Investing the Gold Coin of Prayer Wisely, 33rd Wednesday (II), November 21, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Pro Orantibus Day
November 21, 2018
Rev 4:1-11, Ps 150, Lk 19:11-28

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, a feast celebrated in the East since the 500s and in the West since the 1300s. For 65 years, this feast has been marked by a special character: it’s the occasion on which the Church marks Pro Orantibus Day, the annual observance begun by Pope Pius XII in 1953 and expanded by St. John Paul II in 1997, on which the whole Church prays in a special way “For Those Praying,” for all of those in convents, cloisters, monasteries and hermitages who intercede for us without ceasing before God. It’s held purposefully on the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the model of total dedication to a life of prayer and intercession in God’s service. It’s a day on which we thank God for the contemplatives’ silent, hidden, generous and beautiful vocation. It’s an occasion on which we recognize them, thank them, encourage them and commit to give the material support they need. It’s a day on which we ponder their example of consecration and of following Christ and prioritizing him through prayer. Contemplative life is a great and indispensable gift of God. All of us benefit spiritually from the orantes’ prayers and sacrifices, even if many of us are unaware of their intercession or naively think that their hidden life is being wasted. They remind us — ensnared by the frenetic, noisy and provisional — that God is truly the “pearl of great price” and the “one thing necessary.” In a world that seeks to structure itself without God, their very existence helps us to recall that God is real, provident, and worth our all. They teach us how to adore Christ with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Today, as every day, communities of contemplatives are before God constantly praying for us, that we may long, like them and our Lady, to see the Lord’s face and give whatever we have, even if it seems small, to God and his glory. Today we pray for them, thank them and thank God for them. We’ll never know until heaven how many of the graces we’ve received — and disasters we’ve averted — have taken place on account of their incessant prayers.
• We mark this day on the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary because we ponder Mary’s presentation and life prior to our first encounter with her in Sacred Scripture at the Annunciation. Most of the liturgical elements for today’s feast come from the Pseudogospel of St. James (and even later pseudogospels like the Pseudoevangelium of Matthew and the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary) that attest that Mary was presented as a young girl of three into the Temple in Jerusalem where she was raised until the time she was betrothed to Joseph. We read in the Pseudogospel of St. James, written about 200 years after the events and so historically useless according to the details but useful in terms of the traditions based upon it later, “And the child became three years old, and Joachim said: ‘Call for the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let every one of them take every a lamp, and let them be burning, that the child turn not backward and her heart be taken captive away from the temple of the Lord.’ And they did so until they were gone up into the temple of the Lord. And the priest received her and kissed her and blessed her and said: ‘The Lord has magnified your name among all generations: in you in the latter days shall the Lord make manifest his redemption unto the children of Israel.’ And he made her to sit upon the third step of the altar. And the Lord put grace upon her and she danced with her feet and all the house of Israel loved her. And her parents sat down marveling, and praising the Lord God because the child did not turn away backward. And Mary was in the temple of the Lord like a dove that is nurtured: and she received food from the hand of an angel.” The essential point of the passage was Mary’s being consecrated to the Lord from the beginning of her life, her joy in the Lord’s presence, and the fact that she spent her early years “in the Temple” becoming herself eventually the Temple in whom God would dwell, the Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant. It’s during these years, the early Church knew, that Mary’s heart was prepared to treasure God’s word, to piece it together as tesserae in a mosaic whole, to respond to the Lord in purity of heart, and more. Mary is the model of all contemplative life and the one who more than any other is praying for us.
• Today’s readings help us to ponder the great gift of prayer and to model in our own active lives the prioritization of prayer, the “one thing necessary,” we find in the contemplatives who never cease to pray for us.
• Today in the Gospel we have the Parable of the Coins (on Minas), which is similar to that 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, often we can focus on how many talents we have relative to others, today’s Parable has us focus on the fact that the greatest gifts we’ve received, to a large degree we have received equally with others: the gift of our life, the gift of time, the gift of redemption, for us as Catholics, the gift of God’s word, the gift of the Sacraments, the gift of so many opportunities for charity, and in a particular way, the gift of prayer. How are we investing this gold coin? Are we bearing great dividends from it? How are we planning to invest the gift of this day for loving God and others? 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 numbers 1 and 10. But the Lord wants to teach us how to bear great dividends.
• 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 or for someone making $40,000 a year about $13,000, 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 — about $130,000, or more than three years’ work — was entrusted with ten cities and the one who made five with five cities. But then in each parable 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 been lazy and wicked. The Lord is not necessarily asking us to be successful, but he certainly is asking us to make the effort. But in the case of the wicked servant, the lazy servant, his 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 lead to his laziness and led to his vice. 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 even of giving us freedom. He wants us to do the same. But 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. It’s impossible not to grow from prayer. If we make the effort, God will help us 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.
• The first reading and the Psalm help us to learn how to invest the gift of our time in the most important “market” of all. They both concern prayer, and especially about the most important form of prayer which is praise, adoration and blessing. Many times when we think of prayer we think first or sometimes exclusively about prayer of petition and intercession, asking God for things for ourselves or for others. But this is just a small part of prayer. We occasionally think about prayers of contrition, such as when we cry out, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” As we approach the Feast of Thanksgiving tomorrow, we can recall the importance of prayers of gratitude. But the most important part of prayer is prayer of praise, because in that type of prayer we’re essentially telling God how much we love him without any direct reference to ourselves, whether in gratitude for what he’s given us, in sorrow for what we’ve done wrong, or in request of what we or others need. Prayer of Praise is the most pure form of prayer because it’s focused essentially on God. In the Book of Revelation, we see what St. John witnessed in his vision when he looked through the open door of heaven and was shown what would happen. He saw God on his throne not appearing like a man but shining in complete radiance, sparkling like jasper, carnelian and an emerald halo. Around his thrown were 24 elders, who could represent the 12 major prophets and 12 apostles, or 12 tribes and 12 gentiles, but who represent basically everyone in heaven. Then there was a vision of the “four living creatures” with eyes in front and back for the beatific vision, seeing God from all angles. The first resembled a lion, the second an ox, the third had the face like a man and the fourth looked like an eagle in flight. These have been seen on the one hand as the pinnacle of creation — the lion is the king of beasts, the ox the sum of sacrifices, the eagle the lord of the air, and the human person, the summit of all of creation — or, taking from St. Ireneaeus’ second century reflections, the four Gospel writers, Mark (the lion, because he begins with Jesus’ royal proclamation as the Son of David and son of God), Luke (the ox because of the presence of ox and ass at Jesus’ birth), John (the eagle because of the soaring theology in his Gospel) and Matthew (the man with the face of an angel, because of his focus on Jesus as the Son of Man and all of the angels presence from the Nativity scene to the Garden of Gethsemane in his Gospel). I prefer the latter interpretation. We see that “whenever the four living creatures give glory and honor” to God, exclaiming, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty,” the 24 elders all fall down before him, worship him, throw down their crowns and say, “Worthy are you, Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you have created all things, and by your will they came to be and were made.” St. John saw the Gospel writers praising God and then all the Jews and Gentiles, all the prophets and apostles, joined in that adoration and blessing. It’s key for us to invest the gold coin of this type of praise and adoration of the Lord. The Gospels still proclaim God’s glory and honor and power. We normally respond to them saying, “Thanks be to God,” and “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” and simply “Alleluia!,” which means, “Praise the Lord.” But sometimes those words come off our lips without the wonder and enthusiasm that doubtless marks the four living creatures and the 24 elders. We sing the “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,” but without the passion and piety of the angels. Many of us don’t invest ourselves in this the way those on fire with love of God do, which is one of the reasons why our prayer, our assistance at Mass, our reception of Confession, our membership in the Church, our reading of the Word of God, our service to God’s people do not bear as much fruit in us as they do in others. In response to the first reading, the last Psalm in the Psalter not only tells us how to praise God with all the instruments we have, but helps us to do so as we say the words: “Praise the Lord in his sanctuary, praise him in the firmament of his strength, praise him for his mighty deeds, praise him for his sovereign majesty. Praise him with the blast of the trumpet, praise him with lyre and harp, praise him with timbrel and dance, praise him with strings and pipe. Praise him with sounding cymbals, praise him with clanging cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Alleluia.” One of the most important ways  for us to invest ourselves more in the praise of God is actually to use the words of this Psalm, to use the words of the four living creatures, to use the phrases from the 24 elders. The Psalm and the words of Revelation teach us how to praise and worship God, how to enter more intimately into the very life of heaven, which is the most lasting investment of all, and prepares us for eternity.
• Today as we celebrate our Lady’s prayer, as we thank the Lord for the gift of so many consecrated vocations asking him to bless them with himself and never cease calling young men and women to this beautiful life, we come now to the most important gold coin of all, the prayer of the Mass. The liturgy of the Word we find in the Book of Revelation leads to the liturgy of the Eucharist where together with them we will pray, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Here is where we fall down with all the elders and say to God, “Worthy are you to receive glory and honor and power!” Here we say: Worthy are you to receive praise in your sanctuary, in the firmament of your strength, for your mighty deeds and sovereign majesty, with the blast of the trumpet, with lyre and harp, timbrel and dance, strings and pipe, and clanging cymbals. Here we cry out: not only “everything that has breath praise the Lord,” but use all our breath to praise him. Let us invest this Mass in such a way that Jesus will say to us, “Well done, good servant!,” and give us not ten cities but the celestial Jerusalem, the Temple where Mary and all the Saints have already been presented and where they, like the contemplatives on earth, never cease to pray for us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: