THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH, All Saints and All Souls day, I focused on the end of Matthew 25, the famous "what you did for the least among you" passage. Today's Catholic liturgy has the parable right before that in Matthew's arrangement of texts, one of those things that always struck me the wrong way and which I never remember hearing a good sermon on, the one in which an oligarch gives large sums of money to three of those he enslaves while he goes on a long trip and how two of them invested the money and doubled it while a third one buried the money so he could give back to the oligarch what he'd given him because he didn't want to suffer the consequences of risking it and losing it. Just what we were supposed to make of that story is something that no one I'd heard preaching on it ever made any sense of and it made no sense to me that the sleazy oligarch was supposed to stand in for God.
Of course, if they'd put the parable in the often bigger picture of Matthew 25 and Matthew's presentation of the sayings of Jesus, it would have made a lot more sense because the difficulties of the story would be inescapable and have to be addressed.
The estimable Sr. Mary McGlone, one of my favorite current commentators on the liturgical readings, gives the best investigation of it that I've read.
Three of these characters apparently had chosen ever-increasing wealth as their ultimate goal [The master and the two investor slaves]. Servant number three cared most for his own safety. None of them were people fathers would want as a son-in-law, and it's quite unlikely that Jesus told this parable to direct his listeners toward a corrupt or affluent life.
For the past few weeks, Matthew has been preparing us for the second coming of Christ. The parable of the vineyard presented a vignette of salvation history: God's attempts to bring people's faith to fruition and humanity's poor response. Then we heard about the wedding feast open to anyone humble enough to accept an invitation to join a celebration with the king's guest list. After that, Matthew gave us the story about wise and foolish virgins and now the master and three servants.
This part of the liturgical year focuses our attention on the fact that our time is limited and thus we need to spend it in the best way possible.
Jesus used today's parable to illustrate the demands of discipleship. There's no time to waste or hide away like the third servant, perhaps assuming that the master would handle everything when he returned. [We are here to act, not cocoon and binge watch TV series. So the cautious slave wasn't a good example to follow, either. ] The other two servants, like the master who had become so wealthy, worked with all they had been given. They followed the master's example, most likely reaping and harvesting wherever they wished. That demonstrated their loyalty and increased their master's fortune.
Material gain was the most important value in the life of the master in this parable. Accepting his priorities, his faithful servants did all they could to increase his and their fortunes.
Today, we still suffer from the problems caused by people who prioritize gain, no matter the human cost. Added to that, technology's growth is rushing at us like Niagara Falls. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warns, "If technology becomes the ultimate criterion, the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity."
For the master, all three servants were essentially cogs or commodities — the means to an end. In turn, using people demeaned his humanity as well.
In contrast, the worthy wife, a symbol of true disciples, dedicates herself to good because she and her husband share one heart. They anticipated Leo's teaching that "human persons are called to communion with God and can fully discover their true selves only in sincere self-giving."
Our lifetimes are limited. Jesus, Matthew and Leo each remind us that our time is limited and discipleship is an all or nothing proposition.
One of the consequences of this interpretation, especially in light of Pope Leo's warnings about "AI" is that the ideology that the over-selling of "AI" as "intelligence" or the ideological superstition that the cognition that animals are capable of is calculable inevitably leads to the idea that living beings, certainly including human beings are just such widgets to be used, abused, used up and, if they aren't useful to those who have the power to do so OR A SOCIETY OR A GOVERNMENT, are prudent to dispose of them.
That is what the past quarter of a century of American history has been based in and what is an intrinsic part of the American government, the slave-power features of it may be masked but they are still present and that is most certainly present in large parts of our law, our society, our culture and the media that bends and twists the minds of those who are mostly informed by it.
I wonder what a white-christianist interpretation of this passage is but I doubt it's going to be honest. And I'm not inclined to go looking for one. It certainly wouldn't relate it to what immediately follows in Matthew. I don't think you can understand the meaning of this parable without that taking the commandment to do to the least among us what we would do for the Lord.
