There’s an idea about God that we are all used to, which is that God loves and embraces us just as we are. There are plenty of scripture readings that tell us that, from the Prodigal Son to all those meals Jesus ate with sinners, they tell us there is nothing we need to do on this earth to merit God’s love, we have it without asking for it or earning it. And we should believe it, because it tells us that we have a relationship with God that can’t be broken, no matter how many times we fail in our end of that relationship.
But there are a few Sundays here at the end of this church year where we are asked to picture our relationship with God a little differently. And after hearing these stories we might feel like it’s not so clear that things are totally OK with God no matter what we do. Because they are readings that suggest that all of us have work to do, and we need to find a way to do it. Last week, you might remember the gospel was the one about the foolish bridesmaids, who had one job, having oil on hand to greet the bridegroom, and didn’t do it, and were left outside the wedding feast what looked like permanently. Next week, we’ll hear about the last judgment, and it turns out there are some questions asked there about what we have done that aren’t questions we will always be ready for. And today, we hear the parable of the talents, people like us, three middle managers, with sums of money given them to invest, and at the end there’s quite literally an accounting, and one player who doesn’t even try to play the game doesn’t just lose, but loses everything.
What does this gospel story of the three servants and their talents tell us about God? It doesn’t seem like the same Jesus who says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. But really what Jesus is saying in this parable is a logical extension of our not needing to earn God’s love, of our being loved unconditionally. Because what we see here is Jesus telling a story that asks why we don’t act like we know that God loves us. This third servant is so afraid of his master, so intimidated by the idea of doing something, that he’s literally paralyzed. He should have just gotten to work like the other two, trying to make his boss happy, he should have realized that this was a job that there was only one way he could fail at, and that was by doing nothing.
Really what all three of these gospels seem to be about is that there are moments in our life when you have to be ready. There are times when it’s your moment, some kind of moment that God has been preparing you for. If you are in a wedding party, you had better actually show up at the wedding ready to go. If you are a servant, and all of us are servants, it’s time every now and then to go do something useful for your master. At different points in our lives, there is a moment like that with our name on it, someone is in a mess and really we’re the person who has to help straighten it out, someone needs someone to stand up for them or be a friend to them and we look around us and realize it is clearly us this time, something needs to be said about how someone is being treated in this world and it’s our moment to surprise people and say it. Christian life in a way is all about noticing when it’s our moment, the thing we are called to for someone, for our family, for a total stranger at the border, for the community or the parish, for someone who needs us. It might not be a hard moment where we will have to do something courageous. But it’s the moment where something has to happen.
It might be something that we’re doing for the 20th time and so it doesn’t seem like a big or very promising moment. And yet today’s gospel reminds us, in a way, of the old proverb nothing ventured nothing gained, burying yourself, holding back, hiding, are no answer to the work God has out there that needs doing. There’s a Catholic moral theologian who says that sin is failing to bother to love. And that is what we’re being warned against here, hanging back so much that we fail to do anything.
Part of the problem of course here is that we’re human, we’d rather have even an unsatisfactory status quo we know than something risky that we don’t know. But that makes us like the last servant in this story, burying his money in the ground because it’s safe there. He won’t lose, he thinks. And yet in a way he’s burying himself alive. Without risk, says this gospel, not much good can happen for anyone.
We’re being pushed a little hard in this gospel to worry less about what we might lose in life, and to set our eyes on what we could gain, if only we allowed ourselves to feel God’s love for us, that we literally have God on our side wanting us to win, if we believed that God has placed clues around us that we are intended to see and pray about where we should each be headed, the risks that were meant for us, and that we could take, if only we could also know the safety net that is underneath us always.
One of the things that is most enjoyable about Pope Francis as a leader is that he says he wants the church to take risks. Do something new, he says, when you see that what has been done in the past isn’t working any more. I wonder if the church can do this. But people can do it, they can find new things to do that turn out to be what they were meant to do. Many of us are risk-averse, I know I am about almost everything. But today’s gospel is telling us that we’re playing a game here that you can only really lose by not playing it. We will not have success in everything we undertake for God, but whatever happens will be part of God’s creative work in this world. When you know it’s your moment, don’t bury yourself. We will never be sorry that we decided to say yes.