faithfulness in the risk of suffering is the feast of the holy one we celebrate today, St. Cecilia. She was one whose investment of the gold coin God gave her continues to bear fruit centuries after her death. Cecilia was a young girl of a noble Christian family who fasted, wore a hair shirt, and desired to give herself always as a virgin to God, but her father had plans for a good marriage to a young pagan patrician named Valerian. During their wedding, among the music and rejoicing of the guests, Cecilia stayed apart, singing to God within and praying for help. When she and Valerian retired to the place where he was prepared to consummate the marriage, Cecilia told him a secret that she has an angel watching over her and that if he touched her in the way of marriage, the angel would make his suffer, but if he respected her and got baptized, he would see the angel. Valerian received instruction, got baptized by Pope Urban I, and then saw the angel standing by Cecilia’s side who put on both of their heads a crown of roses and lilies, a sign (like we’d see much later in the life of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe) of martyrdom and purity, respectively. The fact that Valerian could see Cecilia’s angel shows that we’re never abandoned by the presence of the Angel God sends each of us. Valerian eventually helped his brother Tiburtius to convert and the two of them began to care for the bodies of all the martyrs, seeking to bury them. That exposed them as Christians and both were brought to martyrdom with the guard, Maximus, who witnessed their supreme testimony and became a Christian on the spot and almost immediately a fellow martyr. Cecilia buried all three bodies and herself was exposed as a Christian and brought to trial before Almachius. She was unable to be threatened out of her faith and after they tried to suffocate her by fire, ended up trying to behead her, but the axe wouldn’t penetrate through her entire neck. The blow, however, turned out to be fatal after three days and she was buried close to the popes in the catacombs that would eventually be named after St. Callistus. Her relics were translated by Pope St. Paschal in the early 800s to the area that was believed to have been her house and where a Church had been built after the age of persecutions. In 1599, the Cardinal in charge of the Church of St. Cecilia (Cardinal Paulo Emilio Sfondrati), in doing various renovations, decided to re-inter Cecilia with SS. Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus, and, as he opened her tomb, he found her incorrupt. He had the great renaissance sculptor Stefano Maderno make a sculpture identical to what was seen in the tomb. That statue is now found before her tomb as well as a copy has been placed in the catacombs closed to where her bodied had rested for nearly six centuries. Her remains looked as if she were sleeping. You could see the axe marks in her neck. But what has always struck me — and many others — is the way she seemed to be prophesying even in death. In her right hand, she had two fingers and her thumb extended. In her left, she had her index finger extended. This was a means by which she appeared to be proclaiming her faith in her Triune God, one God in three persons. This was the supreme witness she was giving that not even Roman executioners could cut her off from her attachment to God, because she was united with him even in martyrdom. What St. Ambrose said famously in his treatise on virginity for the feast of St. Agnes is certainly apropos for her: “Virginity is praiseworthy not because it is found in [the virgin] martyrs, but because it makes [the virgin] martyrs.” Her daily choice for Christ strengthened her to choose him until the end! She kept investing her daily gold coin until she had become so rich in God that she didn’t fear a thing!
• Today Jesus has brought us here not to slay us before him but to show us that he was willing to be slain before us and to allow us to enter into communion with his loving courage. This is the secret to St. Cecilia’s great eternal dividends. This is what the great mother and her sons now have in fulfillment as a result of their faith. This is what will lead to something far greater than ten earthly cities. This is what will likewise make us strong so that today we might invest our time and through praying our work and action be able to appear before the Lord with great returns in response to his extraordinary trust!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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