Investing the Gifts of God, 33rd Wednesday (I), November 17, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
November 17, 2021
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, everyone gets the same investment on the part of the Lord. 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, 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, 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 would 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, 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. Jesus 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; for someone making $40,000 a year about $13,333, 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 — about $133,333, 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 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 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. As spiritual mothers, Sisters, you fulfill this task for so many.
• Another courageous spiritual mother who inspires multitudes still today to invest the opportunities they have to do good was St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) whose feast the Church celebrates today. She was the daughter of the King of Hungary and at the age of four was betrothed to Louis, the son of the Landgrave of Thuringia. She was raised with him for the next 10 years until their marriage, when she was 14 and he 21. Louis always supported St. Elizabeth’s prayerful piety and ardent charity. In the opening prayer of the Mass, we noted that by God’s grace, Elizabeth was able to “recognize and revere Christ in her neighbor,” and because of that capacity to see and to love Jesus with passion even in the midst of the most distressing disguises, she is truly one of the great examples of charity in history. During a severe famine, she exhausted all the “minas” in her treasury and distributed her entire store of corn to the poor. She built a hospital at the foot of the tall, rocky promontory on which the Wartburg Castle was built so that the infirm and weak wouldn’t have to climb it. She fed them with her own hands — as well as 900 others every day — made their beds and cared for them in so many other ways. She provided for orphans and helpless children. When many criticized her material benefactions as being excessive, her husband said that her charities would bring upon the whole realm divine blessings. But even he reached his limit once when Elizabeth brought a leper to the castle and had him sleep in their protected quarters as a type of quarantine. He rushed into the bedroom to drag away all of the bedclothes and other things that might carry the dreaded disease, but as he was doing so, he recognized that the leper had stigmata. Through his wife, he learned to how to take true risks to recognize and revere Christ, to see and love him, in his neighbor, including the most revolting. St. Elizabeth wants to encourage us like the mother of the seven sons encouraged them to be faithful to the daily martyrdom true love requires.
• Today Jesus has brought us here to Mass not to slay us before him but to enter into his being slain for us. He comes here to bring us into communion with his loving courage. This is the secret to 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: 

Gospel LK 19:11-28

While people were listening to Jesus speak,
he proceeded to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem
and they thought that the Kingdom of God
would appear there immediately.
So he said,
“A nobleman went off to a distant country
to obtain the kingship for himself and then to return.
He called ten of his servants and gave them ten gold coins
and told them, ‘Engage in trade with these until I return.’
His fellow citizens, however, despised him
and sent a delegation after him to announce,
‘We do not want this man to be our king.’
But when he returned after obtaining the kingship,
he had the servants called, to whom he had given the money,
to learn what they had gained by trading.
The first came forward and said,
‘Sir, your gold coin has earned ten additional ones.’
He replied, ‘Well done, good servant!
You have been faithful in this very small matter;
take charge of ten cities.’
Then the second came and reported,
‘Your gold coin, sir, has earned five more.’
And to this servant too he said,
‘You, take charge of five cities.’
Then the other servant came and said,
‘Sir, here is your gold coin;
I kept it stored away in a handkerchief,
for 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.’
He said to him,
‘With your own words I shall condemn you,
you wicked servant.
You knew I was a demanding man,
taking up what I did not lay down
and harvesting what I did not plant;
why did you not put my money in a bank?
Then on my return I would have collected it with interest.’
And to those standing by he said,
‘Take the gold coin from him
and give it to the servant who has ten.’
But they said to him,
‘Sir, he has ten gold coins.’
He replied, ‘I tell you,
to everyone who has, more will be given,
but from the one who has not,
even what he has will be taken away.
Now as for those enemies of mine who did not want me as their king,
bring them here and slay them before me.’”

After he had said this,
he proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem.

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