As we approach the final weeks of the Church year, we read the last parable Jesus taught. It’s not only the final parable, but it is also one of the longest and most detailed. In it, Jesus tells the story of a wealthy man who gave each of his servants a substantial sum of money to take care of in his absence. When he returns, he is pleased at the two servants who have doubled his investment, but he is angry at the one who simply hid the money out of fear of losing it.
We can interpret this story on a purely financial level, talking about the need to shrewdly use our money, but the parable goes deeper than that. It also addresses the wise stewardship of the gifts and talents God has given us.
Clearly Jesus is telling us that we must put our abilities at the service of the Master, God our Father. But before we can do that, we have to discern what our gifts are. We all have been given special abilities by God. It’s up to us to figure out what those abilities are and how we can best put them into practice so that at the end of our lives we will hear the words of the Master telling us, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
This first reading picks up where our Gospel last week left off. Then, we saw the Groom entering into the eschatological wedding feast; that is, the eternal marriage between God and his creatures in heaven. This reading from Proverbs on the virtues of a “worthy wife” can be read in a very straightforward, literal fashion, as a description of the ideal spouse. But it can also be read as a description of the Bride of Christ, the Church at her best. This makes for an especially cogent reading when our first reading is read in the light of the parable of the talents in our Gospel this week. The worthy wife is one who uses what comes to hand to enrich the family and yet has enough left over to see to the needs of the poor. Read in this way, we get perhaps a clearer picture of what it means for the Church to render a return of double to her Groom in this passage from Proverbs than we do in our Gospel.
This passage indicates to the Thessalonians the need for vigilance in regard to Christ’s coming again. It indicates the same to us, but it also indicates to us the coming end of the liturgical year. We always read these sorts of passages as we come close to the season of Advent—the end of the old, and the advent of the new year.
There’s often a tension in these eschatological passages between knowing and not knowing the time of his coming. Those who live in the dark can’t see the signs of his coming. Those who live in the day or in the light have some idea, but still don’t know the exact time of his coming. The Lord’s coming is the day—it’s a determined time—and to recognize it for what it is, we must live in the day. Our liturgical recollection of his Second Coming each year is one of the ways we do that. The light we receive from the Scriptures proclaimed in the liturgy is a way of accustoming our eyes to the light of the day of the Lord.
Viewed as an expression of the workings of grace, we can distinguish two levels in the parable that Jesus tells. The initial sums of money given to the servants could be actual grace—that grace given to all, Christian or not, to encourage good actions. God rains these graces down on us incessantly. However, he doesn’t expect us to simply behave well. Even under the influence of actual grace, our works won’t win us salvation. It’s only when actual grace leads us to sanctifying grace, the grace we receive in the sacraments, that we can be said to be living in a state of grace. That’s so because the grace of the sacraments unites us to Christ, who also opens the gates of heaven to us and makes us capable of living there. We must invest the actual graces he gives. It isn’t enough to simply return them in the amount we received. His actual grace should prompt us to also receive the sacraments as acts of perfect worship and transformation. Having received the sacraments, having invested his actual grace there, we receive a tremendous return in the reception of sanctifying grace. That sacramental grace moves us in turn to real, supernatural repentance and charity.
Reprinted from Opening the Word at Formed.org .
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