31 August 2024 - Saturday of the 21st even-numbered week
1 Cor 1, 26-31; Matt 25, 14-30
Homily
For anyone who has any experience of the money market or who is at all aware of social justice, this Gospel can be problematic. But this parable is not about economics or social justice; nor is it concerned with the talents we have received and must produce. This parable, like all the other parables, is above all about God. It teaches us something about the generosity of God, who always rewards us in a way that is totally disproportionate to what we bring.
This text is part of Jesus' great eschatological discourse in Matthew. To understand it, we need to remember that the Jews had a very different concept of ‘time’ from our own. Ours is quantitative; theirs was qualitative. We see time as the progression of moments on a continuous line, with a long series of these moments behind us and a long series in front of us. And we think that one of these moments will be the last. That will be the end of time and the end of history. This way of conceiving time would have been completely incomprehensible to a Jew of Jesus' time. The ancient Jew did not situate himself somewhere in a specific moment in time. On the contrary, he situated events, places and time as fixed points, and saw himself as a pilgrim passing along these fixed points. His ancestors had passed there before him and his descendants would pass there after him. When an individual arrived at a fixed point, for example the feast of the Passover, or a time of famine, he became contemporary with all those who had passed through the same qualitative time, and also contemporary with all those who would pass through it after him. The nature of the present time was determined either by a saving act of God in the past (e.g. the Exodus) or by a saving act of God in the future.
So when we read the eschatological texts of Jesus, we must not regard them as texts that announce events in future history. They are texts that speak of God. When Jesus announces the imminence of God's final and definitive reign, he is announcing that God himself has changed and that this can be seen in the signs of the times.
The God of Jesus is radically different from the image of God in the Old Testament and also from the image that the majority of Christians today have of God. In reality, Jesus is not presenting a new image of God. He is announcing that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will do something totally new. God himself will be moved by compassion and will express his mercy and love in a way that is totally disproportionate to anything we may have done. Any act of faithful service is enough to bring someone into the joy of his Master, whether it's bringing in ten, five or two talents. The only person who does not receive this gift is the one who has closed himself off to this generosity through fear and lack of trust.