Sharing the Master’s Joy, Thirty-Third Sunday (A), November 19, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
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: 

• In this month of November, as you know, the Church has us focus 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. This Sunday is no exception. In the Gospel, Jesus gives a parable about a man going on a journey for a long time before returning, which is an image of the time between the Ascension and his second coming. In it, with great confidence, the man entrusts his possessions to three servants, and the parable is about how we live our life in response to that trust and endowment. In the second reading, St. Paul tells us, as he told the Christians in Thessalonika, that “the day of the Lord” — the day of our death or the end of the world, whichever comes first — “will come like a thief in the night … as labor pains upon a pregnant woman.” An expectant mother never knows for sure when contractions will start. Many women — like the worthy wives praised by the Book of Proverbs in today’s first reading — prepare a “go bag” of necessary items for the hospital in mid-pregnancy in case the contractions come prematurely so that they’re ready to go to the hospital at a minute’s notice. St. Paul says we need to prepare in the same way for the contractions of death that lead us from the womb of the earth to the next dimension of life intended by God. Death can come when we least expect it. It could come for some or all of us as fast as today. This reality scares some people, because they fear they won’t be ready, much like students who don’t study regularly fear flunking a pop quiz. But St. Paul calls the Thessalonians and us not to be afraid by telling us what we need to do. “You, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness for that day to overtake you like a thief.” He exhorts us, “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.” He doesn’t want us to hide ourselves in darkness but live in the broad daylight. He wants us always to be alert, ready, even eager, so that we might go with joy to the Father’s house. The question for us is: How do we prepare? What do we have to have in our “go bag” so as not to be caught off-guard when the contractions for eternal life begin?
• In the Gospel, Jesus answers that question. He gives us a parable about how we are to be judged and how to get ready for it. In doing so, Jesus tells us so much more about who we are in God’s eyes, where we fit into His plans, and how we should live. The entire history of the world and the vocation of each of us is found in this short story.
• The Parable of the Talents is well-known. A rich man going on a journey calls in his servants and entrusts his possessions to them: to one he gave five talents, another two, and the third one. On the man’s return, the servant who had received five gave him ten back; the servant who received two likewise doubled it and gave him four back; but the servant who had received one buried the talent and just gave him back the one at the end. The first two receive the same reward with the exact same words. The Master says, “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.” The one who returned the buried talent, however, received a totally different response. The Master called him “wicked and slothful,” 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. Whole retreats can be preached on the elements of this parable, but we can ponder the biggest points.
• First, however, we must get an objection out of the way. Sometimes, in our egalitarian culture, we can object to the fact that the Master entrusted his possessions disparately, according to what he deemed each servant’s ability. It can seem that there was far greater risk to the servant who had received just one talent, since it appears that he had no margin of error compared to those who had received five or two. But we have to remember that the word “talent” Jesus uses 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. We see the difference in how the first two servants and the third responded to the trust of the master. Jesus says that those who had received the five talents ($3 million) and two ($1.2 million) “immediately went out” and started to make it grow. They both received a one-hundred percent return from their one-hundred percent effort and investment. The parable almost implies that all they had to do was try, because the conditions for investment were that favorable. The servant who had received the one talent, however, 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 him, even eventually blaming him for his own failure by accusing the master of being demanding, cruel, and even tyrannical. As a result he buried himself, all his potential, and even the master’s trust, along with the talent. God does indeed give to us “according to [our] ability,” but no matter what, each of us has been invested with much. God trusts us. And he wants us to develop his gifts. He desires that we grasp that we are his most valuable possessions and, in giving us his trust and his gifts, he wants us to develop ourselves as we develop those gifts. We might not be as smart as Saint Thomas Aquinas, or 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. And the greatest talents God has given us are spiritual: the gift of Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, our Confirmation, the ability to start anew each Confession, the gifts of Marriage or Holy Orders, the Word of God, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so many opportunities for charity, the Crosses with which he caresses us, the intercession of Mary, Joseph and the saints, our friendship with God and our ability to turn to God in prayer, the gift of the Church, and so much more. This is real “capital.” We’re called not to waste or bury these treasures, but to invest them, because each of them contains such potential that if we even try to invest them, the parable implies, we can’t lose.
• The crucial application that the Lord wants us to make in this month of November as we ponder the last things is to determine whether we have been like the first two servants or like the third. If Jesus were to come right now as a thief in the night and call us to account, would he praise us for having used the gifts he has given us to build up his kingdom, to make his world a more sacred and loving place, to spread his salvific joy to others, or would we recognize in his presence that we’ve really buried most of his gifts, especially the greatest spiritual ones? Have we responded to the unbelievable trust the Lord has shown us in his lavish blessings as a motivation to do good works to the glory of our heavenly Father (cf. Mt 5:16) or have we feared his judgment and done little or nothing? There are some Christians who, out of fear or a false sense of humility, bury their gifts “under a bushel basket” (Mt 5:15-16). They never take a risk of 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 vocation as salt, light and leaven, they succumb to the devil’s wiles and set their goal on simply not harming the world or leaving it like they found it. 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.
• I want to apply these lessons 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. 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?’”
• Pope Francis in his Message specifically thanks “the Lord that so many men and women are devoted to caring for the poor and the excluded” and describes them as “persons of every age and social status who show understanding and readiness to assist the marginalized and those who suffer.” He says about you and many of the others who have given their lives to care for the poor that “they are not superheroes but ‘next door neighbors,’ ordinary people who quietly make themselves poor among the poor. They do more than give alms: they listen, they engage, they try to understand and deal with difficult situations and their causes.” He says, “The Kingdom of God becomes present and visible in their generous and selfless service; like the seed that falls on good soil, it takes root in their lives and bears rich fruit (cf.Lk 8:4-15). On this World Day of the Poor, the whole Church thanks you, Sisters, for your leadership in the Church’s mission of charity.
• 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. Every Mass is a time to bring what we’ve earned and offer it, together with him, to the Father. Every Mass is a time in which we also ponder our omissions, of what we could have done, and ask for his forgiveness and help. Every 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. He gives us, here, every day our “go bag” so that we live, fully awake, as children of the light and of the day. This is the means by which, at the end of this life, when we meet our Eucharistic Lord face-to-face, he 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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