Sunday Reflection with Fr Terry Tastard - 13 November 2011

It is amazing how many parables of Jesus deal with money. There is the woman who loses a precious coin and turns the house upside down until she finds it. There is the Prodigal Son, who demands his inheritance even before his father has died and squanders it. There is the parable of the steward who is forgiven a huge debt by the king and then goes out and puts the squeeze on someone who owes him money. Even the parable of the Good Samaritan has the Samaritan paying the innkeeper to look after the mugging victim until he is properly healed. Today, we have the parable of the talents (Matt. 25-14-30) which uses huge sums of money to make its point. But what is the point?

Jesus asks us in today's parable, What do your do with your blessings? True spirituality is not something other-worldly. It is about how we use our time, our money, our bodies, and our place in society. To all these things we add one more gift: the gift of faith. If we have faith, then time, money, skills, influence, will all be part of what we bring to God, asking that in these things his will may be done and his kingdom come. The people of God should be ambitious. True spirituality helps us temper our ambition and shape it in a responsible way. The parable asks us to take our material world seriously, the blessings that we have, and to do something with them. This includes the material things of life. A spirituality that was divorced from the material realities of our life would hardly be worth living. It would exist in our heads only, and would lack reality.

Money is like a passport. It opens doors and introduces us to whole new worlds. If you doubt that then you are one of the few people who have never dreamed about what they would do it they won the lottery. In the parable of the talents each person has been given a sum, and it represents all the social potential of money. The servants with whom the master is pleased have been out there in the world, engaged with the world. They have used the money to make more money. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the material image, but perhaps Jesus meant to shock. A talent was not a coin but a value that varied according to the metal used for the coins. As an amount of money even one talent was an enormous sum. A talent in Greek silver coins would be 6000 coins.

It is interesting, isn't it, reading this parable in the light of our global financial crisis. What went wrong was not that bankers made money. What went wrong was that whole financial institutions began to manipulate money without asking any questions about the morality of their transactions. Profit silenced all doubts about the social cost of it all. The parable challenges us to use our blessings in a way that benefits not only us but the whole community. In English the word talent also means an innate gift, a skill or ability. This neatly makes the point of the parable, that each of us has been given certain talents. What do we do with them? Are these linked to our faith?

Do not for one moment think that you do not have talents. These do not have to be grand, flashy gifts. In our first reading from Proverbs an industrious woman is held up for admiration. Not only her own household, but the poor and needy also benefit from her hard work. Is the world a better place because we have passed through it? An uncomfortable question for each of us, but one that the parable dares us to ask.

Fr Terry is parish priest at St Mary's in Finchley East, north London. Fr Terry's latest book: Ronald Knox and English Catholicism is published by Gracewing at £12.99 and is available on Amazon, on ICN's front page. To read Sr Gemma Simmonds' review on ICN see: www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=16114