33rd Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2017

Many long years ago I used to be chaplain at St Patrick’s College, Ballarat. I am pretty sure that, on some occasion during my time there, I would have used today’s parable to urge the boys to recognize their talents, whatever they were, and to use them. Today, while I think that the message had some merit, I believe it was not what today’s parable is about. For one thing, in Jesus’ day, the word talent did not mean, even figuratively, a person’s particular capacity. It indicated a certain large weight of money – nothing else. So, if not about talents as we understand them today, what is it about?

As in many good stories, and certainly in any good joke [though this is not a joke], the sting lies in the tail. The focus is on the interaction between servant number three and the master. The earlier detail serves only to create context and to build up interest. Servant number three did nothing, and explained that his reason was because he was “afraid”. Perhaps Jesus’ point was to highlight the dangers of fear. Fear can paralyse people. Jesus was right at the end of his public life and soon to be executed. He wanted his Church to continue his project, “Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature…” They would encounter problems, unimaginable problems. Jesus was insistent. Do not be afraid. Their biggest problem would be their own fear.

Fear causes us to withdraw. It concentrates our attention on our selves, our security. It freezes our readiness to take risks, to face the unknown and have a go, trusting in God. It puts us in defence mode. Instead of engaging with our world and cooperating with God’s Spirit in transforming it from within, we tend to attack our world, to criticize modern culture. We fail to look there for the presence and action of God, to engage with it and encourage people. Fear tempts us to conserve, to obsess about certainties. “I was afraid so I went off and dug a hole and buried the life you share with me in order to keep it safe!”

I want to make another point. As we listen to Jesus’ story, we can fall into another trap. We usually try to make too much sense of every detail of Jesus’ parables – too much “holy” sense! We can read today’s story as though Jesus intended the master of the servants to illustrate the mind and the behavior of God – and we get into all sorts of strife when we do. We get a God who sounds like an enthusiastic proponent of rampant capitalism, more worryingly one who throws the frightened servant “out into the dark where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth”, as well as one who proudly admits, “I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered”.

There is no violence in God. Jesus was not telling us about God in this parable – though he does in some others. We need to learn to turn off our over-pious, but deeply embedded, filters and be smart enough to distinguish. Because we don’t always do this, we can get some terrible images of God. We can finish up frightened, not only of the world we are sent out to engage with and to enliven, but frightened of God! By all means, let us be circumspect – but not frightened of God. True spiritual growth takes us beyond fear. Far too much religion is a somewhat frantic effort to control this unpredictable, potentially violent, God. The outcome is hardly joyful, hardly life to the full.

We would do much better, not by trying to manipulate and to get God on our side by being good, or whatever, but by taking the risk to get to really know God, to let God love us with all our imperfection, to trust God in whatever might happen to us and, perhaps, eventually to fall in love with the God who already loves us.