There are questions that I suspect anyone who's been a teacher, particularly I think of children, don't want to hear. My all-time least favorite question is this. It's when a kid has been absent from class, even if it's just for a day, and they come back and say, did we do anything yesterday?
I always have to bite my tongue. I don't want to be sarcastic, but I kind of want to say, no, you know, you weren't here. We just didn't know what to do. We looked at each other, and we were just filled and overcome with so much sadness. We just sat here and cried.
Of course we did something yesterday. But the second least favorite question is, in a way, it's kind of like it. Will this be on the test? In a way, that's what we're experiencing as we get to the end of the church year. If you've been going to Daily Mass, you'll see the readings are beginning to take a different and kind of more austere turn, to be honest.
They either come from the book of Maccabees, where we get the encounter of the amazing mother who watches seven of her children die for standing up for the faith, or from the book of Revelation, which describes kind of the ultimate struggle at the end of time, or from the book of Daniel, which is a similar kind of book.
All of them are designed to get us thinking about our life, to get us thinking about how we live our life, to get us thinking about what it means to be a Christian, what it means maybe even more so to be a disciple of Jesus. And we have to understand that as we look at the reading that we heard from today's gospel.
This is a great story. It is really a powerful story. But we have to kind of understand some things that maybe aren't readily apparent from this story. First of all, this is a story that Jesus is telling about the kingdom of God. It's interesting that Jesus speaks in this way where he talks about wailing and grinding of teeth, or he talks about paying back the last penny, or he talks about the end of time and what will happen.
He addresses these areas more than just about anything else in the Gospels. He's not just simply a teddy bear. He's calling people to deep and lasting fulfillment. It does not mean that Jesus is trying to paint a picture of God that goes around making people feel horrible about themselves. That misses the point.
But there are some rather interesting parts in this story that might help us to understand and to prepare for the season of Advent, which quite frankly is only two weeks away. Normally, by the way, it's only one week away, but this year we have five Thursdays in November, so it's two weeks away.
Anyway, what do we have? First of all, we have a journey. A journey is a popular image for faith, and we see it all throughout the Scriptures that people are going on journeys, and Jesus uses the imagery of journey too. Of course, there's the big long 40-year journey in the Book of Exodus, which was a quest for faith.
But there are other stories that Jesus tells, the man going on a journey who falls in with robbers who's cared for by the good Samaritan. There are the two disciples who are on a journey on their way to Emmaus. Journey has long been seen as an image to describe our life, our life of faith.
Then there are these talents. When we hear the word talent in Scripture, what we really are hearing is a valuable thing. And its value wasn't set or fixed because a talent could be made of silver, it could be made of gold, and what it was made of made the difference in terms of exactly how much it was worth. But what we do know is that all three of these individuals are given priceless things.
We also shouldn't get caught up in the fact (that unlike) in Luke's Gospel they all get the same number of talents. Matthew's Gospel, it's not that way. They each get a different number of talents. We shouldn't get caught up in that. . .
