Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A – November 16, 2014

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A – November 16, 2014

In this Sunday’s Gospel, the well-known Gospel of the master, the servants and their talents (Matt 25:14-30), Jesus takes an example from the business world to show how we should live and be responsible with God’s gifts. Jesus often took examples from nature or the farming world of 1st century Galilee but as in today’s Gospel he takes an example from the commercial and business world.

Anyone interested in making it in the business world knows the truth of this parable. Money that is not risked, invested, ventured in the open market, eventually diminishes. It’s a tough rule of capitalism. Not to risk and invest the money is, in fact, to lose it.

Look at the big investors in the last 100 years like Rockefeller, then Bill Gates and Richard Branson in our own time. This is the one common element, they were people who were willing to risk. They were told by most at the beginning of their careers that they were crazy, to be careful, don’t risk so much.
How much do these first two stewards risk? Everything. The one who is given five and two talents invest it all. So it is with the great entrepreneurs of modern times.
Listen how Jesus closes this parable, “For to whoever has more will be given, …..but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken away”. That’s a hard-nosed economic principle. The one who risks and invests tends to get rich, the one who clings to what he has, will lose even the little he has.
Here is the spiritual principal based on this parable, the Spirit grows in you precisely in the measure that you give it away. The Spirit grows in you precisely in the measure that you invest it in love, it grows. The one thing you cannot do with the Spirit of God, is to cling to it as your possession because when you do that, it slips out of your hands.

In Christ crucified we see the life of God given away in Love, invested in us. Jesus died for us. He was invested with the fullness of the Divine Life.
That was Satan’s temptation in the desert at the beginning of this same Gospel of Matthew, he tried to get Jesus to use this power for himself, but instead he used it and gave himself away for others. In that great act, Jesus gives life to the whole world. You can see this at work in the lives of all the saints. So we when invest ourselves in the lives of others.