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Dear Parish Family,
The parable from Matt 25:14-30 tells the story of the rich man who gives talents to three of his servants and then sets out on a journey. Upon his return, he assesses the situation and discovers that the servant to whom he had given five talents had invested them fruitfully and that the servant to whom he had given three talents had done the same. But he finds, to his chagrin, that the servant to whom he had entrusted one talent had simply buried the wealth and had garnered neither gain nor interest. Angered, he orders that the one talent be taken from the timid servant and given to the servant who had invested most boldly. And then comes the devastating moral lesson: “For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
The standard reading of this story (in thousands of sermons) is that the talents symbolize gifts and abilities that God has given to us and that he expects us to “spend” generously or “invest” wisely. This interpretation is supported by the fairly accidental relationship that obtains between “talent” in the ancient Biblical sense of the term and “talent” in ordinary English today. But a talent in ancient times was a measure of something particularly weighty, usually silver or gold. A single talent might represent as much as 50 pounds of precious metal and, as such, was not something that one carried around in one’s pocket.
Clearly then the master is entrusting the servants with a huge sum of money. The servants are receiving something that is gigantic in their times. What God gives us is equally colossal and priceless. We have received so much from God that we take for granted. Because the sum is so huge Pope Benedict XVI says the talents refers not just to our natural abilities and qualities but are the riches Jesus gives us. Pope Benedict lists these talents or riches as the Word of God, Baptism, prayer, forgiveness, the Eucharist, the Kingdom which is God himself present and alive in our midst. The third servant buried his treasure because he had a wrong attitude to God; he described God as a hard taskmaster. You would think, listening to his description of God that God was like Pharaoh commanding bricks to be made with no straw. He did not have a relationship with God; in the parable we read that he even was afraid of God. Pope Benedict says this happens when after receiving Baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation people subsequently bury these gifts beneath a blanket of prejudice, beneath a false image of God that paralyzes.
All the while ‘the talent’ is a share in the mercy of God, a participation in the divine love. But since mercy is always directed to the other, these “talents” are designed to be shared. In point of fact, they will increase precisely in the measure that they are given away or shared just as our experience of love. Fear and prejudice close our heart to fellow human beings as well as God. There is a wonderful song with the tile, “On the other side of love is fear.” It is an invitation to cross over from Fear to Love and experience God’s bounty and abundance.Fr. Tom Kunnel