“He replied, ‘I tell you, to everyone who
has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be
taken away.’” Luke 19:26
Piety
Jesus chooses us
from the world to cultivate his harvest.
Pray that we may bear fruit abundantly.
Study
This parable has
nothing to do with gold coins except as a symbolism for the talents we are
given at birth. The faithful and
productive servant uses those talents to build up the Kingdom.
Putting our
natural talents to use has nothing to do with high finance. However, it requires us to come out of our
comfort zone and take the risk of working towards God’s goals and purposes, not
our own.
Action
If we choose to
accept Jesus as king, we must lead risky lives.
It is tempting
to duck for cover and search for a safe way of accommodating to the system
while waiting for things to get better. But ducking for cover is the one action
Jesus condemns in the parable. The servant who tries to avoid risk is singled
out as unfaithful. We are not told what would have happened if the other two
servants had lost money on their investments, but the implication is that all
investments made in faithful service to God are pleasing to him, whether or not
they achieve their intended payoff.[i]
Today
is the anniversary of the deaths of several people who led risky lives for Jesus. In the early hours of November 16, 1989, commandos
of the Salvadoran armed forces entered the university campus and murdered six
Jesuits, together with two women who were sleeping in a parlor attached to
their residence. Remember the
Jesuits and their friends who were martyred on Nov. 16, 1989 in El Salvador.
Remember, pray and always stand up, even when it is risky, against repression
and violence.
Their full story, as told
by Dean Brackley, SJ, a brave American Jesuit who volunteered to work in El
Salvador after their martyrdoms, is here. http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20091116_1.htm. He explains:
[T]he UCA martyrs were killed for the
way they lived, that is, for how they expressed their faith in love. They
stood for a new kind of university, a new kind of society, a ‘new’
church. Together with their lay colleagues, they wrestled with the
ambiguities of their university in a country where only a tiny minority
finished elementary school and still fewer could meet the required academic
standards to enter university and to pay the tuition fees. The Jesuits and
their colleagues concluded that they could not limit their mission to teaching
and innocuous research. Yes, they did steeply scale tuition charges
according to students’ family income. More importantly, they sought
countless ways to unmask the lies that justified the pervasive injustice and
the continuing violence, and they made constructive proposals for a just peace
and a more humane social order. As a university of Christian inspiration,
they felt compelled to serve the truth in this way. That is what got them
killed.[ii]
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