30 August 2025 – Saturday of the 21st week of Ordinary Time
1 Thessalonians 4:9-11; Matthew 25:14-30
Homily
For anyone with a little experience of the money market or who is sensitive to social justice, this Gospel may be problematic. But this parable is not about economics or social justice; nor is it concerned with the talents we have received and must put to work. This parable, like all other parables, speaks to us first and foremost about God. It teaches us something about God's generosity, which always rewards us in a way that is totally disproportionate to what we contribute.
This text is part of Jesus' great eschatological discourse in Matthew. To understand it, we must remember that the Jews had a concept of ‘time’ that was totally different from ours. Ours is quantitative; theirs was qualitative. We see time as the progression of moments on a continuous line, with a long series of those moments behind us and a long series ahead of us. And we think that one of those 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 Jew of antiquity 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 by these fixed points. Their ancestors had passed through before them, and their descendants would pass through after them. When an individual arrived at a fixed point, such as the Passover festival or a time of famine, they became contemporaries of all those who had passed through the same qualitative time before them, and also contemporaries of all those who would pass through after them. The nature of the present time is 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 Jesus' eschatological texts, we should 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 announces 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 most Christians have of God. In reality, Jesus does not present a new image of God. He announces 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 what we may have done. Any act of faithful service is enough to bring someone into the joy of their master, whether it be having made ten, five or two talents fruitful. The only person who does not receive this gift is the one who has closed themselves off to this generosity through fear and lack of trust.
Armand Veilleux