Homily for Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
That first reading expresses in poetic terms the happy condition of the man who has found a perfect wife. I would appeal to those of you to whom this applies to keep the good news to yourselves. A scarce commodity is much sought after! And what is the point of you making the rest of us miserable with stories of your good fortune. I speak entirely from the male perspective (I had hoped it wouldn't have been necessary to stress that!), but I speak entirely from a male perspective: there is nothing on this earth so irritating as listening to another fellow harp on about his good fortune in romance and love! So, without further ado, we will look at the gospel of the day, the parable of the wasted talents.
The primary meaning of today's parable is that every character has got a talent. The talents may well have been unevenly distributed; but that is not the point; the point is that everyone has something to work on. The fellow who ran off and buried the one talent he received is a familiar character enough. Bouts of false humility save him a lot of toil and trouble. Better bury the talent than expose it to the critical and comparative gaze of others. Better deny the talent exists at all than to follow the road it may take me. The problem that is pointed out today is fear; a fear of losing what we have and thus refusing to live. This is not a story about how to be prudent, how to be careful, how to make sure we don't lose anything. Instead, the point of the story is to use all that we have for love of God and love of others.
This actually is the central point of the parable: the attitude of the negligent servant. It wasn't that he was lazy, wasteful, or over extravagant. On the contrary, having received the talent, he buried it, hid it and hoarded it, not for himself but for his master. His problem was that he was over-cautious. And fear is at the root of this caution: "Master, I heard you were a hard man, reaping......I was afraid. So I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is. It is yours." Fear was his problem. Fear and the fact that he did not know his master. This servant regarded God as harsh, hard, severe, in short a tyrant. Jesus wants to show that obedience to such a caricature of God is doomed from the beginning: people will respond legalistically to such an image. The rule book comes into play early in this game. Jesus had in mind the type of pious Jew who sought personal security in a meticulous observation of the law. This is the piety that separates us from God.
This sort of pious caution has bedevilled all of the great religions, paralysing its people with a fear-filled spirituality. In our own Augustinian tradition, a great controlling cant was: 'What will the people think?' Any suggestion that things might be done differently or viewed differently was greeted with this controlling mantra. "What will the people think? That will disturb the people." In truth, what the speaker was actually saying is "That will disturb me, or that will make excessive demands on me." So much talent was buried on the false and spurious assumption that the people would be disturbed by it.
If you look closely at Catholic morality in operation here up to relatively recent times, you will see that is was culturally conditioned. It had much more in common with Victorian respectability than with any inherent Christian conviction. The fact that both worlds might occasionally overlap was merely coincidental. The whole goal of morality seemed to have been respectability. It had its primary motivation in what the neighbours thought, rather than in what the individual was convinced of. In that sort of environment, fear will always hover closely like a low cloud. Christian morality is the ongoing project whereby we strive to integrate the gospel into the very way we see, judge and act in our own lives. Ideally, this ongoing project will mature into a rock-solid inner conviction, a conviction that informs everything we say and do. Respectability, on the other hand, is a social construct. Society polices individual behaviour. When society changes rapidly, the social police are recalled to barracks. Individualism, and in some cases, the individual too, runs amok. That seems to be the experience we are now living through. We bemoan the fact that morals have collapsed. But they were never there in the first place. We confused morality with social control. When our religion becomes primarily an agent of social control, the dynamic, energetic God of the scriptures is reduced to a crusty old social policeman in the skies. Now you may well say with some validity that it is better to have a crusty old policeman than no policeman! Of course you are right. But don't mistake him for the Christian God.
Authentic Christian spirituality, sourced in scripture and directed towards the neighbour, must be internalised if we are to mature as Christians. Traditional Catholicism was probably too inward-looking and obsessed with personal salvation. It would endorse the image of God expressed by the wasteful servant: Master, you are a hard man. You reap where you have not sown and you gather where you have not scattered. The God revealed in the attractive, vivacious personality Jesus was very, very different. He is the one who encourages us to use our talents joyfully and generously, and scorns those who would bury them out of a sense of fear.