God Expects Us to Use the Gifts He Gave Us

User's Guide to Sunday, Nov. 16

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Sunday, Nov. 16, is the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.

 

Mass Readings

Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31; Psalm 128:1-5; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30 or 25:14-15, 19-20

 

Our Take

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our Christian vocation is to do great and mighty things, to change the world, to make our unique, indelible mark on history.

Today’s Gospel encourages a much more mundane take on the Christian life, at least for most of us.

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus describes the Christian vocation not as one of changing the world, but one of doing the most with whatever talents you have.

In the story, a man leaving on a journey leaves talents — the term for large sums of money, but which always had the double meaning it has now — with his servants. He gives five talents to one servant, two to another and one to a third. When he returns, he rewards the servant who received five because he used them to make five more, and he rewards the servant who received two for making two more. But the servant who received one gets punished because he buried his portion and merely returned it.

Two lessons are clear from the story.

One: God expects us to use our talents, not horde them.

Another: God expects vastly different outcomes from different people.

An example of a five-talent Catholic might be Blessed Mother Teresa.

She was an organizer who built up a group of nuns recognized the world over. She was also a deep spiritual thinker who expressed the ideas of the faith with energy and clarity. She was also a great missionary, serving the poor effectively. She also knew how to communicate her work to others, which made her formidable at raising money and attracting volunteers. She used her talents effectively, such that she made an enormous contribution to the world.

One who received two talents might be Servant of God Father Emil Kapaun.

This Kansas priest didn’t have all the talents of Mother Teresa, but he had two big ones, humility and perseverance, and that made an enormous difference in the lives of the men who knew him in the Korean War, where he was a chaplain. He showed his love for his men by suffering with them and for them, showing there was no job he was unwilling to do and no amount of discomfort he wouldn’t accept to serve them. His heroism in a POW camp won him the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously last year.

And who might be those who received just one talent? Most of us should look in the mirror — or perhaps think of the parent or grandparent who made a difference in our lives.

Today’s first reading describes the beauty of the vocation of a housewife, for instance. A worthy homemaker, it says, “obtains wool and flax and works with loving hands. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her fingers ply the spindle. She reaches out her hands to the poor and extends her arms to the needy.”

The point is: Few of us are called to world-changing, astounding feats of apostolic wonderfulness.

But every one of us is called to do what we are supposed to do. And that is enough to win biblical praise.

The only real danger, the Gospel tells us, is doing nothing with your talents: to not pray, to not get to know Christ, to not share his life with your family; to bury your talent, to not do what you are supposed to do.

 

Tom and April Hoopes write from Atchison, Kansas,

where Tom is writer in residence at Benedictine College.