Investing Our Life Well, Thirty-Third Sunday (A), November 19, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
November 19, 2023
Prov 31:10-13.19-20.30-31, Ps 128, 1 Thess 5:1-6, Mt 25:14-30

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• The Parable of the Talents that Jesus gives us in today’s Gospel is an image of human life between the time of his Ascension into heaven and his second coming. Jesus is the master who departs on a “journey” and entrusts his “possessions,” what he values most, so many gifts and the completion of his Mission, to us in the Church. He wants us to use those gifts, to develop them and develop through developing them. The Parable is really about how we respond to that trust and that responsibility, whether the Lord’s trust motivates us to go out “immediately” like the first two servants in the Parable and begin to put those gifts to use, or whether it frightens and paralyzes us to bury those gifts together with our potential in the ground. This Parable has relevance to all of us, insofar as it depicts the final exam of life, given to us in the month of November, when the Church focuses our attention on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell — so that we might always be ready for the first two, enter into the third and avoid the fourth. But the Parable has always had particular relevance for young people, as they reflect on their gifts and make big choices about the direction of their life. So it’s super important for us to get to know it well, to understand its various elements and drama, and to learn the lessons upon which Jesus is hoping we will act.
• The first thing we have to understand is about the talents entrusted, because if we misunderstand them, we risk misunderstanding Jesus’ message. We can sometimes identify with the servant given just one talent and think that, unlike the servants who had received five and two, there was no margin of error and hence we can deem his fear and caution justified. But the word “talent” Jesus used referred to a weight measurement. One talent of silver was equal to 6,000 days wages or 16-and-two-thirds years of work; in today’s money, if someone made $100 per day, even a servant who received one talent would have had $600,000 to invest, a truly sizeable amount.
• The second question we can have is why did the Master entrust his possessions to his servants disparately. In our egalitarian age, we’re tempted to cry out, “Unfair!,” as if the Master is playing favorites. But what was involved was love. In the Parable, Jesus says the Master distributed his possessions to the servants, “each according to his ability.” It’s a simple fact that people have different skills, experiences, capacities. In most circumstances, it would be cruel to give the same amount of responsibility to a 25-year-old as we do a ten-year-old, if we treated someone with twenty years of experience in a field the same way we do someone just getting started. The main point of the Parable is the enormous trust given to each person.
• The third thing is what is meant to be understood by talent. Sometimes, confusion with the English word that is a synonym for skills or aptitudes can make us concentrate on what distinguishes us from other people — our capacity at math, languages, singing, athletics, making friendships, music, sculpture, poetry, and so on. But the greatest talents we’ve received we have in common with others. The gift of life, of new life in Baptism, the pearl of great price that is Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, the gift of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation, the ability to start anew each Confession, the graces of Marriage or Holy Orders, the Word of God, the intercession of Mary, Joseph and the saints, our friendship with God and our ability to turn to God in prayer, so many opportunities for charity, the crosses with which God caresses us, the gift of the Church, and much more. We’re not immaculately conceived like the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may not be as smart as Saint Thomas Aquinas, as brave as many of the martyrs, or as holy as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, but God has given us all enormous gifts. None of us is a pauper in the endowment category. God has given to each of us according to our abilities, and he has given us a lot.
• The fourth element is how did the servants respond to the Master’s trust. Jesus says that those who had received the five talents ($3 million) and two ($1.2 million) “immediately went out” and started to make the gifts grow. They both received a one-hundred percent return from their one-hundred percent effort and investment, giving back ten and four talents, respectively. The parable almost implies that all they had to do was make the effort, because the conditions for investment were that favorable. The servant who had received the one talent, on the other hand, buried that huge weight of silver out of fear, fear to take a risk, fear of the master because, he said, the Master reaped where he didn’t sow and gathered where he didn’t scatter. Rather than sensing the confidence given to him by the Master, he was afraid of failure, even eventually blaming him for his own inaction by accusing the master of being demanding, cruel, and even tyrannical. We see depicted here a huge contrast between the way the servants related to the Master, an image of how disciples can relate to God. The first two were emboldened by the Master’s trust to take risks. They saw opportunities. They recognized that the Master reaped where he didn’t sow and wanted, indeed, through his sowing of trust in them, to reap abundantly. They stand for disciples who live strengthened by the love of God not to be afraid, to put out into the deep. The third servant is an image of those who regard God with a servile fear, as if God is out to get and punish them, just waiting for the opportunity to flunk and condemn them. There are some Christians who, out of cowardice or a false sense of humility, bury their gifts “under a bushel basket” (Mt 5:15-16). They never take a risk investing, growing and sharing the faith. They strive not to “lose the state of grace,” not to commit any mortal sins, not to set bad example, not to make any mistakes, but they don’t realize that they may be failing to do the good that God wants and has made possible. They don’t grow, because the only way one grows in faith, hope and love is through acts of faith, hope and love (with the help of God’s grace). Rather than developing themselves and the Lord’s gifts and making the world a better and holier place by living up their vocations, they succumb to the devil’s wiles and set their goal on simply not harming the world or just leaving it like they found it. Do we look at the Lord as someone who loves and trusts us as his precious children or as someone who fundamentally judges us and finds us a failure?
• The fifth element is about the reward. After the first servant brings the Master ten talents and the second four, the Master congratulates them in identical words. “Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your Master’s joy!” We might have expected for the joy to have been greater for the one who earned the greater amount, but the Master was evidently not primarily concerned with the amount of talents returned, but at the development of the servant. Both had fully developed, it seems, according to their abilities. And the reward he gave them is really important to grasp. It wasn’t a free all expenses paid vacation at a Dead Sea or Mediterranean resort. It was greater responsibilities. That would be the means by which they would share in the Master’s joy. The Master was overjoyed to allow them to share more and more in his responsibilities, as their abilities developed precisely through the work they had done. Just like a loving father delights when he can delegate greater responsibilities to his sons and daughters, just like a coach loves it when the captain is able to take on more and more of the play calling, just like a piano teacher rejoices when a pupil can take on more challenging pieces, so God delights when we prove to be good stewards of his trust and gifts. The one who returned the buried talent, however, received a totally different response. The Master called him “wicked,” “slothful” and “useless,” asked why he didn’t at least put it in the bank to gain interest, had the talent taken from him and given to the one with ten, and then had him thrown into the outer darkness, which was an image of the lightless definitive self-alienation we call hell. It might seem in the language of the Parable that this was a punishment, but it was really the Master’s granting the choice of the servant. He had already withdrawn from the Master’s trust and mentality. He had cut himself off, it seems, from the other servants, who would have been able to help him, at least by their example of prudent risk-taking and success. He didn’t remain truly idle, but in fact dug the hole to bury the huge weight of silver and it seems buried himself with it. He had chosen to make himself “useless” and the Master just ratified his choice, giving him a dark hole in which to separate and hide himself. What happened to him in the story is a reminder of the possibility of human freedom. It is possible to bury the gifts we’ve been given, wasting our life on frivolities rather than making true commitments to develop those gifts that God has given, especially the gift of our relationship with him. If that’s been our general approach until now, Jesus gives us this parable to provoke in us what he was trying to do with his first hearers: to have us unbury the gifts and start to use them for the purpose for which God entrusted us with them.
• So the Parable of the Talents leaves us with a sense of urgency. The gifts God has given us are not supposed to be buried until later, but used now. Just like the first two servants, we’re called to go out “immediately” and trade them, live by them. That’s what St. Paul was emphasizing in today’s second reading. He tells us, as he told the Christians in Thessalonika, that “the day of the Lord” — the day when the Lord comes for us — “will come like a thief in the night … as labor pains upon a pregnant woman.” But he adds: “You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness for that day to overtake you like a thief. You are all children of light and children of the day… So let us not sleep as the rest do but let us stay alert and sober.” Now’s not the time of sleep but of investing, of not hiding our talents but bringing them out of darkness into the broad daylight. And so today is a time for prayerful resolution on how to invest our gifts. To know what they are. To value them appropriately. And, with the Lord’s help, to make them grow.
• I’d like to apply the lessons of these readings briefly to two contexts.
• The first is to today’s seventh observance of the World Day of the Poor. Three years ago, Pope Francis made a powerful connection between Jesus’ Parable and the poor when he said in a homily at St. Peter’s Basilica: “The master tells the faithless servant: ‘You ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest’ (v. 27).” The Holy Father asked: “Who are the ‘bankers’ who can provide us with long-term interest?” He answered: “They are the poor. … The poor are like Jesus himself, who, though rich, emptied himself, made himself poor, even taking sin upon himself: the worst kind of poverty. The poor guarantee us an eternal income. Even now they help us become rich in love.” In other words, the poor are like our eternal investors. Their presence in our life is like a talent we’re called to invest by our loving care for them, for they help us to become rich when we empty ourselves to care for them. This is the love that characterizes the life of worthy wife in today’s first reading from the Book of Proverbs, who “reaches out her hands to the poor and extends her arms to the needy.” Pope Francis says that we see at the end of the Parable a glimpse of the end of life: “The pretense of this world will fade, with its notion that success, power and money give life meaning, whereas love – the love we have given – will be revealed as true riches.”
• In his Message for today’s observance, the Holy Father wrote with concern, “We are living in times that are not particularly sensitive to the needs of the poor. The pressure to adopt an affluent lifestyle increases, while the voices of those dwelling in poverty tend to go unheard. … We disregard anything that is unpleasant or causes suffering and exalt physical qualities as if they were the primary goal in life. … The poor become a film clip that can affect us for a moment, yet when we encounter them in flesh and blood on our streets, we are annoyed and look the other way. Haste, by now the daily companion of our lives, prevents us from stopping to help care for others. …It is easy to delegate charity to others, yet the calling of every Christian is to become personally involved.” He says often when we speak of the poor, we give into the “insidious temptation to remain at the level of statistics and numbers,” but, he emphasizes, “the poor are persons; they have faces, stories, hearts and souls. They are our brothers and sisters, with good points and bad, like all of us, and it is important to enter into a personal relation with each of them.” He underlines that “our concern for the poor always [must] be marked by Gospel realism. Our sharing should meet the concrete needs of the other, rather than being just a means of ridding ourselves of superfluous goods. … The poor need … our humanity, our hearts open to love. … Faith teaches us that every poor person is a son or daughter of God and that Christ is present in them.” In his homily at Mass this morning, he focused on the “multitude” of the poor with faces, all loved by the Lord, and said, “the message of the Gospel is clear: let us not bury the Lord’s goods! Let’s put charity into circulation, let’s share our bread, let’s multiply love! … When the Lord returns, he will ask us to account and, as Saint Ambrose writes, he will tell us: ‘Why did you tolerate so many poor people dying of hunger, when you possessed gold with which to obtain food to give to them?’” At the end of Mass today, Matthew Jedron, one of our service chairs, will speak about opportunities for us to care for the poor after Thanksgiving. Please be generous.
• The second context is to the celebration of thanksgiving that we will mark on Thursday. Thanksgiving is an annual opportunity for us to reflect on all of the talents, riches, and blessings that God and others have entrusted to us, and to turn to Him and to them and say thanks. The greatest way we say thanks is to invest the gifts of love that have been given, to be transformed by them and to share them lavishly with others. Thanksgiving is a day in which we think not about what we don’t have but about what we do. And we celebrate those gifts at the altar with God and at the dinner table with family, friends, and, if we’re Christian, with those who have nowhere else to go. When it comes to our investment portfolio, thanksgiving — not just the fourth Thursday of November, but regularly — has to be our most important mutual fund, because it helps us to remember our gifts and inspires us to share them.
• Today, the same Jesus who emptied himself, taking on our humanity to give it for our salvation, and who upon his ascension entrusted us with his mission of love and salvation, returns to meet us in the treasure of his word and even greater gift of his Body and Blood. Each Mass is an occasion to bring what we’ve earned and offer it, together with Jesus, to the Father. Each Mass is a time in which we also ponder our omissions, of what we could have done, and ask for his forgiveness and help. Each Mass is a time to recommit ourselves, with his blessing, to go out like the servants who received five and two talents to invest immediately the divine treasure with which God entrusts us here, by truly loving and serving others, especially those in greatest need. Each Mass is an opportunity to wake up so that we may live, fully alive, as children of the light and of the day. The Mass is our greatest talent of all, and God, out of love, has entrusted it to you and to me. Investing what God invests in us at Mass is the means by which, at the end of this life, the Lord Jesus will be able to say to us what he said to the first two servants in the Gospel Parable: “Well done, good and faithful servants. … Come, share your Master’s joy!”

The readings for this Sunday’s Mass were: 

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