Parable of the Talents October 17, 2021
by Sister Rebecca
Holy Wisdom Church
In this Gospel we have the well-known
Parable of the Talents. Jesus said that the Kingdom of heaven is like a man who
goes on a trip and entrusts his goods to three of his employees. The first two immediately go to work. When the owner returns, they bring him the
results: each one has doubled the talents he was given. Their work is generously
rewarded because they were responsive to the master’s expectations.
The third employee does something
very strange. The only thing that occurs
to him is to bury the talent he was given and keep it safe until the master
returns. The master condemns him as
wicked and lazy, and he casts him out of his household. This servant was motivated by fear, and it
was this fear that had become the controlling power and influence in his
life. “What happens if I invest money
and lose it all? I know the master is a hard man; what would he do to me then?”
Part of what is confusing in this
parable, and others like it, is that it was not unusual for Jesus to use
persons of less than admirable qualities to provide lessons in his parables. We
can easily miss the point by turning the parable into an allegory in which this
master would represent God, leading us to think of God as some sort of harsh,
severe, and arbitrary character who uses fear as a motivation.
This servant who buries the talent
given to him can’t think straight because his heart has been full of fear. He acts out of fear. He wants to play it
safe. We can do the strangest things
when we are afraid—right? A heart of
love, on the other hand, has an enlivening effect on the mind. Acting out of
fear is the opposite of faith. Faith
involves risk. To live in faith is to
live with fear yet not be overcome by it.
This fearful servant doesn’t love
the master; he is afraid of him. “I was afraid,
and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” He has no clue about his
responsibility. He doesn’t understand
what active, creative faithfulness involves.
He is not engaged. For many
today, Christianity seems to have reached a point where the main goal is to
conserve, not to courageously seek out new ways to face and accept life’s
challenges and proclaim Christ’s burning desire for the reign of God. Now, more
than ever, in our times we need to listen carefully to this parable.
We need to ask ourselves if our religion
is seen as a system of beliefs and practices that protect us from God and from what
God urges us to do: that is, to live creatively. Status quo religion leads to sad, sterile,
joyless lives devoted to safeguarding or protecting the institution rather than
risk to love into action.
The inner motivation of third servant
is like this: “Here is your gospel, your project of the reign of God. We have kept it safe. We haven’t used it to transform our life or
introduce your reign to the world. We
didn’t want to take chances. So here it
is undamaged.”
The message is clear. We cannot hand our life back to God and say:
“Here, you have what is yours. I didn’t use it for anything that makes me
afraid.” It is a mistake to live a
religiously, morally correct life without taking the risk to move out of ourselves,
out of our comfort zone, away from predictability, to connect with persons who
might not respect us, who may treat us unkindly. Jesus urges us to love others courageously,
audaciously, and creatively.
When we mostly care about saving
our life in any given area, protecting and defending it, we lose it. If we are so afraid of failure that we don’t
follow the aspirations of our heart, we have already failed. The Spirit of God speaks to us in very subtle
ways, like nudges, to allow us to freely choose. The first reading from Sirach says: “that God
in creating us, left us in the power of our inclinations and to act faithfully
is a matter of our own choice.” If we fail to listen, if we don’t take the initiative
in areas that seem foreign to us and to our temperament, or if we are afraid we
are wrong, then we are already wrong.
This is tantamount to burying our very lives.
Jesus’ life and words invite us to
live with a certain intensity and the courage to make the Gospel real. We need to stoke the fires of our creative
imagination, listen to the Spirit, and invent Christian love for today.
The greatest mistake of the third
servant in the parable is not that he buried his talent. Rather, he surrendered
his God-given inner power to fear. He mindlessly assumed that he was responding
faithfully to God by keeping his talent safe from risks. Fidelity to God does not consist in leaving
things in a state of status quo…unchanged.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves this question: Do we harbor an attitude that
masks habits of passivity, fear of conflict, paralysis, comfort seeking? And at
bottom: a lack of trust in the creativity of the Spirit of Christ?
When
we act out of faith, we give up the need to control the outcome. It is not what
we choose that matters so much, but why we choose or do not choose. When we operate from faith and not fear, then
the Spirit of God, the Energy of Heaven, flows through us. This is the
spiritual challenge before us.
A word from Mary Oliver may stoke
the embers in our heart: “Let us risk the wildest places, lest we go down in
comfort, and despair.”
