Overview:

Saturday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Saturday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

His master said to him in reply, ‘You wicked, lazy servant!
So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant
and gather where I did not scatter?
Should you not then have put my money in the bank
so that I could have got it back with interest on my return?
Now then! Take the talent from him and give it to the one with ten.
For to everyone who has,
more will be given and he will grow rich;
but from the one who has not,
even what he has will be taken away.
And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’ (Mt 25:26-30)

Find today’s readings here.

My elderly cat, Ronaldo, is going to die soon. Due to some sort of cancerous obstruction in his throat he is becoming more feeble by the day. His affectionate self, however, remains. 

When he asks for pets by wedging his face under my hand his newly prescribed appetite-stimulant ointment greases up my palm, and now his spittle smells of the gabapentin and steroids he tries his hardest not to swallow every night. Each irritating brush with these unpleasant sensations is a reminder for me of not only the present animal stubbornness of my cat’s companionship, but also of the incalculable and unending value of the warmth in every one of his past affections going back to when I was 11 years old.

Were human companionship as easily manipulated by wet food and kibble as a cat’s, maybe today’s readings would not need grappling with.

In the epistle, Paul reminds the Thessalonians that they have already been taught to love one another by God. Still, he asks more of their early church: “Nevertheless we urge you, brothers and sisters, to progress even more…”

Preceding a difficult Gospel passage, the Alleluia gives us one of the Johannine hits: “I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you.”

Then, in the Gospel, Jesus’s Parable of the Talents throws me for a loop. The warmth of the lectionary’s other scripture is at odds, upon my first and also second readings, with the iron cruelty of the master in the parable who casts his “wicked, lazy servant” into darkness. The financial language of investments and interest earned in the lesson, too, feels distant from the Word as it lives and breathes for me in the present day. But these apprehensions of mine are ignorant of the positive affirmations in the parable. The master rewards generous, generative and active stewardship of the sums of money entrusted to his servants. The servant who buried his one talent and was banished for it was not working to “progress even more” as Paul puts it.

In the frameworks of friendship and of love of one another gifted to us in the first readings, today’s Gospel can be a command to love without end. If we are limiting our care or our patience for our friends, we ought to realize we are burying talents ourselves and commit to love them even more. If we can be more generous with our capacities for affection and kindness, why not be more generous? Whether it’s Paul’s reminder to progress further in love, a consideration of the Ignatian concept of Magis or the relentless sweetness of my dear old cat that reminds you to care for someone more deeply today, then surely we will all grow richer.

Julian Navarro is America Media’s advancement manager.