Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 15, 2020 – Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30

All those of you who are now working for a living, or have ever worked for a living, think about the highest annual salary you ever made. Now round that figure up to the nearest thousand. Got it? Now multiply by five. I’ll wait. Got the figure? That’s how much the guy of the five talents got in 2020 figures. It’s a boat load of money! Even the guy with the two talents, even the guy with the one talent, got an awful lot of money.

And, since the story says that the master was gone for a long time, that means this money was invested in something that would yield a long term benefit, at least a CD. Nowadays, maybe one-and-a-half percent on a CD. But, in the stock market, which is ironically booming right now, that would’ve brought an enormous return on the individual investment. I mean an incredible amount of money.

A talent in ancient Rome, and therefore ancient Israel, was equal to a certain weight in gold or silver. They would put rocks that were pre-weighed on one end of a balance, and put gold or silver on the other end until the scale equaled, and that was a talent.

When I was in grammar school, the sisters taught me that this parable was about using the skills and abilities that you were given for the greater glory of God. But they had it kind of upside down. The word talent has come into the English language first through Greek, then through Latin, then through middle European languages, to mean an ability. But the original meaning of the word was that it was a coin or a slug of silver or gold worth a certain value at a certain time. But the sisters at my grammar school were not wrong, because there are lots of other places in scripture where it is plain that God intends for us to use the natural abilities and the talents and the skills that we’ve learned, and invest them in life for our own survival and for the good of other people. In fact, that’s one reason why I decided to become a priest.

During high school I realized I was pretty good at a lot of stuff, but not really good at anything. So I decided the best way to use all these middle range skills was to put them all together and put them at the service of other people for the glory of God. So there’s a long tradition of doing that. But if you take the parable at its face value, then we have to talk about something else entirely.

You know every Sunday at Mass we recite the Nicene Creed. If you say the rosary, we recite the Apostles’ Creed. Those two creeds, set in stone by the end of the fourth century, are boilerplate Christianity. That’s the bottom line of what we believe. But there’s lots of other stuff that we believe as well. Well that we’re supposed to believe. But you and I know that you and I don’t always believe everything that the church teaches. We don’t like anybody to know that. As a matter of fact we were taught that we were not allowed to not believe. But according to fact that’s just a human experience. Sometimes our heads can’t wrap around something, no matter how we try. Or we’re resistant to accepting something because it’s too great a challenge for our world view? And we just sort of hope that when we get to see Jesus, that Jesus will forgive us our inability to wrap our minds around certain things.

But let’s look at it from a different point of view. If all of you are here this cold morning, in the midst of a pandemic, after a fairly long life filled with crises of various sorts and filled with the disillusionment that comes from living the life of the church, the reason that you’re here this morning is that something about Catholicism holds you more strongly than any of the things that you have difficulty with in our faith. Something holds you. You’d like to think this is one of the bedrock doctrines of the church, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s your devotion to some saint. Maybe it is some Catholic that you knew growing up, whom you still have a great deal of fondness and admiration for, who led you into the faith. It could be any one of a number of things, but there’s something that holds you here this morning. And if you’re very young, you haven’t lived a long life, and haven’t been disillusioned yet, then the reason why you’re here this morning is because somebody else who loves you very much had that experience of something holding him or her to their faith in bringing them back all the time. That is the talent that Jesus is referring to in today’s gospel.

That is the thing that you are not only to treasure, but also to invest. To invest in the lives of the people you live with, and work with, and love. To invest in them that great talent, whatever it is, for the greater glory of God.