Today’s readings: Proverbs 31, 10-13. 19-20. 30-31; 1 Thessalonians 5, 1-6; Matthew 25, 14-30.
In the second reading from 1Thessalonians, St Paul is addressing a people whose false expectations of an imminent coming of the Lord led to passivity. Though he was writing before the gospels themselves were composed, he was well aware of the hype being built between those intent on an imminent catastrophe and those banking on expectations that were misleading. He seeks to be realistic and brings to the attention of those who believed in Christ that they were to behave as “sons of light and sons of the day”.
True faith makes of people realists, not daydreamers. It is an interior force, an intense awareness of life’s perils and tribulations so that nothing takes us unawares. The theme of the Lord’s coming “like a thief in the night” is commonplace in the Scriptures. Yet the Scriptures keep us alert so that nothing that happens in real life, both around us and within us, takes us by surprise, making us lose equilibrium.
Very often we hear and read of landslides that are catastrophic for entire villages and fatal for so many. We always think of the worst as happening suddenly without any notice. But, to keep the metaphor of landslides applied to everyday life, it often emerges that much of what happens suddenly has a history that can be traced back to negligence, to abuse of the environment, to lack of care in geological terms.
Many times we learn that much of what happens suddenly and causes havoc and pain, can be avoided and much pain can be spared. It is in this sense that faith can provide that internal stability that makes us strong enough to endure all that we go through. Faith makes people resilient. But resilience demands that we be resourceful people.
Attentiveness is important but it needs to be coupled with being industrious. This is what is highlighted in St Matthew’s parable. The fact that we are all accountable to the Lord is the authentic attitude underlying the entire gospel. Three men are protagonists in the parable, the third of whom was ‘falsely attentive’. His attentiveness was inspired by fear, even by a false sense of giving his master his due.
In their interpretation of this parable, the Church Fathers see the talents in question not as personal gifts of talented people, but as standing mainly for God’s own word in our lives. In this sense, today’s parable can be a very powerful metaphor of what we are all experiencing in the Church at this point in time.
The faith we have received from the past can only be a living faith if passed on in a manner that responds meaningfully to the needs and demands of people today. Seeking to conserve faith as a deposit to be simply safeguarded and passed on without the much needed deepening of insight and understanding, is suicidal for Christianity.
The community of believers is called upon at all times to interpret, develop, adapt and pass on meaningfully what it has received. In this sense there is a basic equality in the Church that makes us all learners and teachers at the same time. This has always been a basic truth for centuries in the first millennium. But unfortunately, the more the Church highlighted its institutional aspect and focussed on the power received from above and monopolised by those who hold office, the less we were in a position to grasp the richness of what Christ gave origin to.
Conservatism is not just the opposite of being progressive, it is the recipe that makes of religion something backward looking, the dead faith of the living. The parable speaks loud about those who risk and those who do not. Those who do not risk are normally guided by fear. But the Church cannot be hijacked by fear.
Ignoring the new times and the new demands of those who today are still seeking the living God, even if outside the parameters we have set from times eternal, is in itself the betrayal of what was handed down to us and the failure to make justice with the authenticity that, in spite of everything, guides so many today in their efforts to be accountable to the spirit that still lives in them.