NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 33 in Ordinary Time Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today we have the second of Matthew's three final parables concerning how to live in the apocalyptic time, in the time in between the Lord's death and his coming. This time in which all the forms of order and the structure of the world will have shifted, nothing will be clear, and how we train our imaginations is to be enormously important. Remember, last week was with the bridesmaids — it was the training of vision, able to see the bridegroom coming. In this time it's going to be about growth, the possibility of growing and becoming in the time of the bridegroom's absence. Let's start to look at this. I want to say, starting off, that I find this actually one of the most painful of the parables to deal with — painful personally — merely because I've spent so much of my life thinking of myself as being a person who'd been dealt a bad set of cards, had been given by a master who I knew harvested where he had not sown and reaped where he had not scattered. In other words, that sense, that absolute sense of lostness in a world in which I've been given an impossible task and no backup, is very, very familiar to me. And this parable is a real challenge to me. Let's see if I can talk it through with you. First, the man goes off on a journey, summons his slaves, and entrusts his property to them. So please notice that the going off on the journey and the summoning his slaves and giving his property to them is part of the package. Jesus is clearly preparing the disciples: "My going off is actually so as to enable you to become a part of this process. You are now going to be doing something for me and because of me in my absence." That's what the shape of this is about. And the question is, what is it that he's proposing? I want to suggest to you that what he's proposing is a partnership. This is something which is rather odd for us moderns, because we're used to financial deals without necessarily notions of partnership. But my New Testament scholar friend Duncan Derrett, in his book, explains very exactly the kind of financial relationships that were common in the ancient Middle East, and which one of them this is. This is something like a partnership in which the person going away says: "Here is a large sum of money. I want you to be me in my absence. I want you to act as if you were me. I'm not asking you to check back in with base and see how it's doing. I'm not asking you to ask for instructions. I want you to take this and be me. You are my agent in the full sense of that term, free to work out how you're to do these things. But in as far as you're doing it, it will be me who is doing it, because it's my funds, and I will expect you to eventually show exactly what you have made of me in my absence. This is the notion of partnership, the notion of something shared. It's interesting that depending on our own mind frame, do we think of him as giving people difficult tasks, or do we think of him actually inviting them into something that is going to be rather fun, rather exciting, and that's a privilege. It's a privilege to be the agent of this person, to have been partnered by him in doing this. And we then notice that he is not a cruel and unthinking person, because in fact he's aware that different people have different possibilities, and so gives them different forms of partnership: one with five, one with two, one with one. And this is not because he's looking down on one and having another as a favorite. It's just there's no point in burdening people with more than they can go with. On the other hand, they will be the partnership — they will be the partner — starting from what they are. This is a benevolent discrimination, if you like. It's actually preparing the person to be who they are, starting from who they are. And just think how easy it is to think, "Oh, the one who's getting one was being hard done by." According to that, that tells you how you think of the imagination of the master, and this parable is all about the imagination of the master. So the one who had the five talents went away. He clearly enjoyed being the agent, a free person to make as much of it as he could, and he did exactly what was required: he made a hundred percent. And in case you think, "Wow, 100% — that's an amazing turnaround!" — under ancient Middle Eastern law, even in the Code of Hammurabi, 100% is exactly what was required. That was the minimum normal profit for dealings of this sort. That was what you would expect. In other words, the one who has five and makes five more — it's not that he's exceeded all expectation; he's done exactly what's expected. It looks bigger because he started with bigger, but the fact is it's 100%. It's 100%. It's exactly the same for the one with two. It's 100%. He has done exactly what was required, and has clearly found his way into becoming exactly who he's supposed to be. And at the end he would be able to say — if he were in St. Luke's Gospel, which he isn't, because he's in St. Matthew's — he'll be able to say, "I am an unprofitable servant," meaning, "I've done exactly the minimum, which is 100%, so that's exactly what could be expected. I could have been asked for no more and I could have been asked for no less. This is who I am." And in both cases the person has become exactly who they're supposed to be, and the master is absolutely delighted: "Welcome into the joy of your master." That was the whole point of setting up in this so that you would become exactly who you're supposed to be. That's what the feast — the words in Aramaic, joy and feast, are the same apparently — "welcome into the joy, the feast of your master." This was why I set up a partnership with you: because I wanted to delight in you being exactly who you became to be. Well then, we come to our third servant, the difficult one, the one who is emotionally difficult for any of us. So first of all, let's look at one talent. Because we think, well, five was a lot, two is less, one is not very much. If we think in invidious terms we think, oh poor fellow, he had a bad start, didn't he? It's a bit unfair to blame him, he had a bad start. But that's not the point at all. The point is this was the person's capacity. And let's remember, one talent was, depending on the exact period, between 26 and 36 kilos of gold. So let's say at an average 30 kilos of gold. Just at today's price, 30 kilos of gold is 1.8 million dollars. So let's say that the point of the parable is not that this fellow was given very little — this fellow was given an astounding amount. As it were, you know, "here you are, here, take a million eight hundred thousand and see what you can make of it." He was given an astounding amount, but it was an astounding amount that the master was convinced that he would be able to handle, that he would become who he's supposed to be with this particular gift, with this particular project. It's very interesting. The servant goes and buries the money in the ground. Now, in a time of war, fear, turbulence, this is what people would do. You get frightened of other sorts of investments, other kinds of ways of making yourself rich or keeping yourself secure — you bury something in the ground. There weren't banks with big safes as we have nowadays, so the way to do it was to bury in the ground, and then there was a chance that even if your village was sacked and your people were raped and killed, you would still be able to have access to your gold when it was all over. In other words, it was a frightened way of coping with frightening times. Notably, the others were also in frightening times; their way of daring to come into being in the midst of the frightening times didn't react in the same way. So the servant, when he's asked by the master what he's done, he comes forward. And it's certainly — I had assumed that this was a sort of subservient way of talking, but apparently not. Apparently the way in which the third servant speaks is actually quite proud, it's quite disdainful: "you only gave me very little, and frankly I don't think what you do as a master — you're not a particularly kind person — so I knew it would be a bit of a trap really, you were setting me up, because I knew that basically you want something out of nothing. So well, I decided not to enter into the partnership with you, so take what's yours." And the phrase he uses basically means, "I will have no part in this partnership. I have no part in this deal. It's up to you. It's yours. I wash my hands of this." That's the sense of this. In other words, the guy knows what he's saying. He's not being a sort of super-confident person; he's actually being really quite proud, saying, "No, no, I decided I didn't want the partnership." And the master challenges his imagination, saying, "Okay, so you imagine me as the sort of person who wrings things out of nothing, who sows, who reaps where I have not sown," and so on and so forth, "who's put you into an impossible position. Well, and you didn't want a partnership with me. Okay, I understand you're not wanting a partnership with me. Well, how about then simply having put your talents into the use of some non-partnership bodies? It's not sharing anything with my project, but it's simply a useful way of making things grow." I mean, that's what a bank is. Bankers are people who are not interested in partnership, in making people flourish; they're simply interested in transactions to keep things going. Even they would have brought something out of this. In other words, if not a partnership, at least something transactional. But that was obviously beyond the thinking of the servant. So he's cast out and is referred to as achreon – unprofitable. Exactly the same word as appears in Luke's Gospel about the unprofitable servant, but here obviously in someone who didn't even want to enter into profit. So what's going on here? I think that the notion of the kind of partnership that we're invited into is being opened up. Our first reading, which is the reading about the fruitful wife – if we stop and think about it not, if you like, as a somewhat patronizing attitude towards women, but rather as an expression of what a fruitful partner looks like – I think that that's bringing us actually very close to the attitude of the master going away, saying, "I want a fruitful partnership with you. I'm actually setting you up to be partners. I want to see you flourish. This is what your flourishing will look like. See how much you can dare, see what you can take, get away with, run away with, see how much you can make out of this." That's the kind of thing. "I want you to understand that I'm actually with you. Things that look impossible aren't. Things that look difficult aren't." And that has been for me the really tough thing to learn. I assumed as a gay man that I was out of being useful. I had no family base, no Church base, and no commercial base. It seemed quite literally as though I was being asked to come up with something out of nothing. And yet it has been my joy and my discovery that I'm called to be a partner Here is the corrected text: And that it's the partnership that is the flourishing.