Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Warren Buffet, the American businessman and philanthropist, supposedly has two rules for how he invests his great fortune. Rule Number One? Never lose money. Rule Number Two? Never forget Rule Number One.

It seems to make sense – if you want to make money, you have to start by not losing money. But in the world of investments, it’s not quite that simple. Return follows risk, and so if you’re not willing to put anything on the line, you’re not going to gain anything more than you already have. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In the Gospel today, Jesus uses the analogy of investment to speak about the logic of the kingdom of God. The story we hear is fairly straightforward. A master entrusts three servants with his wealth, and then leaves on a journey. He doesn’t give them specific instructions, but it’s clear that he expects them to invest what he has given them and gain a return.

Each servant, as we heard, is entrusted with something. What is it? The Greek word τάλαντον is translated in English as “talent”, but it doesn’t mean here a positive characteristic, skill, or ability. Instead it was a measurement, a weight of precious metal – an ingot of about 75 lbs. Talents were literally the fortunes of people of the ancient world; to have one, was to be wealthy, and to be a servant entrusted with one, was to bear a huge responsibility. We may tend to inherently sympathize somewhat with the fearful servant, who was afraid to put his master’s fortune at risk and so buried it out of fear. But we see how he master’s expectation of his servants is at once trusting and demanding – he has given them much and expects much in return.

This Gospel is often interpreted as reminding us that God has given unique gifts to each of us which we are to put to use in return. That interpretation is not wrong, exactly, but it can quickly devolve into something that’s rather cliché – make the most of all that God has given to you, strive to reach your greatest potential, be the best that you can be. But Jesus is not here just to give us a pep talk. There’s something more going on. 

Willem de Poorter, The Parable of the Talents (c. 1660)

The key to understanding this passage is what each servant has is not truly his; it still is the property of the master. The servant possesses it for a time, but the master is expecting the trust he has shown to be rewarded. The one who has received only one talent, and who buries it in the ground, may appear to be heeding Warren Buffet’s first rule: “never lose money.” But this is not caution; it’s cowardice. When the master returns, he appears unassuming, claiming that he did not want to lose the investment of his demanding master. But he’s really making excuses for his inaction. The intrepid servants are rewarded for their boldness, and the lazy one is punished.

The point of Jesus’s parable, of course, is not really to give us advice about investments; rather, he’s trying to impart to us a warning about our duty as Christians. In the Gospel of Matthew, this passage follows the one from last week about the five wise virgins and the five foolish virgins, and it continues the same theme: “Be ready; stay awake”. This latter part of the Gospel of Matthew is a series of descriptions about how to prepare for the end times – what the disciples of Jesus should do after he ascends to the Father and prior to his Second Coming. Since we happen to be in that very time – the era of the Church – we might consider this parable addressed directly to us.

As with last week’s Gospel, Jesus sees inaction in this period as an acute danger. This inaction can take different forms. As with the foolish virgins, it can be a lack of vigilance, of becoming drowsy, and failing to be ready for the Master’s return. We can become too accustomed to this world, to in love with its pleasures and attractions that we fail to take seriously the Gospel command to wait eagerly for Jesus’s return, preparing ourselves to greet him with continued works of faith, hope, and charity.

Inaction can also take the form of fear. Like the servants in the parable, we have been entrusted with talents – not gold or silver, and not even primarily our various positive qualities or characteristics. Rather, we have been endowed with gifts from on high – gifts that are God’s ultimately, and which he lends to us to be utilized. The talents we have been given are spiritual treasures: forgiveness, patience, endurance, kindness, generosity, humility, temperance, courage – above all, faith, hope, and love. These are not our strengths, not our talents innately – they are God’s, they are the result of his grace and they remain his even when they are within us. They are a free gift, given to us without cost, but not without expectation.

If Jesus warned us last week that we can become drowsy, like the foolish virgins, unprepared for his return, then this week he warns us that we may misunderstand the nature of the graces that we have as his believers. Faith in Jesus can bring us new life, peace, and joy, but if we do not utilize that investment of grace to make that gift increase all the more – if we let it lie dormant, or bury it under the weight of our fear and insecurity – then Christ himself will punish us for our inaction when he returns. Our Master has made a strategic investment in us, and he expects from us a return, grace upon grace.

Friends, Jesus knows a principle of return that Warren Buffett, for all of his billions, knows nothing about: give what has been given to you, and you will be all the richer for it. God has invested spiritual capital in each of us, not because of our own merits, but due to our relationship to his Son Jesus. Our own fear or laziness might tempt us to bury these gifts within us, to let them go unused and unnoticed, but Jesus commands us to share what we have received, not tomorrow but today. If we do not venture to the put the Gospel into practice now with the spiritual treasures we have been given, then we may miss out on the heavenly gains that are to come.

The English cardinal Henry Edward Manning once wrote, “Next to grace, time is the most precious gift of God. Yet how much of both we waste. Time is full of eternity. As we use it so shall we be. Every day has its opportunities; every hour its offer of grace.” Let’s look to return the Lord’s investment in us – sharing faith with those who do not believe; providing hope to those who are afraid; showing love and mercy to everyone, as they have been shown by God to us. Jesus is coming back and he wants a return on what he has entrusted to us. May he find us good and faithful servants, so that we may share his lasting joy.

A Servant to All

If there’s one thing that Jesus was good at in his public ministry, it was making people in places of privilege feel uncomfortable. Throughout the Gospels, we hear how he ruffles the feathers of those whom society favored. He tells the man who has invited him to dinner, that he has shown him less hospitality than the woman from the street who anoints his feet with oil. He tells the rich man who wants to follow God’s commandments that he should sell what he has and give the money to the poor. He tells the person who feels self-righteous, they should look at the plank in their own eye before the speck in the eye of the other.

There’s probably no group though that Jesus vexes more than the scribes and the Pharisees, the religious leaders whom the Jewish people looked up to at that time. Today, we hear how Jesus warns the people that they are hypocrites – they claim the spiritual tradition of Moses, along with his authority, but their actions do not conform to their own words. They give the appearance of piety, of following God’s law, but they are obsessed with honor, they love money too much, and they burden the people with heavy demands without helping them to follow them. They are like the Temple priests that the prophet Malachi criticizes in the First Reading; they have abused their position of caring for God’s people in order to serve themselves.

Now, I recognize that there is a not so subtle irony for me as a priest from this pulpit to be telling you about the failures of religious authorities. A Gospel like this one makes me uncomfortable because I recognize that much of what Jesus criticizes about the Pharisees and scribes could be – and sadly, sometimes is – true in our faith tradition, especially from priests. We come to this vocation because of a calling to serve, but at times, we let you down, we let God down; like the Pharisees and scribes, we serve ourselves.

Today is Vocations Sunday, the Church’s chance each year to encourage and promote vocations, especially to the priesthood and religious life. I serve as an Assistant Vocations Director for our diocese and I feel a certain obligation today to preach about vocations, especially with a congregation with so many young people. It may seem counter-intuitive to promote the priesthood and religious life when the Gospel is an account of Jesus warning about religious authorities. But there is an opportunity here: to talk honestly about what we believe about vocations and how we can all contribute to good ones.

At the heart of Jesus’s problem with the Pharisees is not that they claim religious authority, but that they have forgotten what must ground that authority: loving service. At the heart of Jesus’s mission is God’s desire to attend to what we need and give it to us – though great, indeed though God himself, Jesus came to serve us. To share in his divine life, he calls us to follow his lead, to seek to love as he loves each in the way that God calls. We do that by our vocation.

Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples (mosaic), Basilica of San Marco, Venice, c. 120

The word “vocation” means calling; every person has a vocation because every person is called by God to holiness. Those vocations can vary – the three traditional ones are priesthood or religious life or to marriage – but all of them are about learning how God invites me to love, specifically, how God wants me to love Jesus and to love with the heart of Jesus. In marriage, the most common vocation, the husband and wife love Jesus in and through each other, sacrificing for each other as Jesus sacrificed for the Church, and allowing their love to be creative, as God’s is, and to bear fruit in new life. In religious life, men and women forsake the values and pursuits of this world in order to love God radically, embracing poverty, chastity, and obedience and devoting themselves either to prayer or to charitable service. In the priesthood, God calls men to love precisely as Jesus loved: not one person but all, to lay down their lives for the sake of the many by becoming an alter Christ, “another Christ,” and by making the grace of Jesus present through the sacraments.

Those ways of loving, those vocations, are the most fundamental reality of how God calls us to relationship with him. They are like heavenly blueprints for our lives; the more fully we learn them, embrace them, and construct our lives according to them, the more we will discover the true purpose of the life God has given to us. How often we are caught up, indeed deluded, in our own goals and dreams and pursuits and never stop to ask ourselves: Is this from God? Is this forming my heart to be who God wants me to be? Is this drawing me closer to heaven? Like the Pharisees, we seek worldly honor and success, we want lives that are full of meaning and distinction in the eyes of others, and too often we fail to ask whether God sees things like we do.

I think the time has come for us to be bold, to be courageous in a radical way with what God is inviting us to do. The world around us can’t wait any longer for us joyfully follow how God is leading us; to respond to the inner longing, the inner calling of our heart to serve him as we know he wants us to do. If there is one problem that I think plagues us today it is the belief, especially present among young people, that we are not up to the challenge, that we are somehow not really capable of doing what we think God wants. We have to recognize that for what it is – a lie and a temptation! God’s grace is transformative, his power knows no limits, his benevolence and love is all-consuming. All he awaits is our “Yes,” our willingness to follow where he will lead.

Vocations Sunday is a chance for us to pray for our priests, bishops, deacons, and lay ministers; for every person in authority that they may embody the servant leadership of Jesus. But it’s also a chance for us to remember and rededicate ourselves to our vocation, how God is calling us to love, and to remember that each of us represents the Church by our vocation. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a reminder that we must be involved in encouraging those who are still searching for God’s calling. We need strong, selfless, faithful marriages; we need young people who are willing to devote their lives to Christ in religious life; we need men who are man enough to be another Christ by serving as his priests. We need parents who speak to their children not about careers but about vocations; friends who will encourage the vocation they see blossoming in another; boyfriends and girlfriends who will smile and pray instead of laugh if their significant other says they think God might be calling them to religious life and the priesthood.

Friends, these words may make us somewhat uncomfortable. But Jesus does that sometimes, in order to call all of us to loving service – not just those of us who stand in pulpits and preach sermons. Each of us by our baptism shares in the mission of Christ: to serve our brothers and sisters in self-sacrificing love, whether it is in the household, in the convent, in the parish, in whatever context we find ourselves. Whatever our vocation – whether we know it and are committed to it, or are still searching for it – may doing God’s will be foremost in our minds. Jesus has told us his standard for success, and it is the only one that matters: “The greatest among you must be servant to all.” May this Eucharist help us to humble ourselves in our vocations so that God may one day greatly exalt us.