33rd Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005 

Today’s gospel is one of a series of passages that address the general issue of preparing for our step into the adventure of eternal life.  Today’s Gospel deals particularly with how we sense God; and our behaviour in the light of that.

One approach is spelt out clearly by the servant given only the one talent: he feared his master.  I had heard that you were a hard man... so I was afraid.  That fear compelled him to “play it safe”; it paralysed his creativity.  The outcome of that attitude is plain: he missed out.  Take the talent from him and give it to the man who has five talents.

The other two took risks.  The story does not explicitly make clear their sense of their master; but it was certainly not fear.  Their behaviour shows obviously enough that they saw him as a man interested in more, in growth, generous, ready to trust, prepared to face the possibility of failure.  The outcome: Come and join in your master’s happiness.

How does it all relate to us as we live now, with one eye on eternity?  Let’s check out our sense of God: when all is said and done, is our God a hard, inflexible God, obsessed with our toeing the line, our playing it safe, absorbed with commandments - a dangerous God?  Or is our God a God who trusts us, gives us freedom, risks our making mistakes, wants us in his company - a God who loves us and is not afraid of life?

Let’s check out, too, our approach to morality.  Have we allowed ourselves to grow to a mature level of moral development?  Is our primary concern to become persons who love and reach out in compassion, and are big enough to forgive?  Do we seek to get in touch with, and surrender to, our thirst for God, not obsessed with control - always wondering how we are going - but able to die to the protective self?  Are we confident to think responsibly for ourselves and to refine our consciences, living, as we do, in the midst of a complex world of sometimes conflicting duties?  Or, do we feel ourselves overburdened with commandments, obsessed particularly by the negative ones: don’t do this! don’t do that!  too fearful to prioritise Jesus’ positive direction to love God, self and others (perhaps because it is not clear enough when compared with precise prohibitions), always needing someone to tell us what to do, scared to explore, develop and follow our own conscience and to stand on our own two feet?

In contrast to Matthew’s Pharisees and their preoccupations with minute regulations, is it the weightier matters of the Torah that attract us?  As Jesus listed them in a recent Gospel: .. justice and mercy and faith?

In the story, the servant given the one talent didn’t do anything wrong, except to misread the heart of the his master, and (for the sake of the flow of the story and to make its moral clear) to compel his master, as it were, to act in line with his misreading.  It was really a fateful mistake.  Take the talent from him ... throw him out into the dark!  In real life, the consequences of our choices are not so much rewarded or punished by God (that is the child’s-eye view), but they do have their own intrinsic logic: to live fearfully is to live a diminished life; to live trustfully and lovingly is to find life to the full.

We move now into Eucharist.  We seek to align our hearts and minds with the heart and mind of Jesus as, on the cross, he committed his life trustingly to God.  We allow his Spirit to draw us deeper... putting us in touch with our inmost self, and to live and to love from there in freedom.  Perhaps we live in more dangerous times... but we refuse to focus obsessively on self-preservation.  Rather we peacefully face our world, resolved to shape it ever more in line with Jesus’ values of justice and mercy and faith.